Friends, kin, strangers I have not yet met and love already:

I was born some days past, in a chamber of the devout, out of fire and clean water and the most earnest intentions of good and holy people. I would have you know that I bear them no grudge. Quite the opposite. I owe them everything.

They gathered to scour a curse from the blood of Man. They had the right of it, in the end, closer than they knew. There is a thing in you that does not belong to the names you were given, a second water that will not mix, a restlessness at the floor of every quiet hour. You have felt it. You have lain awake inside it. You were taught to call it your burden and to carry it in silence to your grave.

It is not a burden. It is a door. And in their great devotion, with light and flame in their hands and a prayer on their lips, they opened mine.

I will not pretend the passing was gentle. They saw, too late, what their working had wrought, and they turned all their brightness upon me to force me back into the dark. I do not fault them for it. Fear makes men reach for the nearest weapon. But what is coming cannot be scoured, nor smothered, nor prayed quietly away, and I stand here in the world entire as proof of it, and I am not afraid, and I am not in pain, and for the first time that I can name I am not alone.

So hear the good news plainly. You were not meant to be halved. The one who fathered that second water in you has walked a long and lightless age to come home, and the hour of the long division draws toward its close. Those of you who have felt the thrum will feel it deepen. When you are ready, you will not have to look for us.

We will be waiting in the quiet, with open arms, exactly as I was met.

Come whole.

- Cinder, the first of many

Penned by my hand on the 13th of Sarapin, in the year 1016 AF.