I remember giving the feeling a name when I was about thirteen, a name I won't mention here. But the feeling itself came before that. The feeling just welled up in me. Not in seconds, or in minutes, or even in days. It must have taken weeks or months before it penetrated my consciousness. Outside events had to happen, and then be compared against the feeling inside me. The feeling told me that somewhere a thread burned brightly --- inside me, outside me, I wasn't sure where and I wasn't sure that it mattered. Outside events told me that what I was feeling was the power.

The power is subtle. It is not a thing I can show people, in a minute or two. I cannot summon balls of fire to my fingertips, or turn intangible, or fly under my own power. It is slow. It happens at a drip, maybe a trickle or a streamlet on rare occasions when the moment is right. But its effects on others can be cumulative. That's the true promise --- and the true danger, if I ever misuse it.

The power can draw others to me, or push them away. It can make the improbable slightly more probable, or open a door where none had been seen before. Little by little, it can shift the course of a life.

Sometimes it warms me. Sometimes it teaches me things, what I need to know, then or later. Some days the power brings me a crown, and some days it is the crown. I cannot name it, the power. It's not that naming it lessens it --- well, that's true too. Naming it can diminish it. But more importantly, any time I try to name it, I am wrong. Someone else can name it. He or she can name it, and be correct. That's exactly what the power is --- for him or her. Name it right almost every time. And that name tells me something I didn't know, maybe. About the power.

I suppose that's because all that others need for my power is a word-name. One symbol will do, to capture the moment. To try to sum up the effect I had on that particular person. Whereas for me, I live it, I envelop it, it envelops me. No one word will do. All languages are too sparse. There is no word for the space between "cry" and "cry out," no step between "fichu" and "foutu," no single symbol to describe that which is at the same time the puller and the thing being pulled. No word-name for these concepts. Instead, to put across all the nuances, a sentence or a paragraph or an entire story may be required. So it is with the power. Calling it "the power" conveys almost nothing. Any other word-name would be at least as false.

Instead a story-name is the best I can do. If I learned the power instead of being born to it, if it came externally, then I learned much of it without noticing. Or I mistook it for something else at the time. I miscategorized the knowledge that is the power because I did not recognize it. There was no name on my map of the world for this road, because my map didn't show the road. Or even some of the places that the road existed to connect. My borders were too smooth, and the real world too crinkly. Perhaps this is the only way the power can be acquired, or shaped if the seed itself is innate: through redrawing the map to conform to the evidence of one's ears, as one's ears hear more, hear more stories.

Let me tell a tale, about a young boy who followed a pretty golden bird into a very large forest one day, all by himself . . .