The Echoes
The name Estaria gives to a sense he has carried since childhood — an awareness of other people that no one around him shares.
From boyhood, Estaria has felt the people around him in a way he has never been able to explain or escape: their nearness, their feeling, the shape of them pressing faintly against his own awareness. With no one to name it for him, he came to call it the echoes — a private word for a private strangeness.
In Appledale it made him odd, and a little apart. It was not a gift anyone celebrated, nor a thing that could be put to use; it simply was, the way some people are left-handed or sleepless. Only later does it begin to seem less like an affliction and more like a thread — one that runs deeper into the world than a baker’s son from a small town could ever have guessed.
What the echoes truly are, and what they connect him to, is a question the world is in no hurry to answer.