For a long moment, nobody in the hall made a sound.
The image hung above the stage, vast and silent.
Black water rolled under foreign stars.
Mav kept searching for a coastline, the way a man who has dropped a coin keeps staring at the same patch of floor.
There was none.
‘Maybe it’s just the angle.’
It was not the angle.
Every Awakened began with the same thing: a Mote.
That was what people called a newborn world, because calling it a planet would have been generous.
A Mote was 100 km² (38 mi²) of raw matter, hanging in the dark so far from Earth that the distance had no name.
Its owner simply called it his World, and it would grow for as long as he could make it.
What that matter was made all the difference.
A forest could feed you.
A mountain range could hide you.
Even a desert gave you sand to stand on.
Mav’s Mote was, apparently, wet.
Pale letters began to form in the light above the stone, one line at a time.
This was the part everyone waited for.
The Officiant read them aloud in the same flat voice he had used all morning:
“World: submerged.”
He paused, as if the next line might improve if he gave it a moment.
“Potential…
E.”
A murmur rolled through the hall.
It was not a cruel sound yet.
It was the sound of 400 people doing arithmetic.
Every World had a rank, and every rank had a letter.
They ran from F at the bottom to SSS at the top, and every Mote started at F.
The rank said how far a world had come.
The potential said how far it could ever go.
It was a ceiling, set on the first day and shown to the whole hall.
Raising a World’s potential was almost impossible, except for a select few.
Most people here had hoped for a C world.
An A or a B was something a commoner’s family would talk about for years.
The burning mountains belonged to Cassian Pyrecrest, heir to one of the ten Imperial Houses that ruled Earth, and they had come with an S.
That was why the Officiant had dropped his pen.
An E meant that Mav’s world would grow exactly once.
Then it would stop, forever, one step above where it had started.
Only F was lower.
People with an F did not usually live long enough to complain about it.
‘So.
Not the worst possible result.
Just the worst one you can survive.’
He almost laughed.
Then the third line appeared, and he didn’t.
The Officiant looked at it for a while.
He opened his mouth, closed it, and read the letters again, like a man who suspected a spelling mistake.
“Species…”
He cleared his throat.
“Seaweed.”
The silence lasted one more second.
Then the hall exploded.
It was not a murmur anymore.
It was laughter, loud and helpless, rolling from the back rows to the front.
Someone was pounding on a bench.
Someone else kept repeating the word in a high, breathless voice, as if it got funnier each time.
It probably did.
Mav stood with his hand on the stone and let it wash over him, while his cheeks burned with shame.
He looked for one face that was not laughing, and did not find any.
The teachers along the wall were laughing with their students.
The parents in the gallery were laughing.
Even the Officiant had turned his head away to hide his mouth.
‘Laugh.
I’m used to it.
I was really hoping for a decent starting species.’
A world was nothing without something to live on it.
Along with a Mote, every Awakened received a species, and 10 creatures of that species to start with.
They were called Subjects, and they were everything.
They hunted for you, built for you, fought for you.
As they grew stronger, so did your world, and so did you.
People had been given wolves today.
Goblins.
A swarm of iron wasps.
Cassian had been given fire drakes, small ones, each already the size of a hunting dog.
Mav had been given a plant.
It could not move.
It could not fight.
It could not build so much as a fence, and the moment it left the water, it would dry out and die.
As far as he knew, no one had ever received anything weaker.
He doubted anyone in the hall could even name a second candidate.
’10 of them, though.
I get 10.’
Somehow, that didn’t help.
“Hey, traitor!”
The voice came from the bench of the Awakened.
Dorian Ashgrove had risen to his feet, with all the arrogance of a noble’s son, so that the whole hall could enjoy him.
He was a tall, handsome boy with gray hair and the easy grin of someone who had never been told no, and his own Bestowal had given him an A potential and a pack of ash hounds.
“What’s the plan?
Are you going to tangle your enemies to death?”
More laughter.
Dorian waited for it to peak, then spread his hands.
“No, it fits.
It really does.
Even the Genesis knows where a Silkborn belongs.
At the bottom, in the dark, with the rest of the rot.”
He said the last part loudly.
Then he glanced sideways, very quickly, toward the far end of the bench.
It was the look of a dog checking whether its master had seen the trick.
Then he turned back to Mav.
He let the laughter die down a little, and when he spoke again, his voice was almost friendly.
“Do us all a favor and drown on the first night.
And don’t worry about your family.
When you’re gone, I’ll make sure your uncle loses his place at the foundry.
Your little cousin can come and clean my kennels.”
A few people stopped laughing at that.
Even for a traitor’s son, there was a limit.
Most of them did not stop.
Nobody told Dorian to sit down.
The teachers said nothing.
The Officiant studied his list.
Dorian was a noble’s son, and in this hall, that was reason enough.
Mav said nothing.
His jaw was so tight that it hurt, and anger burned in his chest.
‘Not Juno.
Say what you want about me, but leave my little cousin out of it.’
But there was nothing he could do.
Dorian was a noble’s son with an A potential and a pack of hounds.
Mav was a commoner with a plant.
If he answered, the hall would only laugh louder, and Dorian would have a reason to remember the Lowes, the family of Mav’s uncle.
‘I can’t touch him today.
Fine.
Let him talk.
One day, I’ll make him take back every word.’
He added a line to his mental list.
It was a long list, and Dorian was now on it three times.
Then he looked where Dorian had looked, toward the far end of the bench.
Cassian Pyrecrest had not seen anything.
He sat with his back straight and his hands resting on his knees, looking at nothing in particular.
His long red hair gave him an air of elegance and superiority.
He had not turned his head when Mav’s name was called.
He had not looked at the water, or at the letters, or at the boy standing under them.
The loudest laughter of the day broke around him like waves around a rock, and he simply was not interested.
Mav felt something cold settle in his stomach.
Mav could have lived with hatred.
Hatred would have meant that the name Silkborn still weighed something to a Pyrecrest.
Of all the families on Earth, theirs had the most reason to remember it.
But Cassian did not hate him.
Cassian had been shown the son of a man his imperial house had helped to bury, and had found nothing there worth a second of his attention.
‘He’s right, too.
That’s the worst part.’
An S potential and a nest of drakes on one side.
An E potential and a clump of weeds on the other.
There was nothing to look at.
‘Not yet.
But one day, he’ll have to look.’
“You may remove your hand.”
The Officiant’s voice was quieter than before.
It took Mav a moment to realize that the man was speaking to him, and another to notice that his fingers had gone white against the stone.
He let go.
The image of the dark water folded in on itself and vanished.
The light drained out of the slab.
In a few seconds, it was only a black rock again, waiting for the next palm.
“Take a seat with the others.
Next!”
That should have been the end of it.
But as Mav turned toward the steps, something flickered at the edge of his vision.
He stopped.
A line of pale letters hung in the air in front of him.
They were the same letters the stone had shown, only smaller, and much closer.
They followed his eyes when he moved them.
He looked at the Officiant.
The man was squinting at his list.
He looked at the front row.
People were still wiping tears of laughter from their eyes.
Nobody was reading anything.
Nobody else could see it.
That was normal.
He remembered that much from school.
The stone showed a world, a potential and a species to anyone who cared to look.
The fourth gift, however, was shown to one person only: the new Awakened.
Every Awakened received a talent, and no one could ever see another person’s.
People lied about theirs all the time.
The powerful, because they had something to hide.
The weak, because they had nothing to show.
A good talent could change everything.
It could make a C world worth more than a B.
Mav’s heart was beating faster than he would have liked.
He was not a hopeful person.
Hope was expensive, and he had never had the budget for it.
He read the line anyway.
It was a single word.
[Talent: Host]