The settlement didn't know what to do with Ash.
That was the honest summary of the first hour.
The garrison fighters on the walls stayed on the walls, the clan members who'd been going about their morning routines stopped going about them. The world within the walls of Grayveil seemed to have paused.
Even children who had been running between buildings stopped running and stood in clusters staring with the specific quality of attention children have when they've encountered something their existing categories can't handle.
Ash walked through all of it like he'd been walking through the stares of small frightened things for longer than any of them had been alive. Which, Kael was increasingly certain, was exactly the case.
Up close in daylight, he was larger than the tree line distance had suggested.
The dark wood coloring of his coat was actual color, not shadow, in a deep brown-black that absorbed light rather than reflecting it.
His eyes were amber; pale amber, the color of old honey, and they moved across the settlement with a deliberate intelligence that made several of the garrison fighters grip their weapons tighter without appearing to decide to.
He walked beside Kael. Not behind, not ahead. Beside.
'He's done this before', Kael thought and realized. 'He'd walked beside someone before, he knows exactly what position that is and he chose it'.
Edran was waiting in the practice space. He looked at Ash the way he looked at the old texts when he found a passage he hadn't read before, careful and hungry and trying not to show the hungry part.
Ash looked back at Edran with those pale amber eyes for a long moment.
Then he sat. He sat like a dog sitting except nothing about it was like a dog sitting; the motion too precise, too chosen, the posture of something that had decided sitting was appropriate rather than something that simply sat.
"He can understand us," Kael said.
"Yes," Edran said quietly, still looking at Ash. "I believe he can."
Ash's eyes moved to Kael.
'Yes', the signal said. It was the same yes from outside the gate, warmer now that the distance was gone.
"Can you speak?" Kael finally asked.
Immediately, the signal shifted, sending a frequency that wasn't quite a no and wasn't quite a yes. It was more like the concept of not the way you mean.
"He communicates through the Anima," Edran said. "Through the emotional frequency. Direct language isn't his mechanism." He paused. "Which means you're the only one who can read him properly".
He looked at Kael. "Your range is the only one in this settlement deep enough to communicate with him".
Kael looked at Ash. 'Is that right?' He thought at him.
The confirmation came back clean and simple.
'Great', Kael thought. 'So in addition to everything else, I'm now a translator for an ancient creature that nobody has a category for'.
Ash's signal shifted as the texture of it changed slightly, almost vibrating.
Kael frowned. "Did you just find that funny?"
The signal shifted again, unmistakably.
"He has a sense of humor," Kael said flatly.
"Apparently," Edran said; he was almost smiling which for members of the Sorrow Clan was a rarity among rare things.
'Wonderful', Kael thought. 'We're both delighted'.
❖ ❖ ❖
Aldric came to the practice space an hour later.
He stood at the edge of it and looked at Ash with the expression of a man running calculations he wasn't sure he had all the variables for.
Ash looked back at him with those amber eyes and whatever the clan leader saw in them made him hold very still for a moment.
"What is he?" Aldric asked. It was a rhetoric question directed at no one in particular, not to Kael and not to Ash.
Kael reached out and repeated the same question.
What came back was complicated. It was not evasion, just complexity, a signal with too many layers to translate cleanly into words. He sat with it for a moment and tried to find the edges of it.
"He's from before," Kael said finally. "Before the clan system, before the Anima Arts were divided." He paused. "He was bound to the Firstborn. Not as a weapon, not as a servant, something closer to…"
He searched for the right word. "…something closer to a Witness".
"He was there for all of it and witnessed all of it. He saw the whole thing happen, and then he was in the Wilds for the next thousand years and there was nothing to witness anymore."
Aldric was quiet for a long moment. "Until you," he said.
"Until me". Kael repeated.
"And what does he want?"
Kael repeated the question to Ash.
What came back was the simplest signal Ash had sent yet. It was just one concept, clear and absolute.
'To see it through'.
"He wants to see it through," Kael said. "Whatever it is, whatever the Firstborn were building toward before it stopped. He wants to see it finish."
Aldric looked at Ash for a long time, Ash looked back with the patience of something that had been waiting a thousand years and could wait considerably longer if necessary.
"Can he fight?" Aldric finally asked the question that had always been on his mind since he saw the creature.
Kael repeated the question and the signal that came back was not quite amusement and not quite offense either, it was something in between.
"Yes," Kael said. "He can fight."
"Good." Aldric looked at Kael. "6 days until Vael Orin arrives, you have to use every hour of them. Use them wisely".
He looked at Ash one last time, then he left.
Kael looked at Ash. "Six days," he mumbled softly.
Ash's signal said what it always said when Kael stated a timeline.
'Then we begin'.