“I do not know what the full release of three divine natures inside a Void architecture source point does to the person who releases them,” Kael said. “The single-nature seal in the foundation chamber was controlled. This is uncontrolled by design — Ren’s appendix is explicit that any attempt to control the release will result in partial dismantling that leaves the source intact.” He looked at his right hand. “I let it go completely or it does not work.” “And letting it go completely—” Lira said. “I held in the foundation chamber because I was specific enough,” Kael said. “Because I knew exactly who I was and there was no room for displacement. The question is whether that specificity holds at full release or whether full release is the one thing that exceeds it.” The group sat with this. Garrick looked at the cave entrance where the grey morning light came in. He looked at the walking stick against the wall. He looked at Kael. “You have held against everything so far,” he said.

The Pale Coast road north was six days on foot and four on horseback and they took it at a pace that was something between the two. The first day Lira rode beside Kael and asked him the question she had been holding for three weeks. “The three divine natures,” she said. “When they were at full release in the cave. You were — I could not read you. Your emotional signature went somewhere I could not follow.” “Where did it go?” Kael said. “Outward,” she said. “In every direction. Past the range where I can feel individual emotional signatures. Like—” She thought about it. “Like when you hold your hand in water and the water carries the warmth outward and the warmth becomes the water’s warmth rather than your hand’s warmth.” She looked at him. “Did you go somewhere?” “No,” Kael said. “I expanded. And then I came back.” He paused. “The coming back was the part I was not certain would work.” “But it did,” she said. “It did,” he said. “Because you know who you are,” she said. It was

The first spring after the Void sealing was wet. This was not metaphor. The actual weather was wet — three weeks of sustained rain that filled the rivers and flooded the lower market district of the capital and required the city’s water management system to make decisions it had not needed to make since the infrastructure was last overhauled, which was before Malachar’s administration, which meant the overhaul was forty years overdue. Kael spent two days helping coordinate the water management response, which was not an archival function and was also absolutely something that needed doing and that he had both the knowledge and the capability to address. The rune was useful for water — the god’s knowledge included a detailed understanding of water table dynamics and Kael spent two days doing something that looked, to external observers, like a man walking the city’s lower districts with his hand on the ground. In practice he was reading the aquifer and redirecting pressure points wi

Rel left the capital six weeks after the sealing and came back two months later with a discovery that required an immediate meeting of everyone currently in the city. The meeting happened in the Archive reading room at the second bell after midday with Kael, Garrick, Senna, Lira, Calen, Mira, and Solan. Toven Marsh was also present because the reading room was his workspace and he had a policy about meetings held in his workspace during working hours, which was that he attended them. Rel had spent two months in the provinces visiting the locations she had identified as potential rift-sensitive bloodline clusters that appeared on the bloodline map but had not been visited by the group during the sealing work. She had made contact with thirty-seven people across nine locations who carried latent rift-sensitivity in varying degrees. Fourteen of them were under twenty years old. “The capability is more widespread than Mira’s map suggested,” she said. She spread her own documentation o

It appeared on a Wednesday. Kael was mid-sentence in a conversation with Ferrel about the pre-Rift War administrative records when his right palm went from its usual warmth to something sharper and more specific. He stopped speaking. He turned his hand over. A second rune had appeared beside the first. Not overlapping. Sitting three finger-widths to the right of the original seal, smaller, its pulse not matching his heartbeat but matching something else — something external, rhythmic, coming from a direction he could not immediately identify. Ferrel looked at his hand. “That is new,” the scholar said. “Yes,” Kael said. “Did it hurt?” “No,” Kael said. “It simply appeared.” He pressed his left thumb against it. Warm. Present. Different in character from the original rune — where Eldrath’s mark was gold, this was silver-white, and the pulse it carried felt less like divine presence and more like a signal, the specific quality of information being transmitted across a distance ra