The next day, Edran woke him before the settlement did.
There was no knock, just a hand on his shoulder and by the time Kael's eyes were properly open the old man was already outside.
Kael lay there for exactly three seconds doing the mental arithmetic of how much sleep he'd managed and concluding the answer was not enough, then he pulled his coat on and followed.
Cold hit him at the door.
The rain had stopped overnight, which in Greyveil meant the air had simply decided to be wet without the courtesy of actual water falling.
The settlement was dark and silent. Even the chronic sounds of the place, the creak of the communal hall roof, and the distant something the Wilds made at night that nobody had officially named yet were absent.
Edran was in the practice space behind the dwelling, standing in the center of it with his arms at his sides, patiently waiting.
Kael stopped at the edge and looked at his grandfather.
'He looks like a man who has been awake for several hours,' Kael thought. 'Which either means he couldn't sleep or he didn't try; neither option is particularly comforting'.
"Sit," Edran said.
Kael sat. Cross legged on the wet ground, cold started coming up through his trousers immediately, the kind of cold that has opinions about your life choices.
He'd been sitting in this exact position in this exact space for as long as he could remember. Same ground, same grey pre-dawn light, same grandfather across from him with that expression that meant something was different today without specifying what.
Edran also sat and exhaled.
"Everything I've taught you," he said. "The breathing, the centering, the way you hold your Sorrow without going under… you think you know why I taught you those things?"
"Control," Kael said.
"Survival," Edran corrected. "Control is what comes after surviving. Most people in this clan never get past surviving and they call it control because it's easier than admitting the difference".
He let that sit for a second before he continued. "What happened at the stone wasn't control; that was the thing breaking through in spite of you. Today, we find out if you can do it on purpose".
"How?"
"Same way it happened at the stone. You go in, all the way. No walls".
Kael looked at him. "You said it would hurt."
"It will."
"And you're starting me there on day one?"
"We don't have the luxury of working up to it slowly." His voice was even, not unkind, just the voice of a man delivering weather conditions. "A month, maybe less. Remember that."
Well, Kael remembered.
A month. He'd been turning that number over since Edran said it and it kept coming up with the same answer every time.
Not enough, not remotely close to being enough against whatever was coming from outside Greyveil, against whatever was watching from the Wilds. Not enough was the most accurate assessment he could make of his current situation.
He'd been in not-enough situations before but despite his lack of experience, he was still here.
"Close your eyes," Edran said.
Kael closed them.
"You've been carrying your Sorrow your whole life the way you carry that bird token, in your pocket. Close enough to feel whenever you want it, but far enough to ignore when you need to function".
"What I need you to do right now is take it out and leave it on the table. All of it, no pocket."
Kael breathed.
He knew how to find it, that had never been his problem. The problem was always what it did when he found it, the size of it, and the way it kept not having edges no matter how far he reached.
He went toward it the way Edran taught him, not grabbing, more like opening a door and then standing back to see what came through on its own.
Then it came.
He felt the warmth of his mother's hands and the fact that he'd been four years old when they went cold and couldn't fully remember them anymore.
He heard his father's name, which nobody in this settlement said out loud because saying it meant thinking about what it meant that he'd left.
Seventeen years of watching the clan look through him with the quiet resignation of people who had already written the ending of his story without consulting him on the plot.
He held it and this time, he didn't push it away.
"Further," Edran said.
Kael frowned without opening his eyes. "That is further."
"That's the surface," the old man retorted. "You've been working the surface your whole life. Go down."
Kael didn't know what down meant exactly. He sat with the instruction the way you sit with a locked door, looking for what the shape of the keyhole tells you about the key.
After a while he found something below the familiar weight. A layer underneath, older and less organized- grief without specific memories attached to it, just the residue of feelings felt so many times they'd worn grooves in him.
The emotional scar tissue of seventeen years of carrying something heavy in a clan that was itself carrying something heavy on a piece of land that felt like it had been grieving since before anyone living could remember.
He went toward it, and the cold from the ground disappeared. The sounds of the settlement also disappeared.
What replaced them was harder to describe. It was a pressure change, like going underwater except the water was made of something he didn't have a word for and it was pressing on him from the inside as much as the outside.
Then it opened, and it was enormous.
Not just his; that was the thing that hit him hardest and fastest. It wasn't only his Sorrow down here, it was adjacent to everyone else's too.
He could feel Edran across from him like a warm complicated presence, decades of loss compressed into something dense and quiet, the Sorrow of a man who had outlived most of the people he'd loved and made a kind of peace with that without ever pretending the peace was the same as not hurting.
Further out, he could feel the settlement waking up around him like individual signals rising out of the background.
Maren was already awake and was already anxious.
He also felt the communal cook carrying that chronic low dull grief he'd felt at the washbasin, he felt a child somewhere still asleep and dreaming something that felt warm.
Under all of it, the land itself was doing something, beating to a frequency that was low and old like Greyveil's ground had its own Sorrow and it had been running so long it had become geological.
Then something cracked in his chest.
It was not pain, more like a joint that had been held wrong for years finally moving, then he heard himself make a sound he hadn't decided to make.
"Stay in it," Edran said; the voice seemed to come from very far away.
But Kael stayed.
It was exactly as bad as promised. This kind of hurt that didn't have a name yet- like being too large for his own skin, like every nerve ending had just discovered it was connected to things it was never meant to be connected to.
His hands were shaking on his knees, yet he stayed.
Time did something strange in there. At some point, Edran said his name and Kael followed the sound of it back up like a rope, hand over hand, until he broke the surface and opened his eyes and the sky had gone from black to the dark grey that passed for morning in Greyveil.
He was soaked through; he hadn't noticed the rain starting again.
He looked at his hands and noticed a fine tremor he couldn't quite stop. 'Well,' he thought distantly. 'That was terrible'.
"Inside," Edran said calmly. "Eat something. Sleep if you can."
Kael got up on legs that felt like they belonged to someone who'd had a very bad day recently. He went inside, sat at the table, and stared at the wall for a while.
His grandfather came in later and sat across from him.
"What you felt out there," Edran said. "The range of it. That was you at the very beginning of this, barely touching it."
Kael looked at him. "It gets bigger than that."
"Much bigger."
He thought about that, about what much bigger than what he'd just felt would feel like.
"Good," he said, because there was nothing else useful to say.
❖ ❖ ❖
He did it again the next morning, and the morning after that.
The honest summary of the first week was that it got worse before it got better, and better was a relative term.
Each session, Edran pushed him deeper and each time he came back up, he felt scraped hollow like something had been cleaned out of him that his body hadn't finished replacing yet.
He ate more than usual and slept badly and walked around the settlement in the afternoons feeling slightly outside himself, like the volume on everything had been turned up just enough to be uncomfortable without being loud enough to explain to anyone.
The range kept growing.
By the fourth day, he could feel the whole settlement from the practice space. Not cleanly, not with precision, more like a weather sense, a read on the general atmosphere the way you read a sky for rain without knowing exactly when it'll arrive.
Maren's anxiety was the most consistent signal, chronic and sharp.
Aldric was harder, something dense and compressed that didn't give much away, which told Kael something about how long the man had been processing his Sorrow and how deliberately he'd been doing it.
'He's been managing this for thirty years', Kael thought one afternoon, reading the signal from across the settlement. 'He's so deep in the management he probably can't remember what it felt like to just feel it'.
He made a note to never let that happen to himself.
On the fifth day, something changed.
He was deep in the work, holding the full weight of Sorrow without flinching the way he was slowly getting better at when he felt something outside the settlement's edges.
Past the north wall and past the two miles of open ground, at the Wilds.
It wasn't a clear signal, it was more like pressure at the furthest edge of his range. Something large and old was paying attention, and the attention had direction. It was pointed at him with the specific quality of something that had found what it was looking for after a very long search.
He opened his eyes fast.
Edran was watching him with an expression he'd seen before, the expression of a man who already knew what you were about to say.
"Something in the Wilds," Kael said.
"It's been there since the third day," Edran said. "I was waiting for your range to reach it".
Kael stared at him. "Two days… you knew for two days?"
"I suspected." Edran paused. "Different thing."
The same words from the first night; Kael filed his response away somewhere and decided to retrieve it later when he wasn't still vibrating from an hour in the deep work.
"What is it?" He asked.
Edran was quiet in his large-answer way, the silence of someone sorting through everything they know to find what they're willing to hand over right now.
"Old," he said finally. "Whatever it is, it's been in those Wilds longer than this settlement has existed. And until the night of your ceremony it had never paid attention to Greyveil at all."
Kael looked at the north wall like he could see through stone and distance. "Is it dangerous?"
"Everything in the Wilds is dangerous, the real question is what kind of interested it is". Edran paused. "There are different kinds."
"What kind feels like what I just felt?"
His grandfather looked at him carefully. "Get some sleep," he said. "We go deeper tomorrow."
'Of course we do', Kael thought.