He stood atop a high, flat-topped stone spire, the wind ruffling his hair, bringing a thousand dry scents and a faint hint of water hidden in the far distance. For an instant he thought he had the form of a wolf, and fumbled at his own body to make sure what he saw was really him. He wore his own coat and breeches and boots; he held his bow, and his quiver hung at his side. The axe was not there.

“Hopper! Hopper, where are you?” The wolf did not come.

Rugged mountains surrounded him, and other tall spires separated by arid flats and jumbled ridges, and sometimes a large plateau rising with sheer sides. Things grew, but nothing lush. Tough, short grass. Bushes wiry and covered with thorn, and other things that even seemed to have thorns on their fat leaves. Scattered, stunted trees, twisted by the wind. Yet wolves could find hunting even in this land.

As he peered at this rough land, a circle of darkness suddenly blanked out a part of the mountains; he could not have said whether the darkness was right in front of his face or halfway to the mountains, but he seemed to be seeing through it, and beyond. Mat, rattling a dice cup. His opponent stared at Mat with eyes of fire. Mat did not seem to see the man, but Perrin knew him.

“Mat!” he shouted. “It’s Ba’alzamon! Light, Mat, you’re dicing with Ba’alzamon!”

Mat made his toss, and as the dice spun, the vision faded, and the dark place was dry mountains again.

“Hopper!” Perrin turned slowly, looking in every direction. He even looked up in the sky—He can fly, now—where clouds promised a rain the ground far below the spire top would drink up as soon as it fell. “Hopper!”

A darkness formed among the clouds, a hole into somewhere else. Egwene and Nynaeve and Elayne stood looking at a huge metal cage, with a raised door held on a heavy spring. They stepped in and reached up together to loose the catch. The barred door snapped down behind them. A woman with her hair all in braids laughed at them, and another woman all in white laughed at her. The hole in the sky closed, and there were only clouds.

“Hopper, where are you?” he called. “I need you! Hopper!”

And the grizzled wolf was there, alighting on the spire top as if he had leaped from somewhere higher.

Dangerous. You have been warned, Young Bull. Too young. Too new yet.

“I need to know, Hopper. You said there were things I must see. I need to see more, know more.” He hesitated, thinking of Mat, of Egwene and Nynaeve and Elayne. “The strange things I see here. Are they real?” Hopper’s sending seemed slow, as if it were so simple the wolf could not understand the need to explain it, or how to. Finally, though, something came.