He saw, by the glitter of starlight coming through rifts in the clouds, other figures moving also toward the jungle depths. But he did not acknowledge them, nor they him. The Velalisier obeisance was performed alone: a private ritual for a public grief. One never spoke of it; one simply did it, on the fifth day of the fifth week of the fifth month, and when one's children were of age one instructed them in the manner of doing it, but always with shame, always with sorrow. That was the Way.

He walked into the forest for the prescribed three hundred strides. That brought him to a grove of slender towering gibaroons; but he could not pray properly here, because aerial clumps of gleam-bells dangled from every crotch and pucker of their trunks, casting a sharp orange glow. Not far away he spied a majestic old dwikka tree, standing by itself, that had been gouged by lightning some ages ago: a great cavernous charred scar, covered along its edges by regrown red bark, offered itself to him as a temple. The light of the gleam-bells would not penetrate there.

Standing naked in the shelter of the dwikka's huge scar, he performed first the Five Changes.

His bones and muscles flowed, his skin cells modified themselves, and he became the Red Woman; and after her, the Blind Giant; and then the Flayed Man; and in the fourth of the Changes he took on the form of the Final King; and then, drawing breath deeply and calling upon all his power, he became the Prince To Come. For Faraataa, the Fifth Change was the deepest struggle: it required him to alter not only the outer lineaments of his body but the contours of the soul itself, from which he had to purge all hatred, all hunger for vengeance, all lust for destruction. The Prince To Come had transcended those things. Faraataa had no hope of achieving that. He knew that in his soul there dwelled nothing but hatred, hunger for vengeance, lust for destruction; to become the Prince To Come, he must empty himself to a husk, and that he could not do. But there were ways of approaching the desired state. He dreamed of a time when all that he had been working for was accomplished: the enemy destroyed, the forsaken lands reclaimed, the rites reestablished, the world born anew. He journeyed forth into that era and let its joy possess him. He forced from his soul all recollection of defeat, exile, loss. He saw the tabernacles of the dead city come alive. In the grip of such a vision, what need for vengeance? What enemy was there to hate and destroy? A strange and wondrous peace spread through his spirit. The day of rebirth had arrived; all was well in the world; his pain was gone forever, and he was at rest.

In that moment he took on the form of the Prince To Come.