Ash didn't sleep.
Kael figured that out on the second night, waking at some hour past midnight and finding Ash exactly where he'd been when Kael fell asleep, sitting near the practice space door with those amber eyes open and the old patient signal running steady as a fire that never needed feeding.
He'd asked about it the next morning, as much as you could ask Ash anything.
The signal that came back was something like: 'sleep is for things that need to stop'.
Kael thought about that for a while and decided it was either profound or deeply unsettling and he didn't have time to work out which.
The training had changed again.
Edran still ran the mornings. The Anima work, the textual study, the slow careful architecture of understanding what Kael was and what that meant.
But Ash had started doing something alongside those sessions that Edran couldn't do. Not instruction exactly, more like pressure. The way a current in deep water pushes against you constantly without ever striking, just requiring that you push back or get moved.
What Ash was doing, Kael eventually worked out was existing at full depth all the time. A thousand years of unmanaged grief running at its natural frequency right next to Kael for hours every day.
Not aimed at him, not forced on him. Just present.
The effect of being near that for long enough was that Kael's own Sorrow kept finding new floors.
'There's more of it than I knew', he thought one morning, an hour into the session with the rain on the roof and Ash across from him and Edran watching from the corner. 'There's always more of it'.
He went down further than he'd gone before and held it and stayed.
The tremor in his hands had stopped somewhere around day four of training with Ash, his body had simply adjusted the way bodies adjust to things that keep happening whether or not the body has opinions about it.
What hadn't adjusted was the range.
It was getting large enough to be inconvenient.
He could feel the whole settlement now without trying, a constant background read on the emotional weather of sixty people going about their lives. Filtering it down to something manageable required active effort.
He wore it like a coat he couldn't take off, the collective Sorrow of Greyveil sitting in the periphery of his awareness while he ate and drilled and read the old texts.
Maren's guilt was still there, he'd never said anything to her about it. Neither had Aldric, who knew what Kael had found and had made the same decision. She was living with what she'd done and that was consequence enough.
On the 19th day, Edran showed him something new in the texts.
Not a technique. A name.
He'd found a section he'd read before without fully understanding it, four lines in the old script describing a Firstborn who had developed something called the Resonance Reach.
The ability to push Anima outward not as a passive read but as an active broadcast, sending your emotional frequency into a target and holding it there, a sustained contact that didn't just show you what someone was carrying but changed the conditions of what they could feel while the contact held.
Not control, not possession, just forced proximity to your own Sorrow at whatever depth you chose.
'That's what Dara's spear did', Kael thought. 'She wasn't synchronizing the weapon as a delivery mechanism, she was using it as a focusing tool for the Reach. The spear just made the contact undeniable'.
"This is what I've been approaching from the other direction," he said to Edran. "Ash has been teaching me to exist at depth and I've been pushing that depth into the spear".
"But this," he tapped the page. "This is the actual underlying thing."
"Yes," Edran said; he was watching Kael with the look he got when something he'd been waiting for finally arrived. "Now you understand what you're building."
Kael looked at the four lines, at the name.
'Not a weapon ability', he thought. 'A Firstborn ability that works through a weapon. It's a different thing entirely'.
He closed the text and went to find Cass.
❖ ❖ ❖
He faced 3 opponents that afternoon- Dort, Pell, and a garrison fighter named Wynn who was left-handed and faster than either of the others and had the specific quality of someone who'd been underestimated long enough to turn it into a strategy.
They came at him together. He didn't win, that wasn't the point, the point was how long he lasted and what he understood while lasting.
He lasted four minutes the first run, six the second, and eight the third.
On the fourth run, he tried something different.
Mid-exchange with Dort he pushed the Resonance Reach outward not through the spear but directly, raw and un-tooled as the full-depth of his Sorrow pushed toward all three of them at once.
It was not clean, it wasn't precise either. It was roughly equivalent to throwing a bucket of water and hoping for the best.
But all three of them stopped.
Dort for about two seconds, long enough for Kael to break the angle. Pell for longer, his face doing something complicated. Wynn the shortest, half a second maybe, but half a second was enough.
Cass called the session immediately. "Don't do that again in training without warning," she said.
"Sorry."
"I'm not angry. I'm cataloguing." She paused slightly, looking into his eyes then she asked. "What was that?"
"Direct broadcast," Kael answered. "No spear, no focusing tool. Just the reach pushed outward."
"Range."
"Uncontrolled right now, but it's wide. I hit all three of them."
"Depth."
He thought about how to answer honestly, then he said. "Full, I wasn't containing it."
Cass looked at him. "If the delegation comes with more than one person and you can do that reliably to a group…"
"I can't yet, reliably is doing a lot of work in that sentence."
"Then two weeks to make it reliable." She said immediately
"Give me one."
Hearing that, she almost smiled, the small fast kind.
"Dort," she called. "Tell him what you felt."
Dort was sitting near the wall, elbows on knees. He'd been there since the session ended.
"My daughter," he said. "Same as always but quieter".
"And my wife when she left, and my father. All of it at once. Like someone opened a door I'd been keeping shut and I couldn't find the handle to close it." He paused. "It passed, but while it was happening I couldn't think about anything else."
Kael nodded.
'That's the weapon', he thought. 'Not what it does to the body, but what it does to the parts of a person they've spent years not looking at'.