The awakening ground was a circle of old dark stone at the settlement's center, rain polished smooth over god knows how many years. Twelve torches stood around the edge with pale flames that barely bothered the dark.
The whole clan was there already when Kael came down, standing in their clusters along the perimeter like they always did for these things, faces doing that specific expression that meant they'd seen enough of these ceremonies to stop expecting anything interesting.
There was only one candidate this season- him, Kael.
That detail had weight to it.
A settlement Greyveil's size should've been sending three or four people to the stone every awakening cycle.
The fact that it was just him standing in the middle of this circle with everyone watching and the number behind him being one said something about the current state of the Sorrow clan that nobody wanted to say out loud.
They were getting smaller, and it had been so for years.
The emotion of Sorrow that gave them their power was also apparently the one that made people least likely to stay somewhere long enough to build a family.
Maren was already at the stone- a slab of dark granite that was waist high with pale veins running through it that caught the torchlight weird, looking almost like something frozen mid drip.
She was in the formal grey with her hair pinned and her expression doing the composure thing she was good at, the kind of composure that only comes from having gone through a lot of hard things and deciding to stay standing anyway.
Kael walked up and stood across the stone from her.
He looked for his grandfather on the perimeter. He found him at the back, separate from everyone else, arms folded, watching with an expression Kael couldn't read from the distance.
That was unusual, he could normally read the old man fine.
Once the Sorrow Clan's strongest Animancer, Edran Dourne now only operated at a fraction of his former capacity as age eroded his Anima output.
He raised Kael and taught him everything worth knowing.
"Kael Dourne". Maren's voice took on that particular weight it got during formal things as the ceremony began. "You stand at the threshold, what do you bring to it?"
He'd had this answer since he was twelve.
"I bring what I am. Nothing more and nothing less".
"And what are you?"
He paused, just slightly, then he answered. "The sum of everything I've lost".
Maren looked at him for a second longer than the ritual required, then she stepped back and gestured at the stone.
"Place your hands on it. Let it hear you."
❖ ❖ ❖
Cold. That was the first thing. Just genuinely cold stone under his palms, colder than the rain, colder than the night air.
Kael closed his eyes.
His grandfather had spent the better part of Kael's whole life teaching him one specific thing and that thing was this, how to stop managing himself.
How to put down the careful version, the watchful version, the version that existed to function around other people and just feel whatever was actually sitting underneath all of that.
It came the way it always came.
Not fast, not dramatic, just a settling, slow and total like something very heavy finding its proper place after being held wrong for too long.
The weight of his mother being gone, his father being a shape that was never filled, seventeen years in a clan that looked at him with the quiet resignation of people who'd already written the end of his story without consulting him.
He held it the way you hold something you don't want to put down even though it hurts to keep holding, because if you put it down you start to forget the weight of it and then eventually you forget what you were even carrying.
Nothing happened for a while.
He heard the rain, he heard someone cough on the perimeter, he also heard the distant weird sounds the Wilds made at night.
Then something under the stone shifted.
Not a sound, not exactly a feeling, but somewhere in between- like a frequency that had always been there below his ability to notice it suddenly deciding to be heard.
Kael's breath went strange as his hands pressed down harder on their own.
The veins in the granite suddenly lit up, and not the normal way either.
He'd seen two awakenings before this one and both of them had produced the same small controlled pulse, a brief glow that was contained, almost polite.
But this was not that.
BZZZ!
The light ran outward from his hands like it was chasing something, moving through every vein in the stone and across the entire surface in seconds!
And then it hit the ground and kept going, thin bright threads spreading out across the floor clearing in all directions, reaching toward the torches and toward the perimeter, toward the feet of the people standing around watching.
He heard someone make a sound that wasn't quite a word, then it hit him and he stopped being aware of almost everything outside himself.
It wasn't pain, pain he could've categorized and dealt with. This was more like everything he'd always kept at a manageable distance suddenly deciding the distance was optional.
The weight didn't just settle this time, it crashed.
His Sorrow became something enormous and it had things inside it he didn't expect- rage that came from nowhere and burned clean and hot, fear that locked every muscle in his body for half a second, something achingly bright that took him a moment to identify as a kind of joy he hadn't felt since he was small enough to sit in someone's lap.
All of it at once, all of it somehow being one single thing wearing different faces. Then it stopped.
It just stopped. Light gone, sound gone, whatever that frequency was gone back to wherever it came from.
Kael stood at the stone breathing too hard with his vision doing something wrong at the edges, then he looked up.
Every single person on that perimeter was staring at him with wide eyes, this was not the routine watching of people going through a ceremony they'd seen before.
This was something different, something that had no real name but sat right between amazed and frightened and neither one of them was quite winning.
Maren hadn't moved at all.
❖ ❖ ❖
Elder Maren finally broke the silence.
"Get him inside". Her voice was quiet but stern in a way that meant she wasn't asking. "Now".
Before anyone could react, Kael's grandfather was already crossing the clearing, moving faster than an old man should've been moving, and he had Kael by the arm before Kael had fully processed that things were over.
The old man's face had changed.
Kael had studied that face for seventeen years. He knew every version of it, the patient version, the tired version, the particular look it made when he was about to say something important and was deciding how.
And yet, he did not know the version looking at him right now because he had never seen it before.
"Grandfather…?"
"Not a word," Edran Dourne said sternly, his voice low and close. "Not until we're inside. Walk".
The crowd immediately parted.
That was the part that stuck with Kael, just that simple fact. People who had spent seventeen years looking through him stepped aside without being asked.
The looks that followed him across the clearing were the looks you give something when you haven't decided yet if it's dangerous or not.
Behind him Maren was talking to someone, her voice too low to catch the whole thing.
"Seal the record". That part reached him clearly. "Nothing about tonight leaves Greyveil".
Kael kept his face neutral, his breathing even and his pace steady.
His mind on the other hand was going very fast through some very specific things, because from what he read, the Awakening Stone only did what it just did in one place- the old texts, the locked cabinet ones, the ones that pre-dated the clan system by centuries.
They described what awakenings looked like before the Anima Arts got broken up and were parceled out to separate bloodlines among the 5 clans.
The texts about the Firstborn.
Kael turned the carved bird over in his pocket.
Whatever had just come awake in him, the clan elders already didn't want anyone knowing about it.
And out past the border, past the wrong-bent trees and the dark between them, he had a feeling that something else had noticed too.