No. Kumbat explained it. It won't be like that. We will have a certain privacy from each other but we will be intimate as no two other beings can be. You'll see.

Very well.

Raven returned her attention to her two distinguished visitors.

"General Weisel," she said, still disturbed by how strange her voice sounded, "I am glad to see you are well. I remember..." But she couldn't remember yet, not quite.

"You remember saving my life?" Weisel filled in, offering her a smile. "You stepped in front of a crossbow bolt meant for me. That was valiant. I shall reward you for it."

Raven tilted her head. Crossbow bolt? Yes. That was right. She had seen it from the corner of her eye, falling toward the general.

She reached again toward the place at the base of her neck.

"There's no wound there, Raven," Weisel said. "That was another body. You'll get used to it. I feel sure you'll develop an appreciation for this new form you're wearing."

"But does that mean...?" she tried to ask, barely able to consider the concept.

"It means," Matokin put in, quietly, "that the body you knew, the physical person you remember as Raven, is no more. But the essence of that being, everything that made her who she was, all of that crucial substance remains. It has been reborn." His dancing eyes settled on her. "You have been resurrected."

Raven started to shake, and then couldn't stop. Her whole body trembled, this new, wonderful but totally alien body. She wasn't herself anymore. She was someone else. Actually she was sharing someone else's body.

Obviously, this was magic. But it was magic of a magnitude that she'd barely suspected. She had traveled through the portals, hurtling across distances in a few steps that would take days to traverse on horseback. And yet, this was even more amazing.