The third stage of the transformation began on Thursday of the third week. He had five days left.
Ssemakula and Adaeze together for this stage. The stone room had a different quality with two practitioners in it — more charged, the quality of somewhere important things had happened before.
'The third stage is not a battle,' Ssemakula said. 'This is the mistake most students make. It is a different kind of movement entirely.'
'Becoming one with the part of yourself that the animal is,' Adaeze said. 'The wolf is not separate from you. It has never been separate. The third stage is recognising this. Not as a concept but as a physical fact you feel in the body.'
He sat.
The first session produced the most profound stillness he had ever inhabited — deeper than the Occlumency work, somewhere very far down where the ordinary noise of being a person did not reach. He found the wolf there.
He came out and told Ssemakula: 'I found the bottom. I don't know how to take the next step from there.'
'You don't take a step,' Ssemakula said. 'You stop separating.'
Friday he found the bottom again and tried something different: instead of sitting beside the wolf, he let the distinction relax.
It worked for approximately thirty seconds.
His body attempted to change — a bone-deep shift that was not painful but was the most significant physical sensation he had experienced in this life. His hands changed quality at the edges, the magic moving differently through them. Then the self-awareness reasserted and it stopped.
He came out breathing carefully and told Adaeze what had happened.
She looked at him with the quick eyes.
'Thirty seconds on the second attempt of the third stage,' she said. 'In three weeks total.' A pause. 'You understand this is not normal.'
'I've had a full year of preparation,' he said.
'Many students prepare for years,' she said. 'What you have is not preparation. It is integration. Everything you have built this year has been making you more coherent. More fully yourself. The transformation requires coherence. You are unusually coherent for your age.'
Saturday he went in at eight in the morning.
He found the bottom. He found the wolf. He relaxed the distinction.
The shift happened at three hours and twenty minutes. Not the partial shift of Friday — the full shift, the bone-deep movement of everything simultaneously, the world going wolf for a period of time he could not measure accurately because the wolf did not measure time the way the man did.
He could smell the mountain. He could smell Ssemakula and Adaeze across the room, the specific and complex information of two human beings. He could hear the valley below the school. He was aware of his own body in a way that was entirely new — not the human awareness of a body as a thing that carried the self around, but the wolf's awareness of a body as the self, entirely physical and entirely present and entirely sufficient.
He held this for eleven minutes.
Then he shifted back.
He sat on the floor of the stone room and breathed carefully.
'Well,' Adaeze said, after a moment.
'Yes,' he said.
'The grey quality was visible in the magic,' Ssemakula said. 'You understand what you have now.'
'The enhanced senses,' Ron said. 'Even in human form. And the full transformation at will, once I've practised the control.'
'The senses will take a week or two to fully integrate,' Adaeze said. 'Human environments are very loud to a wolf's nose.' She paused. 'The other benefits — the instinct, the endurance, and what it means to pay attention as a wolf does - these will arrive gradually over the next months.'
He sat on the floor of the stone room and felt the wolf present in him the way a second heartbeat was present — not separate, not other, simply the fuller version of what he already was.
'Thank you,' he said to both of them. And meant it at a depth that the word was not quite sufficient for.