The rain never stopped in Greyveil.
Not once, not even in summer when the rest of Varenhold dried out and cracked and people in the Neutral Cities complained about the heat.
In Greyveil, it just rained.
Every day, same grey sky, same cold drizzle coming down sideways when the wind picked up, soaking through your coat before you'd even stepped properly outside.
The elders called it mourning weather. Like the land itself was grieving something it couldn't name.
As the settlement of the Sorrow Clan, Greyveil was a mirror reflection of the clan's dominant emotion.
It was entrenched at the outskirts of the mid-tier Kingdom of Varenhold.
Kael had stopped caring about the rain around age nine. Now it was just background noise, same as the creaking of the communal hall roof or the distant sound of the Wilds at night when the wind carried strange things out of the dark.
He was sitting on the outer wall of the settlement when Maren found him, she was one of the oldest Elders of the Sorrow Clan.
With his legs hanging over the edge, watching the grey treeline in the distance, the carved bird token in his fingers kept turning over and over the way it always did when he was thinking too hard about something.
Tomorrow was his awakening.
He should've been resting. Maren had told him twice, his grandfather had told him once, which in the old man's language meant he was genuinely concerned.
Kael had nodded at both of them and come up here anyway because the alternative was lying in his bunk staring at the ceiling thinking the same thoughts in circles, and that seemed worse.
The familiar settlement below him was doing its evening routine- cook fires, thin broth, and the same handful of children running the same routes between the same buildings.
He watched them without feeling much of anything particular.
That was the thing about growing up in a place like Greyveil, you either learned to feel everything deeply or you learned to feel nothing at all, and most people here had chosen nothing because nothing hurt less.
Kael had never managed nothing.
His grandfather said that meant something. He said the ones who carried it deepest were always the ones who looked the most disconnected from the outside, like they'd gone somewhere internal and just hadn't fully come back.
Kael had asked him once where they went, but the old man had just looked out the window at the rain.
Amid the cold drizzle, he turned the token over again.
His mother had carved the token when he was maybe two or three. He didn't remember it happening, he'd just always had it- a bird with its wings spread, frozen midflight, and small enough to disappear in a closed fist.
He couldn't remember her face properly anymore, four years old was too young to hold onto a face across thirteen years of distance.
But he remembered her hands, the specific warmth of them and the careful way they moved over small things.
He remembered being held.
That was probably the oldest memory he had and he'd never told anyone about it because it felt like the kind of thing that would sound stupid out loud.
Tomorrow, his Anima would come in or it wouldn't.
The clan had seen dry awakenings before, people who went through the whole ceremony and came away with nothing, their Sorrow too thin or too buried to crystallize into actual power.
Those people became background characters, mere civilians. They lived their whole lives in Greyveil doing the same small tasks and dying the same quiet deaths and nobody made a story out of them.
Kael had spent a long time trying to figure out if he was afraid of that happening to him and he'd concluded that no, not really, what he felt was harder to name than fear.
What he felt was something more like a pressure, a sense of something that had been building for a long time and hadn't found its release yet.
Below him Maren came out of the communal hall and looked up. He could see the worry on her from thirty feet away, she'd never been good at hiding it, not with him anyway. She gestured at him to come down.
He looked at her for a moment, then he looked back out at the Wilds.
The trees out there grew wrong. Everyone knew it- they bent at angles that had nothing to do with wind, some of them twisted back on themselves like they'd tried to turn around and gotten stuck halfway.
In a world where human emotion is the source of all power, things lived in there that were drawn to strong emotion the way a fire draws moths.
The stronger your Anima, the more they notice you. That was why weak clans like the Sorrow Clan built their settlements at the border instead of further in, because the Wilds left you alone if you weren't worth noticing.
Kael had read the old texts in the locked cabinet behind Maren's desk. All of them, twice. The Firstborn hadn't been left alone by anything.
Quietly, he stared some more then he put the token back in his pocket and dropped down from the wall.
Tomorrow was tomorrow and right now, he was done sitting up here turning it over in his head.
He'd either be worth something by sundown or he wouldn't.
And if he wasn't, well, he'd figure out what came after that when it got here.