The golden light around me shifted, coalesced, then expanded outward until I couldn't see anything beyond its brilliance. I felt myself lifting off the ground, suspended in a void of shimmering light. The stone circle, the pack, my mates—all vanished, replaced by this endless golden expanse.
Then, abruptly, the light withdrew, and I landed hard on unfamiliar ground.
I blinked, disoriented. I was no longer in the forest near the packhouse. Instead, I stood in a vast arena of sorts—a perfect circle maybe a hundred yards across, enclosed by walls of shifting golden energy that reached up endlessly into a strange twilight sky. The ground beneath my feet was neither dirt nor stone but some substance in between, packed hard but slightly yielding, like clay baked under a hot sun.
The air smell
