Chapter 1

It was as a young child I was first taught the ways of Magic. It was my grandparents who taught me, mostly, but even as a baby I learned about the Light, and about the Dream World and about the Gifts. I even learned about accepting the infinite into myself without letting it overwhelm me. Well, I don't think that last one was something I was taught on purpose, but I learned it, nonetheless.

In addition to showing me the Light and the Gifts, my parents taught me the way of the bow and staff. They taught me the depths of the gifts that were shared by few on Arbor but by a growing number in other places. As a babe I was sometimes rocked to sleep in the arms of the High Wizard of Arbor, or spent my day hung on the hip of the Wind of Arbor, an agent of the Spirits. The life my parents lived was much less glamorous, but for all that they chose to drape themselves in mundane trappings, they too were beings of magic. Powerful magic, but all wrapped up in countless years of prophesy, fate, half-truths, lies and unspoken understandings and misunderstandings. The tangle of it frustrated me from the first day I was aware of it, but it was enough that they were content. Let them be.

The Weaver and the Wind stepped aside now and then and let the Earth-born sides of themselves guide me. Andy and Cor show me what I needed to know about the Light, about mathematics and science, and the ways that the pieces of the universe that they knew worked. My great-grandfather Dave stopped by now and then and when he did, I could feel a connection through him to something. I was too young then to know what it was, but I could feel it. Great-grandmother Ginny would see me every year to give me a 'checkup', and it was during these visits that she gave me my first glimpses into the world of a healer. I followed her sight into my own body and the mysteries and marvels thus revealed.

I made my first visit to Earth when I was seven. I was fascinated. Lost, certainly - utterly, utterly lost - but oh so fascinated. I didn't understand why of course, but there was something about the place that I found comfortable, like a favorite pair of shoes.

I was familiar with Earth, Meadow, Precipice, Taluat, Cascade and a half dozen other worlds by the time I was eight. I was a young girl with a close to unique set of experiences that had given me a life that anyone would have called interesting, but it got real interesting when I turned ten and had a birthday party on Meadow. Birthdays were not much celebrated on Arbor, though I was used to it being noted by a good meal or a new set of something to replace whatever I'd grown out of most recently. This birthday was special though. It was this day that began the journey that was my true life and leaves me as I wish to be known.

My name is Sky McKesson, and I am a Walker Between Worlds.

"Sky! Sky! Come on now, everyone's waiting!" came my mom's call from the back of Great Grandpa and Grandma's house. I had been up at the stables, but was already on my way back, but a little too slowly to avoid the parental holler off the back patio, it seemed.

"Coming!" I hollered, as I began running. I knew what was coming, in a roundabout sort of way. Dad had been through this, as had Grandpa Andy and Aunt Serenity. My present would be a block of stone or other material from a new facet and I had to find my way to it using the Light. I had shared my mind with each and all of them, as they had shared theirs with me. I had, in my memories, a 'taste' of their memories of their own birthday blocks and their own discoveries.

"Sorry!" I said as I came through the patio door, heading off any complaints, I hoped. "I was up with the horses."

"You're always up with the horses," Flare said, and everyone laughed in agreement. Flare was unofficial family. His mom and dad were both Awakened, people who'd had the gifts turned on at some point in their lives, but neither of them were Light-sensitive, even a little bit, and the same was true of Flare. Still he'd been around me and my parents his whole life, so he knew the score as far as me being a McKesson went.

"Well, you've already found your horse," I pouted. "I'm still looking for mine." The fact that I believed that I would find 'my' horse someday and that I was adamant in my belief that not just any horse would do, was one of those things that drove everyone in my family crazy. I was going to find mine, I knew it in the way I knew many things. I don't know if its a McKesson thing or an Arbor thing, but given the fact that I have two seers in the family back on Arbor, I'd guess its a combination of the two.