Initiate’s Trial: First book of Sword of the Canon. Janny Wurts

      I. Imprisoned

      All of his days began the same way. He awoke without any memory. Nameless, he knew nothing at all of his past. Search though he might, his thoughts churned in circles. He encountered no sense of self-purpose. Nothing beyond the fact, I exist, that might endow him with a future.

      Eyes opened, he surveyed his featureless surroundings. The place did not appear to have walls. Which deception perhaps prompted his first recollection. He understood that the silvery, reflective enclosure was a prison, woven of impenetrable spells. Colourless, textureless, the barrier enveloped him in a suspended state of neutrality, neither hot nor cold, apparently without a ceiling or floor, as seamlessly sealed as a bubble. Bland, like the clothing he was given to wear: a white shirt and dark breeches stitched from a nondescript fabric, fitted comfortably to his slight frame. His diligent keepers, whoever they were, did not wish him to suffer indignity.

      Unable to view his reflection, and with no outside window to relieve the monotony, he began with a survey of his own hands. Their structure at least prompted the insight that he was individual, with a claim to both history and character. His fingers were refined, almost delicate, the bones cleanly sculpted beneath his lean flesh. The left ones were tipped with calluses. Insight suggested the wear had been caused by repeated deft pressure to stop off taut strings. First epiphany, he recalled the joyful making of music. But not how he had acquired the scars.

      Tentative, uneasy, though he knew not why, he traced the whitened welt, gouged across his right palm and snaked in a half twist up his right forearm, to end at the elbow. The shudder raised by his tentative touch roused an unpleasant recall of searing fire. That burn crossed other weals, surely older. Disturbed, he found that both wrists, and his ankles, bore the chafe marks left ingrained by steel shackles.

      Rage stirred in him then, a formless awakening arisen from a prior trauma. Someone else had taken him captive before this. The visceral remembrance of freedom denied and the resurgent echo of rebellious anger shuddered in recoil through him. Still nameless, he knew he had broken that chain and those manacles.

      Why was he here? Who held him caged, now?

      But his fogged memory refused to unveil the hidden face of his enemy. The record of past violence written into his flesh failed to account for his straits. He remembered no crime, no offence enacted against humanity, to have earned him this punishing state of incarceration.

      His questions chased themselves into holes, stubbornly uninformative. By then, the explosive surge of his fury lashed him onto his feet. He paced. Every day, like the trapped tiger, untamed emotion spurred his frantic steps. The blank, silver prison swallowed up his dire restlessness. Its forces encapsulated his person and absorbed his aggression without a ripple. His ire blazed deeper, an unstoppable torrent that stripped his nerves livid. How he hated the fact he was helpless! He was given no target to savage. No captor appeared on which to salve his ravening grief for the loss of his being. He had no means to wreak vengeance for the outright theft of the person he had been, and rightfully should be, since he was kept living.

      When the edged intensity of his temper peaked, the old woman always appeared. She came, swathed head to