It feels like someone else's room.

  It's done in earthy, soothing shades—pale greens and browns. Maybe to match the forest beyond.

  But I am not a soothing person, and just looking at it makes me feel vaguely unmoored.

  "You can change whatever you want here too," Zan says. "It's usually one of the first things we encourage sages to do, to start making low-stakes choices for themselves."

  Is it low-stakes, though? To choose what you will surround yourself with every day?

  As if he can guess my thoughts, Zan says, "The room has been remade over and over again. No reason you can't do it however many times it takes for you to like it."

  Aaand that sounds exhausting.

  Zan crosses to the bed and lifts up a corner that appears to have holes in it and sighs. "Moths got this one, it looks like. I don't know why people always leave the blankets out in this room between visitors."

  Visitors. Because it doesn't really belong to us.

  "I do," I say softly.

  Zan looks at me sharply, but I don't elaborate.

  It's the knowledge that there's a starting place.

  That there have been people here before me, and there will be people after.

  It's both a responsibility and an encouragement; a rock that is both weight and foundation.

  "How many sages have lived here?" I ask Zan quietly.

  He shrugs.

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  I narrow my eyes.

  "I don't know off the top of my head," he says, and for the first time I'm not sure I believe him. "It has... varied, over the years. What did you know about the political situation, in your time? Broadly speaking—I'm aware of how closely controlled sages were at that time."

  Zan leads me out of the room, allowing us to return to the less public, less personal, less fraught common space and sit down on the couch.

  A puff of dust emerges, and he makes a face before standing up to go look for something.

  I don't know how to help, so I answer the question.

  "Sages used to move among people directly, but after a previous incarnation of Wrath killed an emperor, there was enough popular backlash to force sages under the management of the temple," I summarize. "At first the emperors liked this setup because the priests could control us, and the priests obviously liked it because it gave them more power.

  "By my time, relationships between secular and religious powers were much more strained, because the priesthood trained sages to be their own personal weapons of mass destruction and maintained a separate base of military strength that answered to the temple first. They were increasingly flexing that power in an attempt to seize greater control when I... created the Quiet."

  Zan returns carrying a wooden stick that looks like it has a flat wooden net on the end.

  "What in the world is that?"

  "Blanket beater," Zan says. "Come on, I'll show you how to use it. That's a very succinct summary of where things stood that I'm very confident the priesthood didn't teach you."

  I get up and follow his lead, stripping the cushions off the couch and carrying them outside into the sun.

  "Wrath isn't just anger," I explain. "Clarity is an important facet that distinguishes it from just mindless rage. Which meant that in order to be able to wield Wrath effectively, I had to have a very good education. The danger of an education, of course, is that it meant I could think for myself."

  Which is why I got quieter and quieter as the years passed. I could see very clearly what the priests wanted from me, and how any deviation would be handled, and the hypocrisy.

  It's also why I hid how much I was capable of from them until I needed it.

  "I did also just spend five hundred years meditating," I add wryly. "Now that I can move, I feel like my mind is primed to synthesize rapidly."

  "Hmm." Zan arranges the cushions in a line. "Watch this."

  He whacks them.

  Dust flies into the air.

  "I think the theory here is within my ability to understand even without centuries of meditation," I tell him dryly.

  His eyes crinkle with humor.

  Damn, didn't quite get the laugh out of him.

  Zan hands me the blanket beater. "Your turn. I think you're going to have some aggression to work out when I update you."