Chapter 236: The Gift's Management
POV: Rune Ashveil
The next morning, before the light had gone fully gold, Rune cleared a space in the middle of the floor the way she did most mornings, and rolled her shoulders, and looked at the east wall like it owed her something.
"Don't judge me," she told Sable, who had taken up her usual post on the third shelf and was watching with the flat, unbothered patience of an animal who had seen this exact routine perhaps ten thousand times and had run out of opinions about it somewhere around year three.
She lifted her hand, and let her focus narrow the way Vael had taught her to narrow it, down past the noise of the room, down to the specific quiet place inside her chest where the gift lived. It wasn't a decision so much as a permission, a kind of stepping aside she did inside her own body. And then her palm met the stone, and instead of stopping there the way flesh was supposed to stop against rock, it kept going.
The sensation never got any less strange, even after fourteen years of it. It wasn't pain. She wanted to be precise about that, because she'd read descriptions in some of her older books that made phasing sound violent, catastrophic, and it wasn't, not when it was done right. It was pressure. A kind of parting, like the wall's molecules were making room for hers the way a crowd made room for someone walking through it, reluctant but yielding. She could feel the stone's density around her wrist, cool and strange, the specific and total wrongness of matter where matter shouldn't be able to coexist with more matter, and underneath that wrongness a discipline she'd built over years, the part of her mind that stayed anchored no matter what the rest of her was doing.
She held it there for three full breaths. Then she pulled her hand back, slow, deliberate, and watched her fingers reappear out of the stone the way a hand reappeared out of water, whole, dry, unbothered.
She let out the breath she'd been holding and flexed her fingers, just to feel them be entirely hers again.
Vael had told her about the two times this had nearly killed her. Not often, not as a warning repeated over and over, but enough times that Rune had the shape of both stories memorized the way she had memorized everything else in her life. The first time she'd been eight. She'd been playing, more than practicing, phasing her hand into a bookshelf without properly holding her concentration, and she'd lost the thread of herself mid-phase. The re-solidification had happened wrong. Her hand had come back solid while it was still partially inside the wood of the shelf, and the horror of that, matter trying to occupy the same space as matter, had nearly taken her whole arm with it.
The second time had been worse, and she didn't like to think about the second time in detail, so she generally didn't.
She wasn't afraid of the gift. She wanted to be precise about that too, in her own head if nowhere else. Fear wasn't the right word for what she felt when she practiced, hand raised, aimed at solid stone. It was closer to respect. The specific, careful respect you gave something that had once nearly killed you and could, with one lapse in concentration, do it again. You didn't fear a fire you'd learned to cook with. You respected it. You kept your sleeves rolled back and your attention where it needed to be, every single time, without exception.
She reached back and touched her braid where it hung heavy against her spine, the whole silver-blonde length of it pooled on the floor behind her where she sat. Vael had explained the hair to her when she was eight, right around the time of the first incident, sitting her down with the specific gravity of someone delivering information that mattered.
The weight of it anchors you, Vael had said. It keeps you tethered to your body the way a kite string keeps a kite tethered to a hand. The longer it grows, the stronger the anchor. You must never cut it short. Do you understand me? Never.
Rune had understood, in the way an eight-year-old understands a rule handed down by someone she trusted completely. She understood it more fully now, the actual mechanics of it, the way the hair's mass and length gave her coherence something physical to hold onto, the same way a compass needle needed the pull of the earth's poles to mean anything at all. She had never tested what happened without it. She had no plans to.
She lifted her hand again, aimed for the wall, and this time let herself go a little further, wrist and then forearm, the pressure climbing with the depth, her focus narrowing until the room around her went a little soft and unreal at the edges.
Sable watched from the shelf, entirely unimpressed, tail flicking once in what might have been commentary and might have been nothing at all.
Rune pulled back before her elbow crossed the threshold. That was her rule. Wrist, forearm, never further, not alone, not without a very good reason. She'd set that boundary for herself years ago and she'd never once been tempted to cross it, because she knew, with total clarity, what waited on the other side of a boundary like that if her concentration slipped even once.
She caught her reflection, or the almost-reflection, in the dark glass of the window across the room, and for just a second, before her focus fully resettled, she saw it. The faint translucence at the edges of her own eyes, a strange pale shimmer where her irises should have been solid and weren't quite. She'd never seen it clearly, not really, not from an angle that showed her the whole effect. She only knew it happened because of the way Vael's expression changed sometimes mid-conversation, a small flicker of something crossing her face, gone before Rune could name it. She knew it happened because it was the one part of the gift she couldn't watch happen to herself.
She let her hand drop and rubbed at her wrist, though there was nothing there to rub, no mark, no bruise, nothing but the memory of pressure already fading.
She had been phasing in and out of solid walls since she was six years old, and she still was not entirely comfortable with it. She'd decided a long time ago that this was probably healthy. The alternative, total comfort with the ability to walk through solid matter, seemed like exactly the kind of thing that led to accidents. Comfort made people careless. Careless people lost the thread of their own concentration at the wrong moment, and lost more than that when they did.
She had been careful about accidents since she was eight years old, and she intended to go on being careful about them indefinitely, one deliberate breath and one measured inch of stone at a time.