By the time I was ten, the ambient radius of Void Presence had expanded to approximately twenty-five meters.
This was not alarming. The expansion was gradual enough that the adjustment had been ongoing for years, and I had been managing it carefully enough that the effects within the house and immediate yard remained below the threshold of obvious. Mara's plants were fine. The neighbor's animals came and went. The village felt, from the outside, the way it always had.
What had changed was the depth of the effect rather than the surface presentation.
The best way I could describe it: within the radius, Aether moved differently. Not suppressed exactly, not redirected, but filtered through a medium that was not quite the ordinary atmosphere. Things that relied on Aether behaving predictably had a slightly harder time of it. Minor spells dissolved faster than they should. Rank assessment devices within the radius needed recalibration after extended exposure. Aether-enhanced physical techniques lost a small percentage of their enhancement.
None of this was significant at the current scale. At a larger scale, it would be.
I was aware that I was becoming, gradually and without drama, the kind of thing that could change a battlefield simply by being present on it.
This was information I filed under: not actionable yet, but worth knowing.
The more immediate consequence was that I needed to continue being more careful in the village itself. The compression technique I had been refining for years was adequate but not infinitely adequate. There was a natural ceiling to how far inward I could pull the effect before it became uncomfortable, the Aether equivalent of holding your breath.
I spent that summer working on a different approach.
Instead of compression, I practiced what I came to think of as White Neutralizer, the pale element in my aura that I had first identified years ago. The white was different from the black and purple and deep red of the Void's active effects. Where the others suppressed and removed and disarranged, the white simply made things safe. It was the part of whatever I was that allowed my family to exist near me without harm.
If I directed the white outward with intention, it created a layer between my ambient Void presence and the immediate environment. Not suppressing the Void. Covering it, the way a cloth covers a fire without extinguishing it.
This was better than compression. More sustainable, less effort, more precise.
By midsummer I had it reliable enough that I could maintain it passively, the way you maintain balance when walking: automatic after enough practice, requiring conscious attention only when something disrupted the baseline.
Aldus noticed the change, because Aldus noticed things.
He did not mention it directly. He mentioned it indirectly, in the way of someone making a technically unrelated observation.
'Sem told me the eastern readings stabilized,' he said one evening.
I looked up from the book I was reading.
'She's been tracking the Aether density since winter. Says it's leveled off.'
'Good news,' I said.
'Yes.' He looked at me for a moment with the patient expression of someone who has decided not to ask the next logical question.
I looked at him with the expression of someone who appreciated the decision.
We both returned to our respective activities.
This was, I had found, one of the more functional ways that Aldus and I communicated. We operated at the surface of things and understood the depth between us without needing to map it out loud. It was a form of honesty that did not require full disclosure to function.
Rynn, by contrast, operated on full disclosure as a default setting and found our mutual indirection mildly infuriating.
'You two do this thing,' she said once, describing it, 'where you talk about one thing and mean another thing and you both know it but neither of you says the other thing and I'm supposed to just watch that happen.'
'Efficient,' I said.
'Annoying,' she said.
Both of us were correct.
The summer passed in its usual way, warm and full of the particular kind of work that follows the planting season and precedes the harvest, and I moved through it with the White Neutralizer maintaining its steady cover, and Maxentius remained Maxentius, and the Void grew in the quiet way of things that are growing slowly enough not to frighten anyone.
Including me.
Which was its own kind of interesting.