~ KAEL ~
"Okay," Kael said, standing in the small courtyard behind the Cracked Lantern with his journal open and a borrowed pen, "new theory. If sincerity is the foothold, and the foothold is bigger now — does the kind of true thing matter? Or just how true it is?"
"I don't know," Nyxara admitted. "I told you — nothing like this has happened before. We're both finding out."
"Great. Science." He uncapped the pen. "First test. Something true, but small. Low stakes."
He thought for a moment, then wrote four lines about the tavern's cat — a vicious orange creature named, with no apparent irony, Biscuit, who had spent two weeks regarding Kael with profound suspicion — and how he'd finally won it over yesterday with half a sausage.
He read it aloud.
There was a pause. Then, from somewhere inside the tavern, a crash, a yowl, and Bertha's voice shouting something about 'that cat' and 'the good cheese.'
"...That might have been Biscuit deciding he loves you specifically and exclusively, forever, starting now," Nyxara said, sounding genuinely startled. "That's— that's not a blessing. That's just… emotional transference. To a cat."
"Is that bad?"
"I have no idea! No one has ever asked me to bless a cat's feelings before!"
Kael crossed out the cat poem and, after a moment, wrote: "note: be more careful with cats."
— ✶ —
~ NYXARA ~
The second test was more deliberate — Kael, sitting with his back against the courtyard wall, writing slowly and carefully about something that actually mattered: Vesna, and thirty years, and what it might mean to finally put something down after carrying it for so long.
It wasn't a request. He didn't ask for anything. He just wrote, honestly, about how he felt watching Aldric and his aunt find their way back to each other — and Nyxara felt the foothold widen, deepen, the way it had on the sea wall, except this time she was watching for it, paying attention to where the warmth went.
It didn't spread outward, this time. It went somewhere specific.
"Kael—"
"What? What happened?"
"I think that one went to Vesna. Not… powerfully. Just — a small warmth. The kind of thing that makes someone feel, for no reason they could explain, slightly less alone for a moment."
Kael sat with that. "So it's not just… raw power, going wherever. It goes toward what the true thing is about."
"I think so. Before, it was just — you, and me, and whatever you asked for. Now it's like… the foothold is wide enough that what you feel can actually go somewhere. Reach someone. Not just stay between us."
There was something in her voice — quiet, careful, turning over an idea she clearly hadn't expected.
"Kael. Before — the blessing always had to come back to you, because you were the only anchor. But if what you feel can reach other people now—"
"—then I'm not just asking you for things anymore," Kael said slowly, understanding arriving the way it always did, all at once. "I could— we could— help people. Directly. Not through favours and negotiations and ledgers. Just… by meaning it."
— ✶ —
~ KAEL ~
"Okay," he said, sitting up straighter. "Third test. Bigger. On purpose, this time."
"Kael—"
"Nothing dramatic! Just — Druven. He told me last week his youngest hasn't been sleeping well, since everything with the council started. Nightmares. He's been worried."
He thought for a moment, then wrote — not a poem this time, just a few lines, plain and direct, about hoping a child he'd never met might sleep peacefully tonight, and that whatever fear had followed her home from her father's worry might find somewhere else to go.
He read it quietly.
The warmth that answered was different again — softer, slower, like something settling rather than spreading. Nyxara was quiet for a long moment afterward.
"That one went further than the harbour," she said finally. "Across the city. To a child I've never met, in a house I've never paid attention to, because a man I barely know mentioned her in passing and you'—" she paused, and Kael could hear something thick in her voice, "—and you remembered. And you meant it."
"Did it work?"
"I think," Nyxara said slowly, "that somewhere across this city, right now, a little girl just fell asleep more easily than she has in two weeks. And neither of us will ever know for certain, and she'll never know why, and that's—"
"That's the point," Kael said quietly. "Isn't it. That's what's different now. It's not a transaction anymore. It's not 'I give you a poem, you give me power.' It's—" he searched for the word, "—it's just kindness. With somewhere to go."
They sat in the courtyard for a while after that, not testing anything, not writing anything — just sitting, the late afternoon light slanting gold across the cobblestones, Biscuit the cat curled up against Kael's leg with an expression of profound and slightly alarming devotion.
"Nyxara," Kael said eventually.
"Mm."
"The Void Mother. The big you. She noticed this — today, the harbour thing. Do you think… she'll notice this too? A whole city, slowly, getting a little kinder, because of… us?"
A long pause. When Nyxara spoke again, her voice held something Kael hadn't heard from her before — not fear, not quite. Something more like hope, tentative and unfamiliar, the way a person holds something they're not sure they're allowed to want.
"I think," she said slowly, "she might. And I think — for the first time in seventeen thousand years — I'm not afraid of what she'll think when she does."