Those family dinners were extremely hard on me. The shaping has always been harder for me to handle than the mimicry, though neither has ever been easy, and those dinners were a thicket of traps and thorns I could not navigate on my own. I drowned in the jealousies, the tensions, the bright spots of laughter. I felt too much at those dinners: those dinners were the meeting place of too many people living full, complex lives, and they were the site of grief and mourning. There is a reason why known shapers notoriously avoid funerals. The reason is that a place like that, with all the weight and the woven emotions, is a place where the gift threatens to swallow its host whole. I felt the emotions of Dirva’s family so much, so deeply, that at times a sigh of disappointment caused me literal physical pain. But I kept going because, except in very rare circumstances, I only saw Dirva during those dinners. I needed to see him. I needed to see he had not fallen apart.

I had thought, before I went to the first one and saw his entire family assembled with all their tangled histories and threaded presents in that tiny, cramped apartment deep in the South Quarter, that I knew what I was getting into. I remember some years ago a mundane friend of mine told me that those of us with magical gifts are arrogant. We know slightly more than the mundane, she said, so we think we know everything about everyone. And she’s right. I knew Athenorkos. I knew by then that Athenorkos and Semadran, as languages, are peculiar mirror images: Semadran is a language of fastidious precision; when you say something in Semadran, you’re trying to communicate the objective truth about a concept as specifically as possible. We are known for the complexity of our sentence structure and the breadth of our vocabularies. But sometimes truths are simple and can be best expressed simply. For a Semadran, the family is one such simple thing: mother, father, sister, brother, son, daughter. That’s all. There’s no word for cousin, for example, just a qualification that whoever it is you’re speaking about is your mother’s brother’s son. Instead of grandfathers, we have our mother’s father. We have small families. Factory assignments cause us to settle in areas far away from our natal homes, so you don’t find many dense familial networks among my people. We have no need for nuance in such relationships because we keep them as simple as possible. Divorce and remarriage is unheard of. Children are not born out of wedlock. Your father is always your mother’s husband; it’s as simple as that. That is the world I was born to.