Maya's POV
The old woman says it plainly, which I appreciate.
She does not soften it or build toward it or give it the kind of careful framing people use when they want to control how a thing lands. She stands in the doorway in her two-hundred-year-old clothes and she looks at me and she says the severance ritual will require the removal of the supernatural sensitivity that made me accessible to the entity in the first place, and that removal will be permanent and complete.
I will become fully human.
She says it and the room receives it and everyone does the careful thing of not looking at me too directly, the specific consideration of a group of people who understand that the person being discussed needs a moment before they become the subject of everyone's response to the information
