Chapter three
The Registry did not classify people by what they could do.
It classified them by what they were expected to become.
Species, in the official sense, was not biology. It was allocation. A framework that determined aptitude ranges, acceptable deviation, and the kinds of strain a body was permitted to endure before intervention was required.
Training refined that framework. Labor expressed it. Class enforced it.
Everyone knew this. No one questioned it. The language of limits had been taught early, gently, as instruction rather than restriction.
Stoneborn were built for repetition. Their joints tolerated weight, their muscles resisted fatigue, but their minds dulled quickly outside structured task. They filled the foundries, the mills, the lower tiers where rhythm mattered more than choice.
Lithebloods learned precision. Fine motor control, extended focus, tolerances for detail that made them ideal for clerical work, drafting, accounting. Their limits arrived as tremors, eye strain, breath tightness—subtle signals to stop before accuracy degraded.
Highkin—rare, visible, managed—were trained for oversight. Long stamina, emotional regulation, resistance to stress. Their ceilings were higher, but narrower. When they broke, they broke publicly, and were removed just as cleanly.
None of this was considered cruel.
It was efficient.
Cael's designation sat quietly in the ledger:
Unremarkable Variant — General Allocation
No annotations. No recommended track. No flagged deviations. The kind of entry that passed through hands without thought.
That was intentional.
In the southern annex, a work detail was reassigned to load transfer crates—dense things, reinforced, meant to discourage single-person handling. The task was not punitive. It was instructional.
Four workers per crate. Rotate every three lifts. Mandatory pauses marked by bell.
A Stoneborn man took position at the corner opposite Cael. Broad shoulders, thick wrists, already breathing through his mouth. He nodded once—professional, impersonal.
They lifted.
The weight settled immediately. Cael felt it register as pressure against the floor, a problem of balance rather than effort. Across from him, the Stoneborn's muscles engaged fully, tendons standing out like cords beneath skin. His species limit asserted itself not as weakness, but as boundary—strength without endurance.
By the second lift, sweat darkened the man's collar. By the third, his breathing had gone shallow, forced. On the fourth, the bell sounded and the crate was set down.
The Stoneborn exhaled heavily, relief evident but not embarrassing. This was expected. He had met his range.
A Litheblood woman beside him rolled her shoulders, flexing fingers gone numb. Fine tremors danced briefly along her hands before settling. She looked at them, noted the signal, and still.
No one complained.
They rotated out, replaced by two others. The process continued smoothly, predictably. Limits expressed, respected, enforced without comment.
Cael had felt none of it.
Not strain. Not resistance. Not the familiar nudge toward compliance. The weight had not pressed back against him in any meaningful way. It existed, but it did not argue.
He adjusted anyway—shifted stance, matched breathing, timed his movements to the bell. Not because he needed to, but because difference was most visible when it lacked explanation.
A supervisor passed, eyes flicking over the detail. He paused for a moment longer on the Stoneborn's flushed face, the Litheblood's resting hands.
Then his gaze moved to Cael.
There was nothing to mark.
Cael's posture was correct. His breathing even. His pace identical to the others'. Whatever his species was supposed to allow, he was using only what was permitted.
The supervisor moved on.
Around them, work continued. People reached their edges and stopped. Others took their place. The system breathed in shifts and bells and measured exertion, never asking more than what had already been agreed upon.
Cael lifted again, steady and unremarkable.
His species ability—if it could be called that—did not announce itself. It did not enhance strength or sharpen thought. It did not expand endurance or dull pain.
It simply refused to supply a ceiling.
Freedom was not excess.
It was the absence of a final answer.
And as long as Cael never asked the world to notice that absence, it remained just another quiet assumption—one more unremarkable variant moving in time with the bell.
Training existed to teach people where their limits lived.
Not to remove them. To make them familiar.
In the auxiliary hall, apprentices moved through prescribed drills—motions stripped of purpose, repeated until form replaced thought. The exercises were identical across species, but the outcomes never were.
A Litheblood boy failed first.
It wasn't dramatic. His hands began to shake as he aligned the weighted rods, precision slipping by fractions too small to measure but large enough to matter. An instructor tapped the slate once. The boy froze, then stepped back, breathing carefully until the tremor faded.
"Good catch," the instructor said. Approval, not reprimand.
Next came a Stoneborn girl. She completed the sequence without error, muscles absorbing the strain easily, but when the pace shifted—faster, less predictable—her timing lagged. Reaction limits. Expected.
She was reassigned without comment.
No one lingered on the failures. They weren't failures at all. They were confirmations.
Cael stood among them, indistinguishable in posture and dress. His task was the same: lift, align, hold, release. The rods were heavier than necessary, calibrated to reveal strain by the fourth repetition.
By the fourth repetition, Cael felt nothing change.
Not because he was pushing through.
Because there was nothing to push against.
He noted the absence and let the motion continue unchanged. Same angle. Same breath. Same delay before release. If the drill demanded fatigue, he supplied the appearance of it—allowing his shoulders to lower slightly, his fingers to loosen at the same interval as those around him.
An instructor watched, expression neutral. Her attention was not on strength, but on deviation.
Cael did not deviate.
When the bell rang, the group stepped back in unison. A few apprentices rolled their necks, massaging joints that had begun to ache. Others stood still, conserving what remained.
Cael stood with them.
The instructor made a brief announcement. "Species aptitude review will begin next cycle. Assignments may change."
No one reacted. Reviews happened often. Reclassification was rare, but not feared. Movement within the system was not punishment—it was optimization.
Cael felt the faintest brush of expectation, like a hand resting near his shoulder without touching.
If tested properly, he would be placed.
That was how the world worked.
A Highkin observer at the edge of the hall took notes—long-term metrics, not immediate results. Endurance curves. Recovery times. Compliance ratios. They would see that Cael never failed, never excelled.
A perfect line.
The most trusted kind.
As the apprentices filed out, the Litheblood boy from earlier glanced at Cael's hands. There was no envy in his expression. Only mild curiosity, quickly dismissed.
Everyone was different. Everyone had a place.
Limits made sure of that.
Cael followed the others into the corridor, his pace matching theirs exactly. The expectation lingered, quiet and patient.
Sooner or later, the system would try to find his ceiling.
And when it did, Cael would already know the answer.
There wasn't one.
The difference became clearest when nothing went wrong.
During rest cycles, workers gathered in designated commons—long rooms with low ceilings and evenly spaced benches, designed for recovery rather than comfort. Conversations stayed quiet. Movements were minimal. Rest was another form of regulation.
Cael sat with a group from the auxiliary hall, hands folded loosely in his lap. Across from him, the Stoneborn girl from training leaned forward, elbows on knees, muscles still humming faintly beneath her skin. Beside her, a Litheblood clerk stared at his fingers as if waiting for them to betray him again.
No one spoke about the drills.
They talked instead about assignments, about which halls were colder, which supervisors were fair, which stairwells were worst on the lungs. Practical knowledge. Shared boundaries.
"My knees always lock on third-tier climbs," the Stoneborn girl said casually. "Doesn't hurt. Just… stops."
A few nods. Recognition.
"Eyes blur after an hour in the south archives," the clerk added. "If I push past that, I start copying errors. They catch it every time."
No bitterness. No complaint. Just statements of fact.
Cael listened.
These were not confessions. They were maps—each person describing the shape of their permitted space. Knowing it kept them safe. Ignoring it invited correction.
"And you?" someone asked Cael. The question was idle, unweighted.
He considered his answer carefully.
"Breathing gets shallow on long stair runs," he said. True enough, when he allowed it to be. "Hands stiffen if I don't pace myself."
No one challenged him. The statements fit within expectation, unremarkable in their vagueness.
"Yeah," the Stoneborn girl said. "Stairs'll do that."
The conversation drifted on.
A bell chimed softly, marking the end of rest. People stood in practiced sequence, stretching within allowed ranges. Limits reasserted themselves visibly—groans stifled, shoulders rolled only so far, breaths measured.
Cael rose with them.
He felt the limits settle again, light as ever, like habits returning to familiar places. He accepted them without resistance. There was no need to remind the world he could move without them.
Across the room, a Highkin observer watched the group disperse. His gaze lingered briefly on the Stoneborn girl, then the Litheblood clerk.
When it passed over Cael, it did not slow.
Difference, Cael understood, was only notable when it disrupted pattern.
His did not.
As they filed into the corridor, someone stumbled—just a misstep, a knee catching awkwardly. Two others steadied the man automatically, easing him upright before a supervisor could notice. He laughed it off, embarrassed but unharmed.
The system allowed for that. Small failures. Human ones.
Cael felt nothing shift inside himself. No surge of impulse to help beyond what was expected. He placed a hand where it was needed, applied exactly enough force, then withdrew.
Later, as they separated toward different assignments, the Stoneborn girl offered a brief nod. Acknowledgment, nothing more.
Cael returned it.
There was no envy in her eyes. No suspicion. Only the quiet acceptance that everyone carried different weights, and the world accounted for that.
That was the lie that made the system stable.
Because some differences did not weigh anything at all.
They simply removed the scale.
The review came without ceremony.
Names were read in even tones. Adjustments noted. Assignments shifted by narrow margins—one tier higher, one hall over, a change in hours rather than role. Optimization, not upheaval.
Cael stood in line with the others, hands at his sides, posture correct. He felt the familiar presence of limits pressing lightly against him, as they always did during evaluation—attention made tangible, boundaries tightening in anticipation of confirmation.
A registrar reached his name.
"Cael. Unremarkable Variant. General Allocation."
The slate paused.
Not long enough to be a signal. Just long enough to register completion.
"No change," the registrar said, and marked it.
That was all.
The limits eased, satisfied. The system had found nothing that required adjustment. No ceiling had been tested hard enough to demand definition.
Cael stepped aside as the next name was called.
Around him, small reactions rippled—someone reassigned to upper storage smiled faintly. Another, moved down a tier, nodded in acceptance. No one looked toward Cael. There was nothing to look at.
Later, in the corridor outside the review hall, a supervisor spoke quietly with a Highkin observer.
"Stable," the supervisor said, tapping a column on the slate. "Predictable."
The Highkin inclined his head. "Within range."
Cael passed close enough to hear, far enough to be ignored.
Within range.
The phrase was not a judgment. It was reassurance.
As he walked, Cael felt the truth settle—not as revelation, but as confirmation of something he had already understood.
Species did not define power.
It defined expectation.
Most abilities were answers to specific needs: lift this, endure that, focus here, oversee there. They solved problems the world had already decided were worth solving.
His did not.
Freedom was not a tool. It was not a function. It did not improve output or reduce error.
It simply meant that when the world asked how far, there was no automatic response.
That made it useless to the system.
Which made it safe.
Cael reached the exit with the others, passing beneath the arch where limits thinned and then returned, settling back into place like a well-worn garment. He let them. There was no advantage in refusing them now.
Outside, the city moved as it always did—regulated, measured, content within its known boundaries. People filled their roles, reached their edges, stopped.
Cael joined them, indistinguishable in the flow.
No envy followed him.
No fear preceded him.
No attention lingered.
Just difference—quiet, unmeasured, and unseen.
And for now, that was freedom enough.