The first stage of the transformation began on Tuesday.
Ssemakula had a room for it — a plain stone room with a floor that had been smoothed by use rather than by tools, the specific texture of somewhere that had had this conversation with many people before him and was waiting to have it again.
'You will sit,' Ssemakula said. 'You will go down into the stillness. You know how to do this.'
'Yes,' Ron said.
'When you find the wolf, you will not observe it,' Ssemakula said. 'Observation is distance. You will sit with it. You will let it be as close as it wants to be. You will not flinch and you will not manage and you will not use the Occlumency as a wall. The Occlumency can be the floor. It cannot be the wall.'
Ron absorbed this distinction.
'The wolf will show you things,' Ssemakula said. 'Not flattering things, necessarily. Not frightening things, necessarily. True things. You sit with them until they stop being new.'
'How will I know when the first stage is done?' Ron said.
'You will know,' Ssemakula said, with the quality of someone who had given this answer before and knew it was unsatisfying and knew it was correct.
He sat.
The first session lasted four hours and produced the wolf, present and close, with the patient quality he had seen in March. And underneath the patience, something else. Not aggression — he had expected aggression and found it was not aggression. It was something more like appetite. Something that wanted things clearly and without apology. Not cruelty. Directness, taken to its furthest point.
The second session produced the thing underneath the appetite: loyalty so complete it was almost frightening. Not loyalty as a virtue performed — loyalty as a fact, structural. He would not leave. He would not stop. He would stay until the thing he had committed to was finished or he was. This was not a decision. It was what he was.
The third session went deeper, and he came out after six hours looking like someone who had been somewhere difficult and had not run from it.
Friday he went back to Ssemakula and said: 'I think I know what it is.'
He told him. The patience over the appetite. The loyalty under everything.
'There is one more layer,' Ssemakula said. 'Below the loyalty.'
Saturday he found it.
Below the loyalty was grief. Old grief — not his, specifically, or not only his. The grief of the first life, the accumulated weight of a life that had been decent and ordinary and had ended on a Tuesday in a flat with cold noodles on the coffee table and no one there. He had not looked at this directly since June of last year. He had known it was there and had walked around it.
He sat with it.
He sat with it for eight hours, and the wolf sat with him, and the grief was not something to be resolved or healed or moved past. It was simply true. It had happened. It was part of what he was, and what he was had led him here, and here was not nothing.
At some point in the eighth hour the grief and the wolf became the same thing. Not opposed. The same thing.
He came out of the session with the quality of someone who had put something down that they had been carrying without knowing they were carrying it.
Ssemakula was waiting outside.
'First stage,' he said, looking at Ron.
'Yes,' Ron said.
'Five days,' Ssemakula said. 'That is fast.'
'I've been practising sitting with difficult things,' Ron said.
'Rest tomorrow,' Ssemakula said. 'The second stage begins Monday.'