The last Lore Drop was about the Seven. Who they are, what their domains are, why they withdrew and left the world to figure out what to do without them. This one is more specific. It’s not about what they left in the world. It’s about what they left in people, that Emarians call the Talents, and those that carry them, the Talented.
In the ancient Persian world that inspired the Emari Chronicles, there are concepts of divine grace resting in certain people, an inner quality, an alignment with the divine order that can be cultivated and lost and misused. It doesn’t just happen to you at random. I found that endlessly interesting, and I built something different from it.
Talents in Emari are echoes. When the gods departed, some of what they were stayed behind in the people they had touched, not chosen, not earned, not granted. Born into people who would carry them whether they wanted to or not. There are people in Emari who never knew they were Talented until the Wasting Sickness killed them.
The six domains each trace back to one of the Seven, covering Earth and Metals, Water, Fire, Air and Wind, Plants, and Soul. Soul is rare enough that most people in Emari have never encountered it in another person.
“Your Talent isn’t a separate thing from you, saqalu. It is as much a part of you as your skin, your breath, or your soul.”
That’s Jeta, in The Veil of Takhsha, explaining to Yasher what he actually carries. She’s been living with hers for nearly five centuries. She knows exactly how much it costs.
Every Talent runs on a finite well, and the cost of pushing past it scales fast. Exhaust it and you’re depleted for hours, sometimes days. Injure it and the damage can be permanent. Go far enough and you die from it. Recovery after heavy depletion takes hours to days, and what’s left in the gap is a specific kind of vulnerability. Bare, stripped down to whatever you are without the thing that’s been part of you since before you had language for it.
Rostam trained Farah to fight without her Talent for exactly this reason. A soldier who can only fight one way has one way to lose.
How a Talent activates is personal. Farah hums, just below audible, and her metal sense opens. Yasher’s Luck arrives as a pendulum swing in the chest, reads with weight and texture. The same domain can feel entirely different in two people who share it.
“The metal had always known the difference even when she had not.”
Farah’s Talent is fully on the page across both books. She senses all metal near her constantly, a low hum she stops noticing after a while, the way you stop noticing your own heartbeat. She reads its fatigue, its heat history, whether it’s about to be used. She moves it, reshapes it, locks mechanisms, pulls blades from hands. In The Embers of Tamidh she reads blast sites forensically, straightening the bent grain of old iron piece by piece. Her Talent responds to who she actually is, not the roles she was made to perform.
The other Talented people you meet across both books have very different domains. Arash carries wind and concussive force, Youseff shapes stone, Leyla heals, and there’s a child in the Citadel who pulls light into threads. And then there’s Darius, the Hand before Farah, whose domain is binding. He can weave strength into weakness, bring things together that weren’t meant to hold. Six domains, and the range of what each one looks like in a specific person is wide enough that two people with the same domain might not immediately recognize what the other one carries.
“His Luck is his own, not a borrowed blessing.”
That’s Rashnu, in The Hand of Mashyana, on what Yasher actually carries. Jeta has her own theory, that his Luck touches the Soul domain, the rarest of the six. But Yasher is not Emari, and his Luck doesn’t behave like a standard Talent echo. It predates his arrival and doesn’t follow the same rules as the other domains.
Under Behnaz, the Talented, especially the children, were invited or at times, coerced into becoming wards of the court as her Beloveds. The institution she named the Beloveds started as an idealistic proposal early on in her and Enayat’s reign. An honor guard of healers, architects, inventors, people whose Talents could serve the kingdom. It became something else over time. Bands existed to suppress a Talent, control devices that made what someone carried in their own body not necessarily theirs to use.
Enayat is dismantling what Behnaz built. It’s slow work.
There’s one more thing about Talents I’ll mention without explaining fully, because it matters for where the series goes. When the Darkness touches a Talent well, it turns volatile, producing unpredictable bursts and abilities that twist toward self-harm. In the worst cases, a Talent becomes a handhold something else can climb through a person. Mazdavir understands exactly what the Talented carry, and exactly what it costs them to carry it. The Wasting Sickness was a siphon that Behnaz took advantage of thanks to Mazdavir.
The gods left echoes in people who never asked for them. Some of those echoes have been turned into weapons, or leashes, or reasons to be afraid. Some of them are a woman who feels every blade in a room before anyone draws. Some of them are a man whose Luck has kept him alive through things that should have killed him.
All of them are part of the person who carries them. As much a part as skin, breath, or soul.