"I don't think our first move needs to be our concern," Maren said, setting the last of the sandwich wrapper aside. "It should be what your end move is."
Ant frowned. "My end move."
"Being on your own, in a world like ours, isn't really an option, not long-term, I mean it's not impossible, but it doesn't hold up. The clan system exists for a reason, and it's not just tradition, it's structure, protection, resources that a single person or even a small group can't generate alone." The words came quickly, one thought already reaching for the next before she'd finished the last. "So if you genuinely don't want to rejoin your old clan, and you don't want to join someone else's, then logically your only remaining option is to build your own. That's what unclanned people who succeed eventually do, honestly, it's basically the pattern every time. The ones who don't build something end up absorbed into an existing structure eventually, one way or another, because the alternative doesn't hold up over time."
She said it fast, without a flicker of doubt, the same certainty she brought to anything she'd actually bothered to think through properly.
"So now our question isn't what our first move is," she continued. "It's what the first step is toward making that a reality."
Ant pushed back immediately, before he'd worked out exactly why.
"I don't want my own clan," he said. "I want a bit of money, a few odd jobs, being left alone with Mahkir to do as I please. That's it. That's the whole plan."
The idea of building a clan felt like a joke told at his expense, though he was fairly certain she hadn't meant it that way. Everything a clan represented had been the thing that rejected him, the ceremonies, the standing, the careful hierarchy of who mattered and who didn't. Building one of his own meant becoming, eventually, exactly the kind of institution that had looked at a seventeen-year-old boy standing alone in a circle and decided he wasn't worth the trouble. He had no interest in that. None at all.
Maren's eyes narrowed slightly, her earlier confidence faltering just slightly at the edges.
"But what if they return," she said.
Ant blinked. "What if who returns?"
She didn't answer immediately, which gave him time to properly register how strange the question had been, arriving from nowhere as though she'd assumed he already understood it.
"What on earth are you talking about," he said. He was, at this point, fairly certain he wasn't taking her with him regardless of anything else that got decided today.
Maren studied his face for a moment, something crossing her expression, gentler than pity. She'd just realised he didn't know something she'd assumed everyone did.
"Your old clan never really explained any of this to you, did they," she said slowly. "Why everyone pushes to level, why patrols happen on a schedule, why so few people ever actually leave a clan once they're properly inside one." She shook her head slightly. "I suppose without a Kithren, there was never a reason for anyone to sit you down and explain it. It's the kind of thing that only matters once you're actually part of the system."
"Explain what," Ant said, and some of the earlier irritation had given way to genuine unease.
Maren pulled herself up onto the edge of the least damaged bench, settling in as though what came next deserved a proper telling rather than a quick summary.
"Clans have existed for roughly three hundred years," she said. "Before that, the world looked very different. No clans, no structure like this at all. People did things themselves, in smaller groups, without any of the systems we take for granted now. Kithren didn't exist. Not as they exist now, at least."
"Then, according to the records my clan keeps, and we keep the most complete version of this story that exists, because recording it has been our entire purpose since it happened, something changed. Something attacked. Unprovoked, without warning, without any indication beforehand that it was coming." Her voice dropped and slowed, each word chosen more carefully than the last. "We called them the Wraithkin."
Ant felt something cold move through him at the name. He recognised it, somehow, before he understood why.
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He remembered it, distantly, not the specifics, but the story itself, the way it had been told to him as a child by someone whose face he could no longer picture clearly. A warning delivered at bedtime, the kind adults used to keep restless children in their beds after dark. Something in the shadows, something that had once nearly ended everything, something that would come back if you weren't careful, if you strayed too far from where you were supposed to be. He'd absorbed it half believed, mostly forgotten, tucked away somewhere that had nothing to do with actual history.
"I know this story," he said. "It's a bedtime story. Something you scare children with."
Maren didn't react to that, continuing as though he hadn't spoken.
"We didn't know where they came from. We still don't, not really, not with any certainty. We didn't know what they wanted. What we did know was that we were completely defenceless against them. They corrupted the land around them wherever they appeared, the soil, the air, everything in range of whatever they were, twisted into something that could no longer support ordinary life. The effect on the world was massive. Entire regions lost, entirely, in the space of what the records suggest was a very short period of time."
"At that point in history, humans had something called mages," she continued. "A small, strong group of individuals who could wield magic directly, not through any bond, not through any creature, just raw personal capability. Their numbers were never large. But they were powerful, and when the Wraithkin came, the mages used everything they had. All of it. They poured their entire life essence into countering the corruption, fighting something that shouldn't have been beatable with the numbers they had available."
She paused before the next part. Whatever came next, it clearly mattered to her more than anything she'd said so far.
"Every mage who fought that day died," she said. "All of them. But the corruption stopped spreading. And Kithren were born, not before that moment, as far as any record shows, but in the immediate aftermath of it. Something about what the mages did, what they poured into the world in their last act, created something new."
Ant sat with that for a moment. He hadn't expected any of it to connect, but it did.
"That's why," he said slowly. "That's why nobody has magic anymore. Why it's zero on every human screen that's ever been read." He thought of his own stat sheet, the flat zero sitting where magic should have been, the old mythology he'd half dismissed as folk tale back in the cave. "They spent it. All of it. Every mage who ever existed, gone in a single day, and whatever they were carrying just left. Left the species entirely."
Maren looked briefly surprised. "That's the leading theory, yes. Not proven, not something anyone alive can verify directly, but it's consistent with everything else we've recorded. The capacity simply wasn't passed on. Whatever allowed a mage to wield magic directly, it went into that final act and never returned to the bloodline."
"One person managed to bond with the very first of them," she continued. "He became known, eventually, as the first emperor. He used that bond, that power, to push the Wraithkin back."
"Not destroyed," she added. "Suppressed. Driven into the shadows, wherever the shadows actually are, and the belief my clan has maintained and recorded and taken seriously for three hundred years is that they will return eventually. That the suppression isn't permanent. That's why the clans were built around exactly that: different responsibilities, different specialisations, all of it structured around being ready for a threat most people have stopped believing was ever real."
"My clan's responsibility," she said, "has always been research. Recording. Understanding what happened that day and everything that's happened since, in as much detail as we could manage, so that if it ever comes again, we're not facing it with nothing the way the mages did."
The room settled into quiet once the last of it had been said, the smoke-thinned air carrying the story between them long after her voice had stopped.
Ant sat with it, going over all of it carefully, looking for the places where it might not hold together. He found nothing to argue with. It was too coherent for that, too consistent with pieces he'd half known already and never bothered connecting. The magic. The Kithren. The reason clans existed at all, structured around specialisation and readiness rather than simple tradition.
He thought about his own zero. About the five that had appeared where zero should have stayed, a number that had already broken every rule anyone had ever explained to him. Kithren were supposed to carry magic, that much fit everything she'd just told him. Humans weren't. If the mages had genuinely spent every trace of magic humanity had ever carried, three hundred years ago, in a single desperate act, then whatever he was carrying now shouldn't exist at all. Mahkir's own number was strange in a different way. Twenty was high for a Kithren still this young, higher than it should have been, even if having magic at all made sense for him in a way it never would for Ant. Two strange numbers, arriving in the same week, in the same bonded pair, for reasons nobody appeared to have an answer for.
He didn't say any of that out loud. It felt like too much to hand over on top of everything else the day had already taken from him.
"And you actually believe they're coming back," he said instead. "Not just institutional caution. Not just tradition kept alive because nobody's brave enough to stop funding it."
"I believe the records," Maren said simply. "I believe the people who wrote them had no reason to invent a threat that costly, and every reason to underplay it if anything. Three hundred years of preparation for something that might genuinely never return is a strange kind of caution to sustain that long without cause."
Ant didn't have a response to that. He sat with it instead, and found himself, for the first time since walking into this house, without anything clever or guarded left to say.