The salt trembled beneath Kael’s fingertips.
Not physically.
The grains themselves remained motionless, pale crystals scattered across the dark walnut desk in a ritual crescent. But through his eyes, Kael could see them breathing.
Every shard possessed weight, angle, density, and alignment. Invisible threads of mana linked grain to grain in precise geometric pathways, forming a latticework that hovered over reality like ghostly silver wire.
Before, a sight like this would have destroyed him.
His mind would have tried to seize every grain at once. Count them. Categorize them. Rotate them mentally until their angles match. The imperfections would have screamed louder and louder until the pressure behind his eyes became unbearable. He would have felt his thoughts splitting into a thousand frantic directions, each one equally urgent, equally impossible to ignore.
But now—
Now the information stopped at the edge of him.
Kael froze.
The realization struck with such force that his lungs forgot how to breathe.
The noise was still there. He could feel it, vast and monstrous, pressing somewhere behind the walls of his skull like an ocean trapped beneath ice. Millions of overlapping sensations still existed beneath the surface: the uneven stitching in the curtains, the microscopic asymmetry in the floorboards, the changing temperature gradients around the candle flames, the wet rhythmic pulse of blood moving through Elara’s veins beyond the door.
But they were distant.
Then the blue windows began unfolding across his vision.
Kael blinked.
“…What?”
Then the room lurched sideways.
The words dissolved.
And the world dimmed around him.
Kael didn't even have time to cry out. His knees buckled, and he collapsed. He hit the floor with a dull thud, his body sprawled across the marble tiles near the toppled chair. He was knocked out cold, his mind finally falling into a silence that wasn't forced by terrors or counting, but by total exhaustion.
A few minutes later, a young servant passed by the open door of the study.
He held a stack of fresh linens and hummed a low tune to himself. He glanced into the room and saw the young master lying motionless on the floor, his limbs tangled near the desk.
The servant didn't panic. He didn't drop the linens or shout for a doctor. He simply sighed and shook his head with a look of mild annoyance.
"Another one of his fits," the boy muttered to himself.
He had seen Kael in stranger positions before. Sometimes the young master spent hours pressed against the baseboards to count the wood grain. Sometimes he fell asleep in the middle of the hallway because the shadows felt "too heavy."
"I'll let Elara deal with him when she comes back with the tea," the servant decided.
He adjusted the linens in his arms and kept walking, leaving Kael alone in the dark silence of his own mind, unaware that when the boy finally woke up, his fits would finally be under control.