He told Chiron more than he had told anyone except Cece and his parents.
Not all of it — the Chaos Codex, the full scope of the foreknowledge, the transmigration in its complete form. But he told Chiron the shape of it: that he had knowledge of events that had not yet occurred, that this knowledge came from a source he could not fully disclose but which was verifiable by its accuracy, and that he had specific reason to believe his presence at Westover Hall in December would prevent a death that the current trajectory of events would not prevent.
Chiron listened. He did not interrupt. When Kael finished, the centaur was quiet for a long time in the way of someone who is not processing new information but reorganizing what they already suspected.
'The death you wish to prevent,' Chiron said finally. 'It is the girl.'
'Bianca di Angelo,' Kael said. 'Yes. She joins the Hunt. She goes on the Titan's Curse quest. She enters a Talos automaton to disable it from the inside and she dies because she does not know where the control node is. I know where it is. I need to tell her before the quest leaves camp.'
'Before the quest leaves camp,' Chiron repeated. He was thinking. 'The quest will be assembled by Artemis's standards. I am not always consulted on the Hunt's affairs.'
'No. But the camp-based group — Percy, Annabeth, Thalia — they will be at Westover Hall. I need to be there with them. Or rather, I need to be there ahead of them, to reach Bianca before the battle that follows makes private conversation impossible.'
Chiron looked at him for a long time. 'You have been planning this since you were a child.'
'Since I was six,' Kael said. 'Yes.'
A pause. 'And the knowledge is accurate? Verifiable?'
'It has been accurate on every point I have been in a position to verify. The Fleece. Thalia's revival. Luke's departure. Percy's arrival. All of it.'
The centaur's expression did something complicated — the expression of someone who has spent three thousand years managing the intersection of divine prophecy and mortal action and has just been presented with a completely new category of the same problem. He said: 'You carry something I have not seen before. You know this.'
'Yes.'
'And you have used it responsibly.' This was not a question. It was a conclusion arrived at from three years of observation. 'You have not tried to redirect events wholesale. You have used it to be in the right place at the right time.'
'That is my intent,' Kael said. 'I am not trying to replace the people who are supposed to do what they do. I am trying to give them — and the people around them — what they need to do it better and survive it.'
Chiron looked at him for a long moment. Then he reached into his desk and took out a camp authorization form — the specific one used for independent reconnaissance missions — and signed it. 'You will report to me before you leave and after you return,' he said. 'You will take Theron. You will not interfere with the assigned quest's primary operations.' He paused. 'And you will tell me everything, after. What you know, what happened, what changed. Everything.'
'Everything,' Kael agreed. He took the authorization form. He felt the weight of it — the formalized permission to do what he had been planning for eight years.
He thought: this is what trust looks like when it is earned properly. Not given freely. Not withheld cynically. Built across three years of showing up and meaning it.