The pendulum age A View from the Future

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.