
I had been a nervous wreck ever since my powers started to awaken,
but now that I was actually walking up to the Sojourn pod my
anxiety cranked up to new heights. In the two weeks since my
psychic powers had started coming in, one of my parents or
my uncle Kaz had kept physical contact with me the whole time,
extending their mind around mine to shield me from the mantel of
madness that had suffused the world ever since Emperor Henry I had
the mental breakdown to end all mental breakdowns thousands of
years ago. Two weeks was much longer than usual, but my family
is one of powerful Dominators, so we didn't have to pay one to
shield me for that time, and it was worth the wait since my
mother managed to get me on a Healer Sojourn.

Healers are the rarest type of psychic, even rarer than the
Warpers who can bend space. They are a strange mix of Fleshdancers
and Dominators, only in both respects they are much weaker than
the more common psychics their powers mimic. In exchange they
have much better control than a Fleshdancer or a Dominator like
me. They are able to bring their minds in tune with a patient
enough that they can reshape their patient's body as if it is
their own. For obvious reasons, they are considered precious
resources, especially since only 10% of them make it through
their tempering, and that is with the help of the Sojourns.
Before we learned to fold space and push it along the gradient
of the mantel of madness to a gentler location, only 25% of
psychic's lived until the age of 25. Now, 60% of us make it.

Even an ordinary Sojourn, which has enough energy to last about
three years, tempers too fast for healers, but they are considered
precious enough resources that special Sojourns are arranged
for them with enough energy to last five. Of course, ordinary
psychics all wish their children could go on such luxuriously
long Sojourns, and thanks to the scarcity of Healers to actually
fill them up, some lucky kids get to go. Since Sojourns are
cast off with the combined power of an array of Dominators
to provide the mental shielding and Warpers to actually
cast the pods off into the space between realms, it's mostly
the children of powerful Dominator and Warper clans who get
the coveted slots. Kids like me.

My mother had tried extra hard to get me this slot since I'm
a lot weaker than average for a Dominator. Normally, even in
ordinary Sojourns Dominators do better than average thanks to
our focus on telepathy, but I'm weak enough that I would have
a good chance of succumbing to the madness in a typical Sojourn.
The Healer Sojourn will give me a much better chance of surviving
my tempering. If it isn't enough, my family's secret unorthodox
technique might be. I really hope it doesn't come to that though.

My mom and I walked up to the entrance to the pod. I've already
seen a few other kids enter, sep
