He had counted the grains of sand on beaches that no longer existed, and none of the counting had ever added up to something he wanted to keep.
Vaelith had been alive since before the lower sea’s currents had names.
He remembered when the mountains to the south had been a single restless volcano that hadn’t yet learned to be ashamed of its temper.
He remembered two farmers arguing over the ownership of a goat until the sun went down, by which point neither of them had a goat, because the goat had wandered off, exhausted by the argument, and neither man had noticed.
He remembered a girl who prayed to a dragon she had never seen, every night for six years, asking him please, please, to let her mother wake up in the morning.
He had felt the exact shape of her grief on the seventh year, when her mother didn’t.
That was the true weight of him.
Not the wings, not the size, not even the particular loneliness of being too large to sit beside anyone without crushing something they loved.
The weight was the feeling itself.
Grief arrived on him like weather — sudden, total, from any direction.
Joy rang through his chest like a bell struck a mile off.
Rage came as heat behind eyes that were not his own.
Across three thousand years he had learned every texture a heart could produce, and had never once been permitted to put a hand — a claw, a wing, anything at all — against a single person and say, I felt that.
I was here with you, and not just near you.
So on a night with no particular occasion, he stopped flying toward mountains and started flying toward the edge of the sky.
Aion did not have a shape so much as a suggestion of one.
Wings that were also hourglasses.
A tail that read, if you looked at it sideways, like a long corridor of doors closing one after another.
When Vaelith folded his enormous body down small enough to be spoken to, Aion looked at him the way a person looks at a clock that has finally, after a very long time, stopped ticking wrong.
“You are tired,” Aion said.
It wasn’t a question.
Aion rarely bothered with questions it already had the answers to.
“I am tired of watching,” Vaelith said.
“I want to be small enough to be someone’s.
I want to love one person badly and specifically, the way they love each other — not this.” He searched three thousand years of collected words and still didn’t find the right one.
“Not this endless weather of everyone’s feelings arriving all at once, none of them mine to keep.”
“I can unmake you,” said Aion.
“I cannot promise it will hurt less.”
“I’m not asking for less,” Vaelith said.
“I’m asking for specific.”
Aion considered this the way it considered everything — outside of time, so that the considering took both no time at all and also several small wars on the ground far below.
Then it opened one of the many doors that made up its tail, and the wind that came through smelled, very faintly, of a nursery.
“Then go,” Aion said.
“And Vaelith — you will not remember choosing this.
That is not cruelty.
It’s mercy.
A creature who remembers three thousand years cannot learn to crawl.”
In the northern march of Ashgrave, in a stone room warmed by a fire that had been burning since well before dawn, Duchess Isolde Veyland made a sound her husband would remember for the rest of his life, and then stopped making it, and then a much smaller sound filled the space where the first one had been.
Duke Corwin Veyland, who had led men into three separate border skirmishes without his hands shaking, found that they were shaking now.
“A son,” the midwife said, and put the boy into arms that had been waiting four years for exactly this weight.
Behind the door, crouched with her ear pressed to the wood because no one had thought to tell a four-year-old to go to bed, Wren Veyland heard her father make a sound she had never heard him make before — something caught between a laugh and something else — and decided, with the total unearned authority of the very young, that whatever was happening in that room belonged to her too.
What none of them could know — not the Duke, not the Duchess, not Wren with her ear against the door — was that the boy in Corwin’s arms was, for exactly the first hour of his life, aware of all of it at once.
Not in pictures.
Not in words, which hadn’t arrived yet and wouldn’t for some time.
In weather.
His mother’s relief poured off her like heat off a stone left too long in the sun.
His father’s love arrived so plainly it was almost embarrassing, the way anything true is embarrassing when you’re not used to seeing it undressed.
And through the door, faint but unmistakable, something smaller and fiercer than either of them — a small animal certainty that whatever this new thing was, it was hers to guard.
He didn’t have a name yet for any of it.
He wouldn’t, for years, understand that most people didn’t arrive at the world this way — that most infants got to ease into feeling one thing at a time, the way you ease into cold water, rather than being dropped straight into the whole ocean of a household on the first night.
But something in him, some old instinct with no memory attached to it, recognized the weather anyway.
Recognized it and, for the first time in longer than he could have said, didn’t want to fly away from it.
He was, by the time anyone thought to name him, already listening.
They called him Kaelen.