Chapter 2: What Raw Solis Does to a Boy Who Is Already Afraid

The first time Kael took Solis, he told himself it was a small thing.

This is worth examining, because Kael was not, generally, the kind of person who lied to himself about the size of things. He had spent most of his conscious life doing the inverse — catastrophizing with a thoroughness that his tutors called excessive imagination and his mother called paying attention and his father called, with the gentle helplessness of a man who did not share the affliction, being your own worst company. He understood that things were usually larger than they appeared. He understood this the way some people understand mathematics: not as a tool he had learned but as a language he had been born already speaking.

And yet. The first time, he told himself it was a small thing.