The Weight of Sorrow; Rise of the Firstborn

In a world where your clan’s emotion is your power, Kael Dourne has the worst one. The Sorrow clan sits at the bottom of every hierarchy that matters- smallest territory, lowest rank, fewest fighters. Their emotion is considered passive and useless in battle, the kind of thing that makes other clans look away out of something that isn’t quite pity. Kael has spent 17 years being looked through by people who already decided what he was worth, then his awakening ceremony happened. The stone didn’t just respond to him. It lighted up the entire clearing, cracked the ground, and sent threads of pale light racing toward the feet of sixty people standing in a circle around him. And in the moment before it stopped, Kael felt something vast open inside him- not just his Sorrow, but everything. Rage. Fear. Joy. All of it at once. All of it somehow his. The clan elders sealed the record before dawn. Because in the thousand years since the old world ended and the clan system divided Anima into separate schools, only one kind of person could do what Kael just did… The Firstborn. Now the Pride clan is sending people to ask questions. Something ancient in the Verdant Wilds has been moving toward the settlement for days. And Kael has three weeks, a grandfather running on borrowed time, and an ability that grows stronger the more he loses- to become something the world hasn’t seen in a thousand years. The hard part isn’t the power. It’s what the power costs to carry.