Imagine if you will the days spinning backward: a millennium ends here, a century turns there, a year ends now, and another, and a thousand others, and finally there are so many days, so many years ending and beginning that you can no longer remember why it seemed important that you keep count of them at all. And yet I have counted them. I have counted every one, marking the beginning of each new year, of each new century, in my own quiet fashion: a glass of wine, perhaps, a silent toast. The world revolves, the view changes. Now I stand atop a castle turret, now upon the deck of a sailing ship. Here I gaze upon an ageless river, there a body-strewn battlefield; now I see the dancing lights of the Champs d'Elysée, now I see the smoldering fires of a fallen civilization. The years change, but the question does not. Will this be it? I ask myself. Will this be the year I tell my story, the whole of it, from beginning to end, at last?

And what a lovely entertainment it has been, all these thousands of turning years, to imagine the telling, the circumstances of the telling, and the reason for the telling. I have created the scenario and variations upon scenario over and over again in my mind. Where to begin? How best to glorify or debase myself in the telling, how to find the thread of truth that, in the end, must be the summation of any man's life -- even if that life has been as long and as tangled as mine. So now the time has come, and the moment is -- as so many greatly anticipated moments are -- disappointing. For I realized some time ago that the whole story cannot be told, not today, perhaps not ever. Every man's life is simply a sum of parts, and these are the only parts I can tell you now.

But the beginning, where was that? I think sometimes it began with a lithe young girl of grand ambition and laughing eyes. At other times I am sure it all started with the wistful longings of a poet-priest I once called friend. Was it a woman's power, or a man's dreams? What dark god fashioned this unlikely tale and sent it spinning into space with a single smiling breath? And dare I think I ever, at any time, had any control over it at all?

It began with the magic, you see. And so, perforce, must I.

I had a name in that long-ago time, but I have forgotten it centuries since, so let me call myself as I was in those days: Han. Perhaps I had a mother, a father, and an early family life but I do not recall those either. Life began for me, as I remember it, in the House of Ra.

Much has been written in human history about this time in Egypt; entire lifetimes have been dedicated to piecing together the scattered bones of that long-ago life. As always, when what is shattered is reassembled with no model to follow, mistakes will be made in the reconstruction, great chunks, perhaps, will be missing and others will seem to have no place in the whole at all. The result is, more often than not, a monstrous grotesquerie.

So believe me when I tell you that, while historians have done a fair job of reassembling the past, so much of what they have learned is only what we wanted them to know, what was left for them to know. And nothing, I assure you, of what you know or what you think you know of that time can even begin to touch the truth of the House of Ra.

Truth is an interesting word. I cannot tell you now with absolute certainty whether the structure itself, the temple complex in which we lived and worked and ate and slept and studied was in fact composed of mortar and stone, or whether it was merely an illusion of the same -- or, most likely, a combination of both. I will describe it therefore as I perceived it to be, remembering that in the end, in almost every instance, the difference between truth and illusion is so faint as to be almost inconsequential.

The House of Ra existed on a man-made oasis far from the banks of the Nile, in a part of the Egyptian desert that is today a particularly brutal and barren stretch of land in a place that is known for its inhospitable nature. Soaring sandstone cliffs surrounded the oasis which, from the sky, would be seen as an island of green in a sea of sand. Date and fig trees grew side by side with banana, papaya, and orange trees. Waterfalls tumbled from limestone boulders, formed deep pools and meandering streams. The ground was covered with a lush low carpet of a fragrant creeping herb that smelled like sweet lavender and felt like moss to the touch. Even after all these years, I can but think of the House of Ra and that fragrance will return to me. There is nothing like it growing in the world today.

The temple complex was enormous -- larger, I think, than any of us imagined, for it seemed the more we discovered, the more there was to discover. There was a set of carved cypress doors at the entry to the temple, easily two stories high, which were closed only on ceremonial occasions. The door was inscribed with pictographs in the ancient language centered around the symbol of our craft -- three interlocked globes in perfect balance that formed the points of a triangle. When the doors were open, the triangle was broken, leaving two globes joined and the one alone. Only when the doors were closed was the triangle complete.

The complex itself was laid out like a triangle, with long straight corridors containing classrooms, laboratories and sleeping areas, and large circular common rooms at each apex of the triangle. The whole was protected by a raised roof, so that indoor gardens and pools thrived in the artificial tropical rain-forest atmosphere that had been created by the designers. There were many levels, some labyrinthine, some so compact they were practically claustrophobic, each with its own internal environment -- cool in the heat of the sun and warm when the cold winds blew across the desert.

Artificial light glowed from the walls and ceilings so that we might work or study at night, and could be discontinued when we wished it. Refrigeration was available, but rarely used, as our supply of fresh foods was abundant. Our clothing was manufactured so quickly and inexpensively that there was no need for laundering, and our food was cooked with a method that used no fuel and gave off no heat. We bathed in warm-water pools and used an internal, automated waste-disposal system. We had, in this ancient, long-forgotten desert temple, every modern convenience.

The House of Ra was a secret over two thousand years old even when I was there. Within those vaulted marble halls and sun-drenched galleries, magic met science, philosophy met truth, wonders and miracles were merely a matter of course. Years later a library would be built in Alexandria that would become known as the greatest in the world; it was only a shallow replica of the library contained in the vaults of the House of Ra. There were never more than thirteen initiates at a time; the best and the brightest of all of Egypt, hand-chosen by the Masters to live at the temple and study the truths.

And what truths were those? Ah, you could spend a lifetime and still not list them all. The nature of atomic particles and the nature of man, the composition of chemical alloys and the mysteries of the soul. The transmutation of matter, the source of all Power. To live in truth, and to practice deception. Magic. Medicine. Discipline. Mastery. Good and evil. Balance in all things.

We were chosen at a young age, male and female, for characteristics not even our parents could identify, and from that time until we gained adulthood we knew no life outside the House of Ra. It was, to the best of my recollection, a very ordinary life: we played, we studied, we ate and slept; we had childish spats with our classmates, we were impertinent to our teachers. We had moments of great joy and deep pain, of triumph and failure and enlightenment and humiliation. We grew, we learned, we loved. We formed loyal friendships and casual sexual liaisons. There was nothing special about us, at least in our own view. We lived in the same universe that you do today; we simply learned to operate that universe according to a different set of rules.

Yet I don't mean to minimize the grandeur of our time there; the majesty of what we were becoming. Even now I have but to close my eyes and it will return to me with breathless, aching wonder, the first time I understood the workings of this world and the power I had over it. Let me speak the words, with proper tone and rhythm, choosing the syllables and the harmony they produce, let me hold the thought and say the spell, and what once was is no longer so. Watch me now as I pluck from the air the electricity that sparks from my fingers, for don't you know it was always there? And now with an outstretched arm I will lift that stone with the strength of my intent, and see how it floats like a feather in the air! Let me touch your hand and rewrite your memory. Let me bind you with my eyes, let me whisper your name and capture your will. We were dealers in magic, and magic ruled the world.

I have said we, but it is important to know that not all who studied at the House of Ra were of equal ability. Some would never do more than master the principles of physics and chemistry that would enable them to control the environment in which we must live; others might dip their fingers into the stream of the human unconscious and come away with a basic understanding of the arcane laws that govern existence here on earth. The study of the Art was intensely personal, and we competed against no one but ourselves.

But there were three of us who, from the beginning, excelled above the others at the Practice. We couldn't help noticing. And we couldn't stop, no matter how we disciplined our minds, the thread of ambition from snaking into our days. It was inevitable, I suppose, that that ambition should bring us into conflict. But even we would not have sought conflict within the mastery of one of the most dangerous and complex of all the mystic arts -- nor could we have guessed how deeply, in the end, it would bind us together.

It is quite one thing to perform the mysteries on inanimate objects, to cause boulders to melt into lava, to dry up a stream with the force of one's breath, for it is well-known that all things exist in all forms at all times; it's merely a matter of learned skills to shift them from one state into another. But to transform oneself -- that is the thing that will tempt and terrify every Practitioner, in one form or another, for as long as he lives. Many an adept, quite competent in all other areas, will never achieve the state of simple Oneness that is necessary to become another living being. But for the three of us, in that long-ago time in the House of Ra, the gift came easily. Perhaps too easily.

There has been much debate over the millennia as to whether this transformation was a literal, physical transmutation of matter, or an equally literal, but far less demonstrable, transfiguration of spirit. Did I become the frog, or did I merely cast my consciousness into the essence of frog-ness, and did I do it with such power and conviction as to cause others to see me as I saw myself -- in the form of a frog? I tell you now it is one and the same. All magic is illusion, and all reality is only what one perceives it to be, and in the world in which we lived the line between these two planes of existence was so faint as to be almost invisible.

So if it will help your modern, Western-scientific mind to accept more easily the occurrences I describe, believe if you will that it was merely a function of the occult mind. That we imagined, and caused others to imagine, those things that seem impossible for you to believe. I'll not argue the point. Imagination can stop a heart, you know, or break a bone, or alter the face of time, and in the end it is all the same to those whose lives are affected.

Still, I should not wish you to think that it was a casual thing, this shedding of one form to become another, or that it might be summoned at random will. Quite the contrary. Most of us will never master anything more than simple animal forms -- the frog, the fish, the bird or snake. Ah, but to attain transmutation to any form was a wonder almost too exquisite to bear; so intensely involving was it, so deeply, singularly pleasurable, that there was a real danger in giving oneself over to it so completely that one lost all desire to change back, and soon forgot how. Our history is rich with tales of such unfortunate occurrences: the prince trapped in the form of a frog, the lovers transformed into swans, the virgin who changed herself into a tree -- and neglected to change back. Oh, believe me, I know the temptation. I know the pain of choice.

By the time I attempted to transform into a bird I had already mastered the sinuous silky lightning-quick form of the snake, with its incredibly enhanced olfactory senses that opened to me a hundred thousand scents and shades of scents I had never imagined before. I knew what it was to lie motionless on a branch in the form of a tree worm, surrounded by green, imbued with green, awash in the splendor of an infinity of green. I had breathed water through my lungs instead of air, I had seen colors in the muddy waters of the Nile that no one else knew were there. But to be a bird. To be lifted up by a breath of wind, to have all the world spread out beneath my wings... this I wanted beyond all things.

I practiced relentlessly, striving for the exact harmonic, the precise state of nothingness which would allow the molecules of my body to shift their composition that minute fraction that would allow my form to melt away and then, with exquisite timing and singular command of the universal laws, to synchronize my being into the form I held clear in my mind. Oh, I came close. I watched with a detached consciousness as my fingers stretched into feathers, and I felt in my body the tingling and prickling, the delightful whispering sensation as a breeze ruffled the pinfeathers on the underside of my barely formed wings. I felt my toes curl into claws, bony and strong, and deep in the core of me I felt consciousness begin to shift and dissolve. And then I heard the laughter.

My heart, which already had begun to shrink, molecule by molecule, into the tiny avian muscle required for what I was becoming, exploded to its full size with an abruptness that trapped blood in its gasping valves and sent a shocking stab of pain through my chest. Porous bones abruptly hardened, snapping several small ligaments in my toes as they straightened too suddenly into their human shape again. I screamed with pain, grabbing at my injured limb, hopping on one foot as I jerked around, seeking the source of the laughter. I fell in the sand, and she only laughed harder.

It was Nefar, one of only five female adepts in the House of Ra at that time. I had alternately adored her and resented her since the day I reached puberty.

Much has been written about the role of women in ancient rites and in the various mystic disciplines. They have been alternately portrayed as either purveyors of great power and superior skill, or as having been barred entirely from the pursuit of the arcane arts, objects of scorn and superstitious fear. I assure you that in the time and place of which I speak, under the great equalizer which was the discipline of the House of Ra, females were valued neither more nor less than males. It was one's adeptness in the craft that mattered. And Nefar was very adept.

I have said before that within the perfection of the Art one competes only against oneself. That would be the ideal. The truth is that any creature of pride will find himself seeking approval, even adulation, for his own accomplishments. In short, I enjoyed it when I was the only one, the first one, or the best one in the mastery of a study. I did not enjoy it when Nefar was. For all my time at the House of Ra there were only two who kept pace with my successes, and even, on occasion, surpassed them. Nefar was one.

"Are you mad?" I roared at her, clutching my twisted toes. "You could have killed me! Even a novice knows better than to interrupt a Practice. But to call you a novice would be a flattery. How dare you follow me! How dare you spy!"

The amusement was wiped from her face as she ran to me, but by the time she had dropped to her knees beside me it had been replaced with annoyance. "Now it's you who flatters himself," she said. "I didn't intend to disturb you. I didn't see you there. Stop writhing like a baby. Let me see."

I knocked her hand away as she tried to examine my foot, but the pain that shot up my leg almost shamed me with a cry. When she reached again for my foot I pressed my lips tightly together and did not resist.

The three middle toes of my right foot were randomly askew, knotted and swollen and already beginning to turn blue. I felt a certain satisfaction at the look on her face when she saw what she had done, but it was short-lived and hardly worth the pain I was enduring.

The regret on her face was quickly disguised by indifference, and in an easy competent movement she passed her fingers over my toes from base to tip, swiftly straightening them. The sensation was like warm oil being massaged into the skin, the muscles, the sinew and bones; no, it was like a small sun being captured inside my bloodstream, spreading its radiant warmth in a cascading bright wave to the ends of my toes. The pain was not simply taken away. It was replaced by a localized euphoria that seemed to glow throughout my foot. The torn ligaments straightened and knitted, the blood and fluids that engorged my injured tissue gradually seeped away. My toes regained their healthy shape and color.

It was a simple energy transference, a natural healing. I would have done the same for her. But, still, it took my breath away.

"Was anything else damaged?" she inquired.

I shook my head, slowly flexing my toes. Now that she had removed her hands, some of the soreness was returning, as naturally it would, but full function was restored. "I think that was it," I admitted grudgingly.

Then I scowled at her. "What did you mean, you didn't see me? I'm the only one out here! What were you laughing at?"

She sat back on her knees, allowing her dark eyes to take on the glint of subtle amusement. "No, you're not," she said.

My impatience was showing. "I'm not what?"

"The only one out here."

A breeze blew a strand of dark hair across her face. She brushed it back with the fingers of one hand on her way to lifting those fingers to the sky. Her eyes turned silvery with the sun as her gaze followed her hand, and her face relaxed into a smile of pure pleasure.

I followed her gesture with a frown, and then I caught my breath. Silhouetted deep against a sky so bright it was almost white was the magnificent shape of a large falcon. Only it was not a falcon at all.

I let out my breath in a single word. "Akan."

"I wasn't laughing at you," she said softly beside me. "I was laughing because... it was just so beautiful."

The bird swept, it soared, it glided on a current of air; it turned lazily into the sun, it climbed swiftly and was in a moment only a dark speck upon the vast emptiness of the sky. And then in a rush of powerfully engineered wings he sped toward us, he dived for the ground, he drew so close that his shadow made my pupils dilate and I could hear the air that fluttered through his wings; I could almost count the feathers on his belly. And I hated him with a hot bitter envy that tasted like shame in my throat.

Akan. A quiet, studious boy who was generally disliked by his fellow students if for no other reason than that he kept so much to himself, and that he achieved -- and often excelled in -- almost every task assigned to him on the first attempt. He was the only other student -- aside from Nefar -- who could overshadow my own accomplishments. And now he was shadowing me literally, from the sky where I longed to be, a brutal mockery of my own pathetic attempts.

I couldn't watch anymore. Jealousy was making me ill, and the violence of my emotions had ensured no further Practice would be possible today. With a sharp breath I tore my gaze away from the hypnotic grace of the creature in the sky, and I prepared to lunge to my feet.

Her voice stopped me. "He reads the Dark Arcana, you know."

I stared at her. "Impossible. Not even the Masters--"

She shrugged. "The Masters don't know." Her eyes left the sky reluctantly and lost their silvery sheen as they came to focus on me. "I followed him one night to the upper library. It's not locked. Anyone can just go in and read what he likes."

"I doubt it's that simple." But despite the cynicism in my voice, I was intrigued.

"Perhaps not," she admitted. "I think the trick must be to understand what you're reading."

"Do you think he does?"

Again she shrugged. "I don't think it matters."

In that I supposed she was right. Whether his secret excursions were ever known or not, whether he himself ever learned enough to comprehend what he read, the very fact that he tried made him quite a different sort of boy than I had previously imagined. Oddly, I could not decide whether my new assessment of him was based on respect, or pity.

I looked at her, a little uneasy now. "Have you ever..." I gestured rather awkwardly toward the sky, though I could not bear to turn my head to see whether the bird still soared there.

She sighed. "No. Simple plant organisms are all I've been able to manage."

I was absurdly pleased. In that, at least, I had not been outshone.

"But Master says that once you demonstrate an ability to control the concepts, the bridge to animal life is really just a matter of realignment. And most animal forms are--"

"Merely imagined," I finished absently, by rote.

Reluctantly, I raised my eyes to the sky again. He sailed far away now, toward the banks of the river, wings dipped, riding the current. "Shouldn't he be getting tired?"

"He hasn't been up that long. And besides..." She flashed me a grin. "Who can say what is 'tired' to a bird?"

I stood abruptly. "Move away," I said.

She got to her feet in no great hurry, eyeing me with an odd mixture of amusement and wariness. "You don't mean to try a transformation now, do you? It's quite against the rules."

The rule she referred to concerned the necessity of undertaking advanced forms of the Practice in absolute privacy, which is why I had come to the edge of the desert to practice. A reminder of the danger of breaking that rule still throbbed in my sore toes as I tried to find my balance, stretching my muscles.

"Go then," I responded irritably. "Or stay. It makes no difference to me."

"Do you think you can?"

Ah, vanity. Even an adolescent Practitioner such as I should have known better than to succumb to its charms.

"Of course I can. I would have finished the thing before if you hadn't interrupted."

I thought she eyed me with new respect. "I think I'll stay, then."

Too late I realized that the admiration I had imagined in her face was in fact skepticism, and already I regretted the flash of temper that led me to make the claim.

I remembered snatches of overheard stories, whispered late at night, tales of such horror they must surely be apocryphal: the young adept who attempted to transform himself into a snake and baked to death beneath the merciless sun, having forgotten his skin. Another who died a slow and horrible death when his lungs reconstructed themselves on the outside of his body, and another who spent the remainder of his tortured days with the forequarters of a cat. Just stories, surely. But still, this was serious business, not to be undertaken lightly or for show. I couldn't believe I had let myself be goaded into such a position.

Nonetheless, I squared my feet, opened my palms, closed my eyes. I sought my center. And within moments I knew that nothing was going to happen today except my humiliation.

Such a complex transformation can take hours, even days, of concentrated effort, even for experienced Practitioners. It is not a matter of simple desire giving way to manifestation, even for the most advanced of us. There are a thousand steps, a hundred thousand tiny transformations that first must occur inside before an outward transformation can begin, and if even one of them is incomplete, the whole will collapse. Like all magic, it is a science as much as an art.

I was weary from my previous efforts, distracted by the presence of the girl, angry and annoyed, and my toes hurt. I couldn't even summon a quiet breath.

I was just about to turn on her, full of defeat and blame, when the most amazing thing happened. I felt her hand touch mine, and the tingle of energy transference that was much like what she had used to heal my toes. I was confused. The sensation was pleasant but pointless, mildly energizing but baffling. I hesitated just a moment before opening my eyes, and in that moment everything changed. Upon the white screen of my closed eyes I saw the shadow of a wing, I felt the kiss of a feather-borne breeze upon my cheek and heard the purring rustle of flight. Nefar gasped aloud. I opened my eyes.

Akan swept down, and captured me in his shadow. His wings brushed my face and ruffled through my hair and something sweet and pure and powerful passed from the essence of him into the essence of me. It was terrifying, it was consuming, it was the shock of a raging river tearing through my soul and suddenly I knew -- as simply as that, I knew -- the state of being a falcon. In effortless ecstasy I sank into the Oneness, on the wings of his shadow I was borne into the air. I was flying. I was feather and cartilage and air-filled bone; I was a bird.

The girl Nefar grew smaller and smaller beneath us, her eyes, wide with yearning as she followed our progress, and then I laughed, but the sound was wild and shrieking, a thrilling alien thing in my throat. I looked at my companion, my classmate, this creature I had never known, and I felt his surprise, which was as full as mine, I knew his excitement and, yes, his amazement. I let sound pour forth from my throat again, and he answered with a sound of his own, a joyous, piercing screech that flowed into my lungs like breath and buoyed me upward, spinning and turning, on currents of pure, unadulterated delight.