Rashanna plunged into the dream and was met with a confusing scene. She was a girl not unlike herself in her features, but here she was happy. How rare, for her to be so animated, to be dancing among people who looked like her, dancing to the music of drums and woodwind instruments as men and women chanted and sang in a dusty circle amid stone structures. How strange that she should know the words to this song, being in a nguage she could not remember learning.

  The song suffused the air with power. The spirits were here with them, adding their song to the songs of the mortals who pyed with them. Her hair was bound in pigtail braids, not yet the hip-length things of those older than her, and peacock feathers were ced into them, so that the rib formed the core of the braid and the eyelet poked out against the end. Her braids bobbed and swayed as she worked through the steps of this intricate dance, and a bonfire burned at the heart of the circle of others, children and men and women all dressed in ceremonial attire with their faces painted to reflect the animals native to the region. Her own face was painted like a tiger’s, and her brother wore a paint made of white ash reminiscent of the bone snakes that lived in the jungle.

  Broad feathers bobbed over his shoulders, and his chest was bare, exposing a newly id tattoo, the shape of it signifying a power he was deemed ready to carry. This ceremony was for him, an Atreiya family tradition for he had just become a man, would have gained the right to take a bow from the Tree of Life, were it not so damaged. The tree had not grown a leaf since her grandfather’s time, a curse which was slowly fading, which had left the nds in Jaukali and the neighboring territories inside the Sun Empire where her city was centered into a period of drought sting more than a decade.

  They danced, for the drought had lifted. For her brother was a man and had earned a fluted flower set over his chest on the right hand side. The mark was an auspicious one, for by itself it held little power, but were he to draw on it in the presence of a Watcher, a Whisperer, one with a gift such as those, it would draw them into a soothed state, drive them to him, lull them into a sense of compcency.

  A strange gift, one which would take time to master, it was nonetheless a mark with utility, if he found himself in the presence of those who would influence his mind.

  He found her among the dancers, smiled and hopped his way over, spinning as he came to join her. The skin around the tattoo was still puffy and dark, ridges marring the image of the flower. It had been done just that morning, when the sun was still rising over the horizon, had been tested that afternoon, when he was exposed to a Watcher’s gift.

  Light broke the night darkness deeper in the vilge. Torches drove back the dark to her eyes, and her feet froze under her, her arms dropping to her sides.

  He followed her gaze, the good natured grin falling from his face as he stopped dancing too.

  Others, seeing the coming lights, froze in their steps to contempte the new arrivals.

  All at once the scene was changed. Fire fshed amid houses, screams filled the air. Shadows flickered unnaturally back and forth as creatures out of legend stormed in to break up their circle, to put an end to this ceremony.

  Signs in an ancient nguage, a nguage that predated what the Jua people spoke, bloomed radiant against the bodies of armor-cd soldiers, burned bck into the soil. Soldiers fell in dozens, and dozens more spilled into the circle, id sughter with sword and sorcery. More spilled from the shadows, and she was taken.

  Drawn down.

  Into darkness, and away. Away from all she had known.