Three days out from the ceremony, Kael's Anima did something strange at the washbasin.
It was nothing dramatic, just a flicker- the air around his hands going briefly strange, the water seeming to pause in a way water doesn't pause, and then two seconds where he felt the inside of everyone within thirty feet of him like they were all broadcasting at once.
He felt Maren's anxiety, sharp-edged and chronic.
He felt the cook's low dull grief about something old enough she'd probably stopped naming it. He felt one of the kids from outside carrying a happiness so clean and uncomplicated it was almost hard to be near.
Then it cut off and the water was water again.
Kael stood still for a bit, recalling the sensations that he just had, then he dried his hands and went to find his grandfather.
Edran was behind the dwelling in the practice space, sitting cross-legged on the wet ground with his eyes shut, doing the breathing work Kael had been taught alongside walking, reading and eating, the kind of thing that becomes so basic you stop thinking of it as a skill.
Kael sat across from him and waited.
After a few seconds, one eye opened as the old man looked at him.
"Tell me," Edran said.
Kael told him; he told him of the basin, the water, the two seconds of everyone's insides arriving uninvited.
The second eye opened.
"How far out?"
"Thirty feet, maybe a bit more. Everyone in range".
"Did you read the emotions or carry them?"
Kael sat with that.
There was a real gap between those two things, he could feel it as he tried to answer. Reading would be standing outside a thing and identifying it, but what happened was different.
"I carried them," he finally answered carefully. "For those two seconds, they were mine".
Edran got up off the ground without a word and went inside. Kael followed because that's what you did when the old man moved after hearing something that mattered.
The old man went straight to the locked cabinet and pressed the latch in the place that gave if you knew where to press it.
It opened the same way it always opened. Edran didn't bother looking surprised about that, which meant he'd known someone had been in here already.
He pulled out the oldest text, the one whose cover had mostly given up, written in the old script Kael had spent roughly two years getting comfortable with.
He set it on the table, opened it to somewhere near the middle and turned it around.
Kael had read this page before. He read it again.
["The Firstborn did not stand apart from emotion the way their descendants learned to. They were inside it."]
["To grieve was to briefly hold the grief of every grieving creature within range. To rage was to become for a time, a vessel carrying every burning anger nearby. This was what made them what they were, it was also what made them ruinous to be close to."]
Kael looked up.
"The range is going to keep opening up," Edran said.
He wasn't looking at the text, he was watching Kael's face. "As it develops, it'll go further. And passive reception is just the start, eventually it becomes something you can point at things and use deliberately".
"Use how?"
"More ways than you can currently picture".
Kael looked back at the page. ["…ruinous to be close to."]
"What does that mean exactly?" He asked.
Edran pulled out the other chair and sat on it. "The Firstborn didn't keep people long". It was a plain fact and he delivered it plainly. "The ones they were close to felt everything more. Good days felt better, bad ones hit harder".
"That compounds over time and it does real damage to a person". He stopped for a second.
"It's part of why the clan system spread so easily. People got tired of being turned up louder than they wanted to be, instead they chose their own volume".
Kael sat with that for a while.
The fire, the rain, the small sounds of the settlement outside, and past it all, past the border and the wrong trees and the dark between them, something that was either listening or wasn't and no way yet to know.
"Aldric wants it hidden," Kael broke the silence.
"I know".
"Is he right?"
"He's right to be careful, he's wrong that hiding it holds". Edran put one finger on the old text. "Anima grows".
"It doesn't plateau and stay manageable. When it gets loud enough on its own, the Wilds will pick it up whether you want them to or not. And the Wilds aren't the only ears".
"Who else?"
The old man went quiet in his specific way, the way that meant the answer was large and he was cutting it down to what he could hand over right now.
"The Pride Clan keeps archivists," he said carefully.
"That's their whole function, watching for exactly what you did at that stone. Maren sealed the local record but a sealed record doesn't unsay what happened in front of sixty people".
He paused. "We have a month before someone shows up with questions, maybe less than that".
Kael looked at the page again, at the singular and ruinous sitting a few words apart from each other.
"Then I need to be ready before they get here," he said.
His grandfather looked at him for a long stretch.
"Yes," he said quietly. "You do".
He tapped the cabinet door.
"First text, first page, read them in sequence. All of them". He paused again. "And we start properly tomorrow. Not the work I've been giving you since you were small, that was preamble".
His eyes gleamed. "What comes next is the real thing".
Kael pulled the oldest text toward him. "How bad," he said.
Edran almost smiled, the almost-smile that showed up specifically when the honest answer wasn't a gentle one.
"Your Sorrow runs deeper than anything I've seen in sixty years in this clan," he said. "That's your advantage, more to draw from than anyone I've ever put through this before you".
"It's also why when the world asks you to go all the way in, no walls and no management…" He stopped.
"What?"
"It'll hurt in ways that haven't been named yet," Edran said carefully. "That's it, that's the whole warning".
He got up and put the kettle on, he was done talking.
Kael sat at the table with the old text open, the fire at his back, the rain on the glass, and a month's worth of time shrinking in his head.
He found the first page and started reading.