The elders did not know what to do with Kael after that.
They tried prayer first.
Then chains.
The chains melted.
They tried exile.
The forest parted to let him through, then closed again behind him like a mouth swallowing its own lie.
Finally, they tried silence.
No one spoke of the dawn massacre. No one spoke of the bones that had turned to dust before burial. They pretended Kael was just a boy who had gotten lucky.
Kael let them pretend.
He was learning.
When he concentrated, things behaved correctly.
A cracked cup reformed itself in his hands because a cup, by definition, should hold water. A fire went out when it threatened to spread, not because he commanded it to—but because it understood that it had gone too far.
This wasn't magic.
Magic was effort.
Magic pushed.
This was authority.
Kael didn't force the world to obey.
He corrected it.
By fourteen, he realized something else:
Nothing could surprise him.
Arrows curved away from his body before he noticed they had been fired. Poison neutralized itself in his stomach. A collapsing roof froze in place mid-fall until he stepped aside.
Causality deferred to his presence.
He asked a simple question one night, staring into a still pond:
"What am I?"
The water reflected not his face—but a crown of impossible geometry, hovering above his brow.
The reflection blinked.
Kael did not.