Isaiah had always been told he was meant for great things.
It was the kind of sentence that sounded like a blessing at first - until you realised it was a promise you never asked to make.
In the Saul household, you didn't get to simply be. You had to become. And for Isaiah, the youngest of three brothers, becoming meant carrying a weight no one ever set down for him. His father's Doma - the Lion's Poise - had been passed down for three generations, and though Isaiah had yet to claim it, everyone already spoke of it as if it were a crown waiting to rest on his head.
They never spoke of the ritual.
They never spoke of the cost.
The morning had been filled with errands - half for the market, half for his father, who liked to remind Isaiah that "responsibility begins in the small things."
The market was alive with colour and noise, despite the clouds threatening rain. Spice merchants bellowed over one another, stringing their words together like hooks for passing customers. Street tailors tapped their shears in rhythm as they worked, cutting cloth the colour of midnight or desert gold. And somewhere between the stalls, Isaiah caught the scent of smoked rooibos drifting from a tea vendor.
He kept his head down, moving quickly. He didn't like to linger here - not in the Hollow District, where eyes watched for weakness the way hawks searched for movement.
Halfway through the list, he felt it.
A shift in the air. A subtle tightening in his chest, like his heartbeat had missed a step. It wasn't fear, exactly - more like someone had reached into his mind and brushed against a memory he thought was locked away.
He glanced up and saw him.
The man was leaning lightly on a cane, his suit pressed sharp despite the dust underfoot. He didn't speak, didn't move much at all - and yet every person within ten paces seemed to give him a little more room than the street allowed. Isaiah didn't know his name, but he knew the type. An Elder. A man who carried a Doma so deeply it had become part of his shadow.
Their eyes met for the briefest moment, and Isaiah felt that strange tightening deepen - not painful, but heavy, as though someone had just placed a truth in his hands he wasn't ready to hold.
The man's gaze moved on. His steps were slow, deliberate, each click of the cane like a sentence in a language Isaiah didn't yet understand.
Later that evening, back home, Isaiah found himself sketching the shape of a lion on a scrap of paper. Not the roaring, golden beast his father's stories always painted - but a lion at rest, muscles coiled, eyes half-closed. Waiting.
He didn't know why.
But something in his chest told him it wasn't patience.
It was the stillness before a leap.