How many things are there that people never truly see?
Not because they are hidden, exactly—but because most minds are not shaped to perceive them. Not trained. Not cursed. Not blessed.
And would it even be a blessing?
To know everything?
To see the deeper truth behind faces and masks and motives—to feel the tremor of a soul when it lies, even as the voice remains calm? To look at someone and know they're doomed before they do?
Would that be wisdom?
Or simply a slow death in disguise?
Erin Valeheart had asked herself that more than once.
Because she could see.
Not through walls, not through illusions, but through people. Through the fragile scaffolding of personality, through the messy knots of fate and contradiction that defined them. She had never learned it. She had been born into it. Birthed into a lineage so steeped in mystery that truth and madness had long ago learned to walk hand in hand.
