I am glad to have proof that the many years in the Circle has not rotted your mind entirely as I feared. [And she leans forward, steepling her fingers as she does so; did she not explain this to Shale once? It feels like another lifetime ago that she did.]

Tis indeed the soul, and though there is some small measure that can be gained from a book, that would be more about the animal itself than the magic. This is not a discipline you will learn from a book, believe me, if there are those who will claim to have done so then it will be a poor shadow of what this truly is. Each form must be learned anew. You study the creature, learn to move as it does, to think as it does; how do you think you know the world? And yet how many creatures disappear before you ever even knew they were there but for their song in the wind, the rustle of the leaves and bushes, their footprints?

I am still me. I smell it as a wolf, hear it as a cat, see it as a raven, but I am still myself simply another form.