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So he had tried to do the same. Think, but not of any particular thing. Just think.

He had run away after trying it for just a moment or two. It had been like drowning. He could not breathe. He could not even tell where he ended and everything else began. There were no boundaries, and he needed boundaries.

Now he found himself slipping away from his own sense of self. It was not so hard, nor so frightening, as it had been when he was young. He drifted in his mind and was no longer tethered to his body. He did not know if he was still walking with Chala or if he had stopped.

It did not matter.

He felt as if he were touching tender new skin to the world around him, and the sensations were exquisitely clear and sharp. Everything touched him.

The forest. The sounds of the animals within, the tiny flutter of leaves, the burble of a stream nearby, the smell of life and death combined, of wildflowers and juniper bushes, the sight of color juxtaposed on color, green overwhelming all.

He quickly became exhausted by the overwhelming sensation, but there was no escape. The magic, long put off, had come for him at last, and it pressed at him with demands such as he had never known.

It was as if his ears had grown larger, for he could hear the scurry of the ants searching for food in the rotting limbs of a tree, and the beetles with them, the worms in the ground underneath, digging their way through dirt.

His nose was overwhelmed with scents, as when he was a bear. The scent of berries. A dead mouse, rotting in the leaves. The fish in the stream. Overhead, the scent of an owl’s nest.

He could see to the woodpecker’s marks on the oak tree there, and the lines left in the dirt by the crossing of a snake.

His hands felt as if they were on fire from the feel of the air on them, telling him so many things. Speaking to him in a new language.

And he tasted the whole world. Flowers yet to bloom. Pine trees far away in the mountains. The meat a mother wolf fed her cub.

He choked and gasped.

In his mind he heard a sound, soft and high-pitched as his mother’s voice, but something else altogether. It was inviting, and he stepped into a new place that was full of all the sensations he had felt before, only they did not overwhelm him. They were part of him, but not all of him.

He felt his body again.

He was slumped against a log, and Chala was next to him.

He turned to her and now he could see the magic in her. The color was green, and it pulsed through her like blood.

He could see the magic everywhere now, in all the animals around him. Even the trees had a portion of magic, though it was a cooler green. The air itself, it seemed, was made of life, for it, too, had a greenish tinge to it.

What else could he see?

He looked down at his own hands and saw the magic in them.

If he had needed more proof, here it was. His hands were so bright that they were more white than green. He stared at them, feeling part of the forest as he had never felt before.

It was like falling, and yet he fell into himself.

He heard a sound from Chala.

She pointed to his hand, on his knee.

He glanced toward it and saw a bear paw on his knee rather than the human hand he had begun with. Only one bear paw, and it was fading quickly, becoming smaller and hairless, losing its claws.

But still, there it had been.

And he had changed it himself, not the wild man.

“Your magic,” said Chala encouragingly.

It made him immediately want to try again.

But by then he had a terrible headache that seemed to block his vision entirely. The world was black again, with floating blobs of light in it, all color gone.

He banged on the doors of his mind, but it was no use.

The magic had suddenly fled him, like a fish avoiding his grasp as he leaned over a pool of water, eager for dinner.

“It will return when you are ready,” Chala assured him as he held his head to his knees, afraid that if he did not he would fall to pieces.

But he told himself that Chala was right as he held her in his arms, and for the first