Generations ago, humanity crossed a threshold no one saw coming: most people were simply born gifted. Telepathy ended the lying. Levitation rebuilt the skyline. For three generations, there wasn't a single war. For a while, the world was better for it.But power has a way of forgetting what it cost.As the gifted came to outnumber the ordinary, a quiet, unspoken order took hold - not cruelty exactly, just a thousand small choices that added up to one: those without the gift became "Mouths," sorted into lesser schools, lesser lives. And the mages paid a price of their own. Bred for generations to shield their minds from one another, they lost something no one had thought to miss - the ability to feel anything all the way through.She is a mage, born into privilege, sent to study the Mouths the way you'd study any curiosity. He is a baker who paints in his spare time, for no reason he can fully explain. What begins as fieldwork becomes something neither of them planned: she starts to feel - not other people's emotions, read secondhand, but her own, for the first time in her life. And every real feeling she claims costs her a little more of the power she was born with. Adi Riel writes psychologically layered fiction that explores control, identity, and the fragile structures we build to feel secure. His work often blends minimalist prose with philosophical tension, examining modern emotional detachment and the shifting boundaries of social norms.
