The change Kova had sensed came not as catastrophe but as evolution, five years of transformation that reshaped him from bridge-builder into something the world had no name for. At seventeen, the Moon Mother stopped visiting his dreams and simply never left, her presence settling into his bones like marrow made of starlight. By eighteen, he could heal fifty people without pausing for breath. At nineteen, his touch could rewrite genetic code, cure conditions that existed only in theory. By twenty, even other Otherkind looked at him with the particular wariness reserved for forces of nature. Now, at twenty-one, Kova Blackwood had become something between deity and man, avatar and anchor, powerful enough to reshape reality with a thought yet still waking each morning with the taste of dreams
