When I was eight years old, I stopped counting the days.
This is worth noting because I had been counting since the beginning. Days awake, days passed, approximate ages, developmental milestones tracked with the precision of someone who was used to tracking things. The count had been a form of control, a way of maintaining the sense that I understood where I was in my own timeline.
I stopped because I stopped needing it.
The days had become their own thing, which sounds obvious and is probably not interesting to anyone who grew up in a place where days were simply days, but for me it represented a genuine change in how I was experiencing Maxentius. Less documentation. More living in it.
The year I was eight was a good one by any measure I applied.
Rynn made rank D in early spring. The assessment was done at the town hall, officially, by a certified Conclave examiner, and she came back with the card and the expression of someone who had crossed a line they had been working toward for a long time. She showed the card to every person in the house individually and then put it on the table so she could look at it during dinner.
Aldus said something very specific and well-chosen about what the rank meant and what it did not mean and how the second thing was at least as important as the first. Mara cried in the way she cried when she was happy, which was freely and without embarrassment. I told Rynn that her footwork was better than it had been at the start of the year, which was the most honest compliment I had available.
Rynn said: 'You are genuinely the strangest person I know.'
'Thank you,' I said.
She hugged me, which was the Rynn version of a lengthy emotional response.
The spring was warm. The planting season went well by Aldus's assessment. Mara took on a new informal role in the village as the person who managed the shared seed supply, which was not a formal position but which she performed with the organizational precision of someone who had been thinking about logistics since she was a child.
I helped when asked and observed when not asked and continued my work in the clearing, which had produced three more significant data points by midsummer.
Data point one: the range of Void Presence was expanding passively as I aged. Not by dramatic increments. The ambient radius had grown from approximately ten meters to approximately fifteen. The effect at the edges was still subtle enough that only sensitive things noticed it, but the trend was clear.
Data point two: Void Touch, the deliberate contact application, had become significantly more controllable. I could apply it at a level light enough to be undetectable and increase it incrementally from there. The disappearing stone had been maximum application. The minimum was below anything I had been able to measure effects for.
Data point three: something new had begun, which I did not have a good name for yet. When I was in contact with things for extended periods, not in the deliberate Void Touch way but in the ordinary way of existing near them, I sometimes received information from them. Not communication. More like reading. A stone near the Riftzone had information about the Riftzone in the way that a stone absorbs the environment around it, and I could read that information if I paid attention.
I called this Void Echo in my internal taxonomy. It was early and inconsistent and I did not yet understand its range or application.
I noted it and kept working.
The summer festival came and Aldus gave his toast and the dog was there again, or possibly a different dog, and the musicians were as enthusiastically imprecise as usual.
I sat with my family in the warmth of it and did not count the day.
Later, walking home under a sky with more stars than the city I had come from ever permitted, Mara took my hand on one side and Rynn's on the other, and we walked the short distance between the festival ground and the house in the easy quiet of a family that did not need to fill every silence.
Aldus walked slightly ahead, hands in his pockets, looking up at the same sky.
'Good night,' he said, to no one or everyone.
'Good night,' we all agreed.
It was a good night.
It was a good year.
I was eight, and Maxentius was mine in the way that a place becomes yours not through ownership but through accumulated presence, through knowing which boards in the floor creak and which neighbors to go to for what kind of problem and how the light comes through the east window in early morning.
I was home.
This was not a small thing to be.