[A few days before the ritual to cleanse the crystal ball and the raising of the ironwood grove, on the slopes of Mount Llanos:]

The first hours are unpleasant. Ca’armine vomits until there’s nothing left in his stomach. His hands shake. The stars smear into long silver tracks wherever he moves his head. Eventually he lies flat against the earth and realizes that he can feel it breathing. Not metaphorically — the ground rises beneath his back. Falls, rises again. And then he hears footsteps.

Raiden walks across the sky. The stars begin moving. Constellations stretch into the outline of an enormous figure walking across the heavens. Bow across his back, sword at his side, cloak flowing behind him. Every step takes centuries. Where his foot falls, Ca’armine sees civilizations appear beneath it — the Ederos Empire, its destruction. Ilceros. Shasharak. The desperate migrations through the Red Waste. The First Gate. Sutheron reclaimed. Ægir founded. Generations are born and die between Raiden’s footsteps.

Then Ca’armine hears: “You keep asking where you belong.” Another celestial footstep. “You belong where your feet are.”

Ca’armine suddenly understands something fundamental. This may not be the world of his birth. Time itself may have carried him into something different — but duty does not depend upon chronology.

Raiden says: “Do not worship yesterday so fiercely that you abandon today.”

A tree grows out of Ca’armine’s chest. He feels its roots passing harmlessly through his ribs and sinking into the earth. Its trunk becomes enormous. Raiden stands beside it. With one fingernail, he opens the bark. Inside are thousands of growth rings — but Ca’armine doesn’t really see them. He enters them. One ring shows his childhood. Another, his years among the Raidensblud. Another shows events he hasn’t experienced. Another shows him ancient and gray.

Then Raiden closes the bark. “Mortals think time is the road.” He puts his palm against the tree. “It is the tree.”

Then something painful happens. Ca’armine sees himself standing naked beneath the stars. There is a black thorn embedded beneath his ribs. Raiden tells him: “Pull it out.” Ca’armine does, and it hurts enormously. Blood pours from the wound — but underneath it is another thorn. He removes that one, then another, then dozens. Each carries a voice. Fear. Hatred. Shame.

Finally he pulls out one enormous thorn, and recognizes the voice within it: the goddess Avv. The thorn whispers: “I was invited.”

Raiden kneels beside Ca’armine. “Evil enters many doors. Sometimes force, sometimes despair, sometimes an invitation offered by someone who believed they were doing good.” Raiden takes one of the discarded thorns. “Learn the difference.”

Near dawn, the visions become gentler. Ca’armine sees a partridge. It looks at him. He looks at it. The partridge says, “You’re hungry.” Ca’armine replies that he is. “Unfortunate for me.” Then the bird runs away. This is the last supernatural vision he remembers clearly.

Later that day, while hunting, a group of partridges breaks from the bush. Ca’armine smiles ruefully. One of those partridges looks just like the one he talked to while enjoying those mushrooms. He lets them run off unmolested, but mutters happily: “You are off the menu today, little one — but just for today.”