Sera Voss left on the morning of the third day.
She shook Aldric's hand at the gate with the formal courtesy of someone completing a process that had already moved past courtesy into something else.
She looked at Kael one last time before she left, the same steady read she'd been running since she arrived, and whatever she found or didn't find on the surface of him she kept behind her careful face.
"It's been informative," she said to Aldric, but her voice was deliberately loud enough for Kael to hear.
"I hope your journey back is smooth," Aldric replied her.
And after that, she left.
The settlement finally breathed out.
Not everyone, not audibly, but Kael felt it through the Anima, the collective tension dropping a notch as the six Pride Clan signals moved away down the road and the familiar signals of sixty Greyveil residents settled back into their normal frequencies.
Suddenly, Aldric came to stand beside him at the gate. "She left one behind," he said quietly.
Kael looked at him.
"The younger one," Aldric continued. "The Pride clan representative, not the assessors. He's staying and officially, he's waiting for additional census documentation."
'His name is Rael', Ash said from somewhere behind them both.
Kael turned.
Ash was in the shadow of the gate's inner wall, which was becoming his preferred position when things were happening near the gate. The amber eyes were on the road Voss had taken.
'He's not here for documentation', Ash said. 'He's here to watch you until whatever comes next arrives as a live observer, his report feeds the response planning in real time'.
"He's a monitoring post," Kael looked at Aldric and said.
"That's my read too," Aldric nodded calmly.
"Can we ask him to leave?"
"Not without giving them cause to accelerate the response timeline." Aldric paused before he continued in a calm voice. "He stays, we'll manage what he sees."
But they soon learned that managing what Rael saw turned out to be less straightforward than expected.
He was twenty-five, maybe younger, Pride Clan from his coloring to his posture and the specific way he had of standing in rooms like he was assessing the load-bearing walls.
His Anima was Flowing Rank, the second Rank, and it was enough to be functional but not enough to be threatening to Greyveil.
What made him difficult wasn't his power, it was his eyes.
His eyes had the same quality that Orin's eyes had, that archivist's attention, except where Orin had been looking for evidence of specific things Rael seemed to be looking for everything at once.
He was cataloguing the texture of daily life in the settlement with the thoroughness of someone who had been specifically trained to notice what normal looked like so he could identify when something wasn't.
On the second day after he was left behind, he watched the afternoon training session from the same spot Sera Voss had used.
He didn't have her read, Flowing Rank wasn't enough to run a meaningful Anima probe against what Kael was doing.
But he watched the physical elements with the same careful attention, the footwork, the spear mechanics, the way Dort and Pell and Wynn responded to the synchronization even at the contained level.
On the third day, he asked if he could participate and Kael quietly looked at him for a moment.
"You train with a blade," Kael said.
He'd seen the short sword on Rael's hip, and he'd noticed the wear patterns on the grip that said it wasn't decorative.
"I do."
"You do understand what the synchronization does to people near it, right?" He asked in a tone of concern.
But Rael didn't cower as he paused briefly and nodded. "I've been briefed, but I'd still like to experience it directly."
"I trust that you'll go easy on me".
Kael slightly narrowed his eyes.
'He's measuring you', Ash said. 'If he participates, he can send a physical assessment alongside the Anima report to detail what your fighting looks like up close, how you use the spear, and how you respond under pressure'.
'He's also going to feel the Reach', Kael thought back as his eyes gleamed. 'Even if at the contained level'.
'Yes, that's the point'. Kael thought about it.
"Fine," he said as he looked at the Pride Clan Animancer. "But you follow Cass's parameters. Her session, her rules."
Rael nodded with a smile.
After that, Cass ran it clean as she pitted Rael against Kael- short blade versus spear, standard drill parameters, no tricks, no escalation. Just two people working through an exchange with the synchronization active at the Dara level.
Rael was good, better than Kael had expected from a second-rank Animancer who was primarily an observer.
But Kael was perhaps the only Kindled Rank Animancer in the world who would dare say that a Flowing Rank Animancer was just good, it showed just how much of a monster he was.
From the beginning, he was different and it was why this whole sequence of activities were happening in the first place.
But still, his judgement of Rael was not off the mark.
Rael had clearly been trained by people who knew what they were doing and he had the composed quality of someone who didn't panic when pressed.
He also felt the synchronization and showed it in the specific way people showed it when they'd been briefed about what to expect and were trying to manage their response.
A slight over-correction in his footwork at the three-minute mark, his attention shifting inward for half a second at the five-minute mark, something pulling at him.
Kael let him work through it and kept the exchange honest.
Afterward, Rael stood at the edge of the training ground and was quiet for longer than the exchange warranted.
"What did you feel?" Kael asked.
Rael looked at him with the same careful eyes. "My mother," he said simply. "She died three years ago, I don't usually think about her during training."
He didn't say anything else about it.
That evening, Kael felt the subtle signal of a message being prepared in the guest quarters, the particular focused concentration of someone writing carefully, and thought about what Rael was sending back to the Second Spire.
'He's not lying in the report', Ash said.
'No, he's not the lying type'.
'Which means what the Second Spire receives tonight is accurate'.
'Yes'.
That evening, Kael felt the subtle signal of a message being prepared in the guest quarters, the particular focused concentration of someone writing carefully, and thought about what Rael was sending back to the Second Spire.
He lay back and looked at the ceiling.
'I guess the timeline just got shorter', he thought.
'Yes', Ash answered. 'It did'.
...
[Please Read Author's Notes!]