Robin’s first weeks with Kraag had been a flurry of constant stimulation and activity. The day after he was welcomed to the inner rings of the god’s camp, the resident master of the winds, an aloof and frustratingly condescending man whose name Robin had honestly forgotten, tested him.

  The prospective Speaker had passed of course, which then spurred the days of “probing.” Anya, Yanni, and Louise would sporadically appear as Robin wandered the camps littered around Kraag’s host and demand he carry out some fashion of test of his emotional intelligence.

  “Brighten the flame!” Yanni urged, his tanned and calloused hands thrusting a candle with a weak flame at him. “What is urging this spark to hold itself back?”

  “Do you know how the clouds feel?” Anya asked dreamily while a summer rain shower fell around Kraag. “Can you feel it, too? What would you do with those feelings?”

  Louise, for her part, would come wobbling up to Robin, stop, and roll her eyes before wobbling away. The test came and went, and Robin failed, without so much as a word for the elderly woman.

  All through this, Kraag’s glistening, watery eyes would watch with excitement. At risk of sounding dramatic, Robin could not get over how much the elder god must have to say and how excited he seemed to be to say it.

  After a handful of days of these probes of Robin’s skills, they had developed his training plan. Every week, Robin would spend only one day with Yanni, two with Anya, and four terrible, miserable days with the crone.

  Yanni was, as Robin had expected, his favorite tutor. The emotional outbursts of fire were simplistic to read. Though he was too used to channeling wind to be able to control fire like Yanni, describing and empathizing with the passionate emotions was simple.

  The one day with Yanni per week was the only time Robin was pleased with his own skills as a shaman. He would spend time with Yanni and his wife and kids singing loudly, doing “cliff shouts” and setting small fires to cook camp foods. The days with Anya were bizarre walks into the most “mystical” and “superstitious” aspects of their culture.

  “What kind of person would you describe as world-weary, Robin?” Anya had asked one day. They were sitting, cross legged, in a pond after hiking up a scenic trail on Kraag’s back. A gentle stream waterfall fed the pond and gave their meeting an almost cliche ambience of mysticism.

  “I don’t know,” Robin said without thinking.

  “You did not even spend time wondering,” Anya said, her eyes judging. They twinkled with the same silver light as her tulle shawl.

  Robin looked up and to the right while he spent some time dreaming someone up. “I guess it is someone who feels like nothing's going right?”

  “And what makes them different from someone downtrodden?”

  “I guess someone world-weary is old,” Robin said, tossing his hands up in surrender.

  “Very good, Robin,” Anya said with a grin. “Sadness in reaction is acute, while cynicism is cultivated. Think of how water moves. The waterfall behind us? It is that acute moment of passion in the life of this stream.”

  “That makes sense,” Robin said.

  “Many of our nomadic partners count water as singular in its representation. Like stone. But that is not so! We are more prone to reaction than they may be. Do you understand?”

  “That’s why we’ve spent time in all those places. In the rain, by the pool, at the well. You were showing me all of the emotional states of water?”

  “You’re getting much better at this.” Anya shifted on the stone she sat on and held out her hands. “So I think it is time we did what we needed to!”

  Robin looked at her hands quizzically, and when he did not react, Anya continued.

  “The key is not for you to learn our skills,” she said with a nod. “You never will.”

  “Thanks,” Robin growled.

  “No!” Anya chuckled. “I mean no offense by that. You have your propensity for wind, and I have mine for water. I will never be able to run like you, and you will never swim like me. That is okay. Your job is not to learn from us anything but how we achieve our skills. You need to be able to, with a glance, with a single taste, name the emotion we are feeling. As I showed over our training sessions there is more than one flavor to sadness. And more than one shade. And more than one timbre. You need to be able to recognize them all.”

  Anya kept her hands outstretched, and Robin’s eyes widened when he realized why. “You want to empathize? Completely?”

  “If I am honest with you, you will taste every flavor, see every shade, and hear every timbre.”

  “But,” Robin stammered. Empathizing freely with another person was one of the deepest taboos. If they carried out the process, there would be no secrets between them. Robin was okay with that, personally, but it was so hard to trust that Anya was okay.

  “Robin,” she said, reaching forward and taking his hand. She gave him a warm and welcoming smile. Robin was struck by just how sincere, but platonic it was. He had never seen a look like this before. “It’s fine. I am inviting you in.”

  With a deep breath, Robin took her hands and opened the walls around his heart. And Robin could feel Anya remove the ones around hers as well. Suddenly, he was awash in her emotions. It was wholly overwhelming, a little frightening, and more strange than he had ever imagined.

  Robin had empathized with wind in the past. And once with fire. But the thing about those elements is that everything had a cornerstone. Wind had some sort of ambition, excitement, and eagerness at all times. And fire was just passion. But here in this woman was everything. The sideswipes on checking in with human emotions were always a way to probe emotions being felt in the moment. This was giving him a whole buffet of every formative feeling Anya had ever experienced.

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  Her childish, innocent happiness had a certain tint to it. One that Robin recognized. It was a sort of warm satisfaction that came from being surrounded by loved ones. Could this be when Anya was living on the ship she had mentioned? She had grown up at sea, and called her crew her family.

  There was one aspect to this warmth and excitement that stood out, and Robin picked a bit at it. It was a family member closer than anyone else.The memory of this person was engorged with adoration, but there was no necessary love that Robin knew was part of blood relations.

  The girl or the woman Anya cared so deeply for was a sister, but not by blood. And tied closely with the emotional identity was a sense of loss. But loss without despair. Anya was hopeful she would see her again.

  Someone else umbrellaed this loss, too. Anya had a passionate sense of duty. One that was greater than her other emotions. It was her drive and her inspiration. Anya saw herself small, part of a larger whole. She sacrificed her personal happiness for this duty, and did it wholeheartedly and excitedly.

  It was clear to Robin because this umbrella was ribbed by pride. Anya may not presently have the happiness and joy like what she felt in her memories, but she had a new one. One that held together by doing what she was born to do.

  And that was where Robin felt things that were extremely familiar.

  His own emotions. Anya was thinking about him. How his training was the most important thing in her heart. Robin smiled.

  As Anya withdrew her hands, he was gently brought back to the waking world, the sound of the waterfall now a welcome soundtrack instead of a trope. “Did you see?” Anya asked, wiping away a tear.

  “So much, Anya,” Robin said with a grin.

  “You are going to be great, Robin,” she said softly, the tears still working their way out.

  “Thank you so much,” Robin said, leaning toward her and hugging her tightly.

  “You really are a natural, it seems. You figured it all out so well. I’m going to call it a day now. Do you mind? We haven’t been training that long, but…”

  “No, I understand,” Robin said. “I could use a break, too. Y’all have been working me like a mule.”

  Anya let out a laugh and rose from the pond, helping Robin to his feet. “I understand Louise is hard on you. But understand it is because the emotions of stone are so distant from what you’re used to.”

  And that was only part of the truth. Louise was also objectively a horrible teacher. Some days she would just be sitting on a rocky outcropping or on the solid ground beneath Kraag, just meditating. She would not even acknowledge Robin. She would just sit there.

  And Robin would try. He truly would. He understood that he was no longer just “some guy” doing a job for his family, but someone who could potentially change the world. So he figured the least he could do was sit and meditate for a while. But he would often grow too hungry or too bored and wander off without ever being spoken to. Louise never mentioned it either. Robin had to guess she knew? But he could not be sure.

  The day after empathizing with Anya was another day with Louise. He had to ask ten people before someone could tell him where she was. With a wind-assisted leap, Robin reached the lower reaches of Kraag’s shell to see Louise sitting, eyes closed, with her back to a sheer cliff.

  “Again?” he wondered out loud. “Seriously?”

  The old woman did not respond.

  Robin fell to the ground with a groan and looked out at The March. The distant flecks of buildings on the horizon denoted Crossroads. It was so far away. He wondered what they were thinking about Kraag having stopped near their city.

  And why did Kraag stop, after all? For him? He was here now. Did he not need to continue walking? Why does he walk? Where is he going?

  Suddenly, Robin realized just how little he knew of Kraag. And in that, he had an idea. With a deep breath, Robin put his hands flat against the ground and began to empathize, just as he had the day before.

  At first, there was just the emotion of the dirt on Kraag’s shell, but just a bit deeper, and suddenly Kraag could be the massive emotions of the elder god. And to his surprise, Kraag received him.

  The emotions struck too heavy at first, and Kraag seemed to notice that it sent Robin reeling, as they immediately pulled back.

  Robin was inundated with Kraag’s concern.

  The Windwalker urged Kraag that he was fine.

  Kraag felt relieved. Then there was curiosity. Specifically about the state of Robin’s training and study.

  Robin felt it was going well enough, but he was not sure if he would be up to Kraag’s expectations.

  Kraag was amused at Robin’s modesty. He was optimistic and proud of Robin’s skills.

  Robin wondered to Kraag why he needed a speaker.

  Kraag’s response was worry and anxiety. There was something temporally and spatially far away. Something bloodthirsty and hateful. And very dangerous.

  How do you know what this is? Robin wondered.

  Kraag expressed affection. A kind of comradery you would feel for someone of similar class and occupation.

  Robin felt curious. A god? Which one?

  And that was when everything went wrong. Kraag’s emotions began to express this god’s identity, and at first, Robin felt great. It was the glee of achieving goals, getting what one wished for, and feeling content in obtaining what you longed for. But that was not all there was to this god’s identity. In addition to dreams, the god was made of nightmares.

  And suddenly, Robin was drowning in fear, terror, and stress. Horrid dreams of falling and waking just before striking the ground. Running but never going fast enough. Terrors of his body being paralyzed while monsters approached.

  The nightmares compounded and exacerbated one another. Robin would feel himself falling alongside a cliff while a hulking beast sprinted alongside him, waiting to pounce, but Robin’s body was immobile. And he was slowing. The beast grew closer and closer, roaring with a sound that filled Robin’s brain.

  He tried to pull back from the empathy, but it was impossible. His emotions had all been drowned by the fear. It was filling him, head to toe, and was suffocating him. And at that moment, Robin realized he was truly suffocating. The fear was killing him.

  He could feel Kraag worrying outside of his own palace of dread, but it was not helping. In fact, it was worsening the situation, as having Kraag so worried kept Robin from calming himself. After all, if a god is worried about something, surely a mortal should be, too.

  Robin tried gasping for air as his muscles cramped with strain.

  There was an explosion of light and he fell to the ground. Louise was standing over him, her staff had a spattering of crimson flecks. Robin coughed, slinging flecks of blood onto the ground.

  “You idiot!” Louise shrieked. “You nearly died!”

  Robin tried to speak, but he was breathless. He could not ever raise his hand to wipe the blood from his lips. His body felt like it was asleep.

  “You need to understand the emotions of stones if you ever try something like that again. That is the point of all of this.”

  Robin just looked up at her.

  “No more training with Yanni. Your horseplay is asinine and unnecessary. Five days with me from now on. You need to learn to be steadfast against the overwhelming. Stupid.”

  Robin groaned. All he could feel was an intense apology coming from all around.