The weight did not land all at once. It accrued—a slow press across the collarbones, a thumb between the brows, a heaviness at the back of the tongue that turned breathing into a negotiation. The burden of what he might know settled onto Tian like armor set on a body not yet used to wearing it. If the sequence that had lived in his skull was no dream, no fever, no suggestible mind replaying fear as prophecy—if it was future—then in the quiet, fierce mathematics that governed a leader's life, it was his to carry.
If the vision was truth, then every life in this sanctuary had just been handed to his judgment like a flame nobody else saw.
He turned the thought over as if it might show him a gentler face from another angle. It did not.
Is this mine? he wondered, without letting his lips move around the shape of it. Is this the orb's? Does this belong to me now—the seeing of lines before they're drawn?
Questions multiplied like a landslide, stone striking stone, everything he toppled answering with an avalanche of its own. The divine orb had awakened something in him; that much was plain—even sitting still, he could feel a new architecture under his skin, a scaffolding on which energy climbed at his call. But prophecy? Foresight? The glimpse of a thread pulled taut days before a hand took hold? Those belonged to priests in warmed rooms of legend, to men in stories whose sentences ended in the words always and never.
Evidence laughed softly at superstition.
Every gesture around him matched his remembered moment with ruthless fidelity. The floating crystals pulsed in a rhythm tied to the Grand Elder's soft, steady current; dust motes—he could count them—hung in exactly the same little constellation between his vision and the slant of light falling across Elder Lysara's face. Elena tucked a strand of hair behind her ear with the left hand, not her right—the strand would fall again in eleven seconds; he counted to eleven and watched it fall.
The room lay on its rails. And he lay on his.
He noticed something else. The golden overlay of his new sight—those threads that revealed streams of life-force and intention—did not stay constant. When doubt rose and churned, the light flickered, unfocused, edges bleeding into one another like watercolor left out in rain. When resolve gathered, when his thoughts clicked into clean engagement like gears meshing, the streams sharpened, brightened, took on the authority of lines carved into stone. The orb's power did not just make him stronger; it made his thinking louder to itself. It made hesitation expensive. It made clarity into a weapon.
What if the gift was more than sinew and speed? What if it included a widening of the walls of a mind? What if the orb had pressed open a door at the back of perception so he could look—briefly—outside of time's one-way street? There were stories like that. He had dismissed them as window-dressing on old miracles. Stories where prophets and seers pulled aside the curtains and saw the stage being set before the actors made their entrances. Stories where the price of sight was not admiration but responsibility sharpened into a blade.
Responsibility made itself felt now as a weight that made him want to bend his head and straighten his spine simultaneously.
If he could see—and if this seeing meant action—then every choice made in ignorance would become a failure of nerve, not of knowledge. If his vision was a map, then wandering would be a sin.
And yet.
The paradox of it unspooled like a rope he couldn't get his hands around. The training session rolled on in its familiar script around him, voices rising and falling in exactly the way he had seen them do. He could interrupt now. He could stand and speak with the iron in his chest and say: listen to me, what comes will break us unless we face it prepared. He could say: there is a mouth in the dark that waits for us if we take the sky. He could say: there is a flower that is not a flower that will make you think your bones forgot how to hold your weight.
Would they believe? Could he make them believe without showing his hand? Could he explain a knowledge with no source in evidence without collapsing the thing that made it precious? If he changed the river's path too hard, would it drown a village downstream that had been spared before? If his warning bent the timing even a little—if it made them move too soon, or too late—would it sand from the gears the teeth that made the elders' astonishing choreography clean?
Intervention glowed like salvation and like disaster at once. Panic came when instructions arrived out of order. Confidence came when they aligned.
He let his eyes move around the ring and found that Elder Lysara's eyes had already found him. She hadn't missed it—his stillness, the way he didn't try to make a joke to ease Sarah's excitement into something he could manage, the way he watched the space above Amara's breathing body instead of the body itself.
"Tian," she said, and it was not a call to be brave; it was an invitation to be exact. Her voice lowered without losing command. "I can see that something is troubling you. The integration of divine energy can sometimes bring unexpected experiences—visions, dreams, or moments of expanded perception. Would you like to share what you're feeling?"
The want rose like heat under his sternum. Here stood a woman whose life arced across one hundred and forty-two winters, who had wrestled energies through the eye of a needle and come up with thread. If anyone could hold what he had to say without dropping it on his feet, it would be her. And yet he pictured time as a pond that had just begun to freeze, a clean, thin sheet forming while water still moved underneath; he didn't know which step would crack it.
He set a foot on the middle path.
"Elder Lysara," he said, finding the tone that suited the weight he was handing her—no drama, no trivialization—"I'm experiencing some… unusual sensations. As if I've been here before. Or as if I know what's about to happen next. Is that normal after consuming a divine orb?"
Her mouth softened, the kind of softening that came when a teacher saw a student reach for a tool and not a crutch. She glanced toward Hisag. He had been quiet at the chamber's edge, eyes kind but not distracted. They shared the look of people who had run this corridor before and knew where the floor dipped. "Enhanced perception is indeed one of the documented effects of divine bonding," she said. "Some develop heightened intuition. An ability to sense danger before it manifests. Some—rare—report brief glimpses of potential futures. The orb doesn't only thicken your arm. It enlarges the room your mind can move in. We do not fully understand the limits."
Validation landed with a relief he tried not to let show on his face. The phenomenon had a shelf in their library. It wasn't just his—he wasn't a lone, fevered man in a corner making patterns out of his fear. It was an old path, even if a narrow one. There was a framework to borrow while he built his own.
"If I were to sense an approaching danger," he said, careful now to leave the serpent sleeping inside the words, "something that might threaten the sanctuary, how seriously would such a warning be taken?"
The air in the room changed the way it does when weather turns without announcing itself—pressure shift, ears remembering their duties. Lysara's gaze sharpened, the concern in it focusing down to use. "Any warning from someone with your level of divine enhancement would be taken very seriously," she said. "We have learned at cost that such intuition may outrun scouts and auguries both."
Meditations opened like eyes. Sarah leaned forward without realizing it. Marcus stopped counting breaths. Kai looked sideways at Elena and found in her face that she had already adjusted her stance from rest to ready.
Tian drew one steady inhale, and the golden threads of his sight brightened by a degree in agreement. The time to hold the rope had ended. The time to tie it had come.
"Then I must tell you," he said, and in his chest an echoing click said doors had shut and locks had turned, "that I sense great danger approaching the sanctuary. A coordinated assault—creatures working together. And something else with them—not claws, not heat—something that will drain our power unless it is found and destroyed."
The words did not merely hang; they took up residence, filled the corners, turned the room into a place where chairs no longer belonged in circles but in lines. Conversations ceased mid-breath. Hisag's body had already shifted—a fraction toward the door, a fraction toward the cord that would ring down the elders after one call. Lysara's chin lifted not in defiance but in acknowledgment. The training session shed what softness it had worn. It became a council.