The second stage of the transformation he had been warned would be harder than the first. It was.
The second stage required him to encounter the wolf not in stillness but in motion — to go into the meditation and let the wolf move, let it be what it was, and stay in contact with it without being overwhelmed. The first session lasted three hours and ended with him shaking slightly in a way he had not experienced since the early Occlumency work.
Adaeze was there for the second stage.
'The first stage was about knowing,' she said. 'The second stage is about surviving the knowing in a dynamic state. Your wolf moves. You move with it. You do not become it yet — that is the third stage. But you do not resist it either. You are running beside it.'
'That's accurate,' he said. 'And the appetite thing — the directness — it's louder when it moves. In the stillness it was a fact. In motion it's an argument.'
'The wolf wants things,' Adaeze said. 'When it is still, it has patience with the wanting. When it moves, it is less patient.' She looked at him. 'What does it want?'
'To act,' he said. 'When it moves, it wants to act. The stillness is waiting. The motion is the thing after waiting.'
'And you?' she said.
'I'm also tired of waiting,' he said. 'For some things.'
'Good,' she said. 'That honesty is what the second stage requires.'
The second stage took six days. He had been warned it took eight to twelve for most students. On the sixth day he came out of the session and sat outside on the mountainside in the late afternoon and looked at the valley below the school and felt the wolf settle into him the way a second heartbeat settled — present, not separate, simply there alongside everything else.