I didn't understand the ceremony at first.
Not because the words were complicated—but because everyone kept looking at me like they were afraid of breaking something.
Cannot cultivate.
The phrase followed me out of the hall, echoing softly in a way that didn't hurt yet. It was too clean. Too final. Pain needed time to arrive.
Mother held my hand the entire walk back.
She didn't tighten her grip. Didn't loosen it either. Just… stayed. As if letting go was no longer an option.
Father walked slightly ahead of us, his back straight, his pace steady. Anyone watching would have thought nothing had changed.
They would have been wrong.
Inside the ancestral hall, the doors closed.
No elders.
No observers.
No heaven.
Just us.
Mother knelt in front of me, bringing her eyes level with mine. Her expression was calm—too calm—but I could see the effort it took to keep it that way.
"Cassian," she said gently, "look at me."
I did.
"You did nothing wrong."
I nodded, because that felt like the correct response. But something inside me shifted anyway, quiet and deep.
Father spoke next.
"You heard what they said," he said. "And you understand what it means."
"Yes," I replied.
He studied me for a long moment, as if searching for cracks. Finding none, he continued.
"It changes nothing."
The words surprised me.
Mother smiled faintly. "It changes what they expect," she corrected. "Not who you are."
I didn't know how to answer that.
So I didn't.
Instead, I asked the question that had been circling my thoughts since the ceremony ended.
"…Will they keep watching?"
Father's gaze hardened—not with anger, but with clarity.
"No," he said. "They will stop."
That, more than anything else, made my chest feel tight.
The days that followed were quiet.
Too quiet.
Visitors stopped coming. Couriers arrived less frequently. Conversations around me softened, then thinned, then faded altogether. It wasn't abandonment—not yet—but it was distance.
Heaven had decided.
I spent more time alone after that.
Not because I was told to, but because silence felt… necessary. When I sat with others, my thoughts pulled inward. When I was alone, they finally settled.
It was Mother who found me one evening, sitting in the outer garden, hands dusted with stone fragments.
I had been carving without realizing it.
Just a block of ordinary stone. No tools. Just my fingers, pressing, shaping, removing what didn't belong.
She didn't interrupt.
She sat beside me and watched.
After a while, she asked softly, "What are you making?"
"I don't know," I said honestly. "I just… needed it to exist."
She looked at the half-formed shape, her eyes thoughtful.
"It feels calm," she said.
I nodded.
That was when I understood.
If I couldn't circulate qi…
If I couldn't walk the path they respected…
Then I would find another way to remain whole.
That night, I went to my parents together.
"I want to enter seclusion," I said.
Mother's breath caught. Father didn't react immediately.
"How long?" he asked.
"I don't know," I replied. "As long as it takes."
They didn't argue.
They didn't try to dissuade me.
Father placed a hand on my shoulder, his grip firm and grounding.
"You will always be Aetherion," he said. "Seclusion does not change that."
Mother embraced me then—tight, unyielding, warm.
"Come back when you are ready," she whispered. "Not when they are."
The doors to the inner courtyard closed behind me soon after.
No announcement followed.
No declaration was made.
Cassian Aetherion entered seclusion not as punishment, nor as retreat—
—but as choice.
I brought stone with me.
And silence.
And time.
Ten years stretched ahead, unmarked and unwatched.
For the first time since my birth, heaven looked elsewhere.
And in that quiet—
I began to shape something that belonged only to me.