The small body on the sun-warmed stone was just a thing now. A husk. Kyon looked at it, and where a mind like Elara's might have seen tragedy, his saw only a concluded equation. The frantic, fluttering variable of life had been solved, leaving behind a quiet, absolute answer.
The knowledge he had consumed was not a list of facts. It was a silent, perfect understanding that had settled deep within him. He didn't know the sparrow's heart rate; he knew the feeling of its terrified pulse as if it had been his own. He didn't know the frequency of its call; he knew the sharp, desperate sound of its fear, a note that was now permanently etched into his memory. He knew sparrow-ness, in its entirety, from the inside out.
The voice, sweet and light, had cut through his reverie. Elara.
He looked from the dead bird to the living girl. The shift in his perception was jarring. Where the sparrow had been a simple, closed book, Elara was a vast, bustling library, every breath a turning page, every smile a chapter heading. He could see the pulse in her throat, a fragile rhythm against her skin. He could sense the warm, vibrant complexity of her, a stark contrast to the cold, finished silence in his hand.
"Kyon! Enjoying the sun?"
His smile was a conscious, mechanical act. He noted how it made her own expression soften further. A social cue, reciprocated. A successful interaction.
"Yes," he replied, his voice a practiced, pleasant mask. "I was just studying."
Her gaze fell to the sparrow. Her smile faltered, replaced by a gentle sadness. "Oh. Poor thing. Did it just… die?"
"Its state of being has concluded," Kyon said, picking it up. The lightness of it was profound. All that fury and life, reduced to this. "I was fortunate to observe the process."
"That's so sad. But also… a little beautiful, in a way? To be there for someone's final moment. To bear witness."
Beautiful. He turned the word over in his mind. Was it beautiful? It was efficient. It was illuminating. It was the most truthful thing he had ever seen. Her sentimentality was a filter, distorting the clean, sharp lines of the reality he had just witnessed.
"Beauty is a frequent byproduct of efficient processes," he said. The words felt true, though her faint frown suggested they missed their mark. "I should go. Notes to transcribe."
He left her there, a splash of confusing warmth in the afternoon sun, and dropped the sparrow's body into a thorny bush. Its purpose was served.
He didn't return to his dormitory. He went to the Athenaeum, but not to the sections on philosophy or theology. He sought out the bestiaries, the anatomical folios with their detailed plates of dissected creatures. Before, they had been mere illustrations. Now, they were pale echoes, clumsy maps of a territory he had already visited. They showed the machinery but completely missed the ghost—the vital, thrumming essence he had consumed.
He found a secluded desk, but he did not write numbers or measurements. His hand moved, sketching not the sparrow, but the feeling of its end. A single, sharp line that tapered into nothing. He wrote a single sentence, over and over, as if trying to capture the shape of the void it described.
To know a thing is to witness its unraveling.
A new hunger awoke in him, cold and deep. If the essence of a sparrow granted such clarity, what would the essence of a man grant? What was the flavor of courage? The texture of fear? Could those truths be isolated, tasted, and known?
The world, once a blur of confusing emotions and arbitrary rules, now presented itself as a structured, comprehensible system. A dark and delicious system. He had found his lexicon.
The next days passed in a blur. Kyon attended lectures on ethics and history like a specter, his physical presence a shell for a mind racing on a different plane. He listened to debates on morality and heard only fear—a fear of looking into the abyss he was now eager to explore.
He began to see his fellow students as walking concepts. The swaggering nobleman from the fencing club was not a person; he was a living embodiment of arrogance. The timid librarian was a treatise on anxiety. And Elara, with her easy kindness, was a deep, complex study in empathy.
He wanted to open the books. To read them. To understand them from the inside.
The opportunity presented itself not in the gentle courtyard, but in the dripping, moss-choked undercroft beneath the old alchemy wing. The air was thick with the smell of damp stone and forgotten chemicals. Kyon was searching for a text on archaic metallurgy when he heard the sound.
It was a wet, rasping struggle. The sound of a thing fighting a losing battle with its own existence.
He found it in a dark alcove, behind barrels swollen with rot. A large, brindled rat. It was dying. Its leg was twisted into a unnatural angle, and a deep gash on its side wept dark blood. Flies formed a shifting, buzzing crown around the wound. Each breath was a shuddering effort that seemed to cost it everything.
This was not the clean, contained end of the sparrow. This was messy, ugly, and already in motion. It was perfect.
Kyon knelt. The rat was too far gone for fear. Its eyes were glazed, seeing nothing. Its whole world had shrunk to the single, agonizing task of drawing its next breath.
He did not touch it. He simply watched. He observed the terrible rhythm of its suffering. The sparrow's end had been a sharp, final note. This was a slow, discordant symphony of decay.
He focused his will, as he had before. He waited for the final, dissolving chord. The rat's breaths grew further apart, each one a weaker echo of the last. A final, shuddering sigh escaped it, carrying the last of its warmth into the cold air.
The moment came. The faint light in its eyes drained away, leaving behind dull, black beads. And there it was again—that shimmer in the air, that ethereal afterimage. But this one was different. It was murky, tinged with a greasy, sickly color. It wasn't just rat; it was rat-in-agony. Its essence was saturated with the truth of its suffering.
Kyon focused. Mine.
The shimmer dissolved into him.
The knowledge that flooded him was not clean and sharp like the sparrow's. It was a cold, oily wave. It was the intimate, immediate knowing of pain. Not the word, but the raw, screaming reality of it. He knew the white-hot fire along shattered nerves, the deep, throbbing anguish of infection, the way a mind could unravel under its relentless weight. It was a dark and terrible symphony, and he now knew every note.
It was the most real thing he had ever felt.
He stood, his own heart beating a steady, calm rhythm. He looked from the dead rat to his own hands. An idea, simple and pure, presented itself.
He found a splintered piece of wood. Without a moment of hesitation, he dragged the sharp end across his palm.
A line of fire erupted on his skin. Blood welled, vivid and red.
A normal person would have flinched, gasped, cried out. Kyon did none of these things. He watched the blood bead up with intense, fascinated curiosity. The pain signals screamed along his nerves, a bright, urgent message.
But he now spoke the language. He understood its grammar. He knew this sensation for what it was: mere information.
He focused his will inward, not to stop the pain, but to listen to it. To understand its message—laceration, bleeding—and then to file it away. He acknowledged the signal and then dismissed it. It was data, not a command. It had no power over him.
The pain didn't vanish. It simply became… a whisper. A sensation he observed from a great distance. It was utterly irrelevant.
A true smile touched his lips then, the first one that ever reached his eyes. It was a smile of pure, terrifying discovery.
This changed everything. Pain was the great teacher of fear, the universal inhibitor. If he could master pain, what else could he master? What other lies had he been told about the limits of the self?
He needed to know more. He needed a healthier subject. A conscious one. The rat's essence had been diluted by its long sickness. He needed to observe the transition from vibrant vitality to pure terror. He needed to taste a purer spark.
His thoughts turned to the fencing club braggart, Torin. What was the essence of such a boy? What truth would his unraveling reveal?
And Elara… her essence would be a complex, layered vintage. A challenging and rewarding consumption.
A shadow fell over him. He looked up, his face smoothing back into its neutral mask.
Master Corbin stood there, his kind face etched with concern. He held a small, cloth-wrapped bundle. "I thought I saw you come down here, lad. Dark place for studying." His eyes, still sharp, flicked to the dead rat, then to the bleeding cut on Kyon's palm. "Gods, son, what happened?"
"An accident," Kyon said, his voice flat. "A piece of wood. It's nothing."
Corbin knelt, his knees cracking softly. He tutted. "Doesn't look like nothing. Here." He unwrapped the cloth to reveal two pastries. "Brought you these. You look like you forget to eat. Now, let me see that hand."
Kyon allowed the old man to take his hand. Corbin's touch was gentle. He examined the cut. "Clean, at least. You'll live." He pulled out a small tin of salve. "This will sting," he warned, applying a dab.
Kyon watched, fascinated. He felt the coolness of the salve, the gentle pressure of the old man's fingers. The warning was meaningless. He was the master of stings.
"There," Corbin said, wrapping a clean strip of cloth around the palm. "All mended." He smiled, a network of kindly lines spreading from his eyes. "Just like my vase. You have to understand the nature of the hurt to know how to fix it."
Kyon looked at his bandaged hand, then at the old craftsman who believed in mending, in putting things back together.
You misunderstand, Kyon thought, the words crystalline and certain in his mind. I am not interested in the hurt. I am interested in the wounding. I don't want to understand it to fix it. I want to understand it to perfect it.
He took the pastry. "Thank you, Master Corbin."
The old man clapped him on the shoulder. "Don't mention it, lad. The world needs more young men with a thirst for knowledge."
As Corbin walked away, his form swallowed by the gloom, Kyon took a bite of the pastry. It was sweet and flaky, but it tasted of nothing.
The old man was wrong. The world didn't need more young men with a thirst for knowledge.
It needed to fear the one it had already created.