I was five years old when I began systematic training.
The word training may be generous. What I was doing was closer to controlled experimentation conducted in the forest at times when no one would notice I was gone, aimed at understanding the nature and extent of what I was capable of, with the specific goal of knowing my own parameters before the world decided to test them for me.
I had learned enough from three years of passive observation to know that passive observation had a ceiling.
The Void, as I had come to think of it, did not announce itself. It did not come with instructions or incremental ability trees or any of the game-like systems I had read descriptions of in the overheard conversations of Rynn and the few guild members who passed through Maxentius. There was no notification when I gained a new capability. There was no blue screen confirming my rank.
There was only the quiet presence of something I did not understand yet, and the ongoing work of understanding it.
I started with what I already knew.
Fact: proximity to living things without deliberate intention caused a passive effect. Small organisms, plants, insects, were more susceptible. Larger organisms registered the presence and moved away. Human contact, at least with my family, produced no apparent negative effect.
Fact: deliberate contact intensified the effect proportional to intention and duration. This I had established at three in the forest with the moss.
Fact: the effect stopped when I stopped it, which meant I had some form of active control.
What I did not know was the upper range. What I did not know was whether the Void could do anything other than the passive suppression I had been observing. What I did not know was whether it responded to Aether in the same way it responded to living energy.
I found a dead log and practiced on it.
This sounds mundane. It was, in fact, informative in ways that a living subject would not have been, because a dead log has no passive response to suppress. What happened when I directed attention at the dead wood was different: a slow, selective decay that worked through the internal structure rather than the surface, a kind of accelerated entropy that reduced the log's coherence in ways that were not visible until pressure was applied.
This took me several sessions to fully understand.
The Void did not simply kill things. It removed what made them coherent. Their organization, their structure, the property that made a living thing alive or a formed thing formed. What remained after prolonged exposure was technically still present but had lost the internal arrangement that made it what it was.
This had implications I was not entirely comfortable with.
I moved on to testing whether I could direct this as a focused effect versus an area effect.
The answer was yes, with concentration. A focused effect was substantially more controllable and left a smaller ambient trace. An area effect was easier and less precise.
I catalogued all of this and thought about what it meant for practical applications. The conclusion was not dramatic. At this stage, what I was capable of was genuinely useful for self-protection and genuinely problematic for anything else, which was a balance I found appropriate for a five-year-old who had no immediate need for combat capability and significant need to continue appearing unremarkable.
In the evenings, I watched Rynn train.
She had been at it long enough that the gap between her form and what the book described had narrowed considerably. Her footwork was now genuinely good, her timing was improving, and she had developed the particular quality of focused attention during practice that separated people who were learning a skill from people who were absorbing it.
I had been giving her corrections since I was old enough to speak, delivered in ways that could be plausibly attributed to intuition or observation rather than technical understanding. She had taken all of them.
'Your weight transfer is early,' I told her one evening.
She stopped. Tried the movement again more slowly. Found the problem.
'How do you keep seeing these things?' she asked, not annoyed, genuinely curious.
I considered the available answers.
'I watch a lot,' I said.
She accepted this. Rynn had, at some point in the past year, arrived at a working theory about me that involved the phrase weird in a positive rather than negative framing, and she applied this theory consistently.
We sat in the yard afterward, in the cooling evening, while Mara called from inside that dinner was close.
'I'm going to be good enough for a real guild someday,' Rynn said. Not a question. An update on her current projected timeline.
'I know,' I said.
She looked over at me. 'You could train too, you know. Properly. You could probably be good.'
I looked at the sky above Maxentius.
'Maybe,' I said.
I thought about what good meant for someone like me and decided the conversation could wait.