He was at the tree when they brought the Fleece back.
He had been there since dawn — not reinforcing, just present, sitting with his back against the bark in the way that had become his habit over two years, feeling the faint warmth of Thalia inside the wood. The tree was weaker than it had been before the poisoning, despite his thirty-one days of support. The decay had left its mark. The Fleece needed to come soon.
He heard them coming up the hill — the group returning from the quest, Percy among them by the specific divine shimmer, Annabeth's precise footstep pattern, Tyson's enormous warmth. He did not turn. He stayed at the base of the tree and felt what was coming and prepared himself for the next part.
The Fleece went over the branches. The effect was immediate: the golden warmth of it pulsed through the tree like a heartbeat starting up, the divine healing energy of the relic interacting with the divine energy of Zeus's chosen child. The decay reversed. The tree straightened slightly. The shimmer around it deepened from flickering to steady.
And then it overheated. He felt it the moment it happened — too much divine healing, too concentrated, the Fleece's power doing what Thalia had been afraid of when she made her choice. He braced against the bark and felt the overcharge building.
The tree cracked.
Not with damage — with release. The bark split along a vertical line and Thalia Grace stepped out of it, blinking in the morning light, fifteen years old, three years older than the last time she had been in a body.
He was the first person she saw. This was by position rather than by design, though he had been sitting in exactly that position for two years and some things are not entirely accidental.
She was disoriented — of course she was, three years of tree-dream transitioning instantly to a body and sunlight and people and the overwhelming sensory reality of being alive. He did not rush it. He stood up slowly, giving her time to see him as not-a-threat before she registered anything else.
He said, quietly: 'Hey. I'm Kael. I've been sitting with the tree.' He paused. 'Welcome back.'
She looked at him with lightning-blue eyes that had a wildness in them that would not leave quickly — the wildness of someone who had been somewhere else and was not fully back yet. She assessed him with the instinctive warrior's read and found, apparently, something that was not a threat.
'How long,' she said. Her voice was rough with disuse.
'Three years,' he said. 'Almost exactly.'
She processed this. Her face did something complicated — three years compressed into a moment of understanding, the weight of time that had passed while she was inside the wood. Then she looked at him with those lightning eyes and said: 'You knew I was in there.'
'Yes.'
'You've been here before.'
'Many times.'
She was quiet for a moment. Then she looked at the camp below — the familiar shapes of it, the changed and unchanged, the faces of people who were beginning to rush up the hill toward her. 'Tell me what I missed,' she said.
'I will,' he said. 'Come down when you're ready. There's a lot and there's time for it.'
She came down the hill with him on her right and Percy Jackson — meeting him for the first time with the particular charge of two divine bloodlines recognizing each other — on her left, and the camp spread below them in the August morning like something worth coming back to.