He can sense large amounts of negative emotions over a large

“They…” He began before faltering slightly and shaking his head. “They’re…afraid of us. They hate us.”

The words didn’t make any sense to me. They? Who were ‘they?’ There was no one here and even if there were, who could drive my brother into a state like this? But if he hadn’t realized that his words would be unclear, hadn’t been able to formulate a real reply, then trying to get answers out of him would be slow.

So I switched gears and began to change roles. I looked him over with the eyes of the Healer and the Protector before turning my gaze outwards. The Seer, the Farsighted, the Theocrat, and more all shifted to the forefront, taking the stage for only a moment before moving on. I scaled our surroundings, this time piercing the physical and metaphysical distance that separated this place from the outside world, looking for anyone who might be a threat.

It was only as I adopted the role of the General, however, that I truly saw them. Patterns lit up across the globe far below, written in shades of hostile colors. These places, a threat to what I wanted to protect. Here, weaknesses, ways to cripple them, draw them out, and strike them down. Without even thinking about it, I felt my power assign them priorities, threat levels, and more, and I felt a plan taking shape to cripple them all and remove the threat.

Except the threat was ‘everyone and everything.’ All of Mankind.

“The people?” I asked after a moment, still feeling a disconnect. “Brother, I don’t understand. How are they hurting you?”

“I can feel them,” He whispered. “All of them.”

I analyzed that reply for a moment and then shifted to the Researcher to do so better. My natural awareness of people remained no matter what my role, but it sharpened in some ways and dulled in others. As I looked at Malkuth now, I could feel…something, a connection that flowed this way and that, shifting endlessly, and the texture of it was—

Ah.

“You can feel their emotions,” I said at last, pieces finally coming together. “That what you’ve been noticing in our experiments. But it was never like this before…”

“Something finally clicked,” He said. “And I finally understood what I was feeling. Everything became clearer then and I realized why it was so familiar. They think we’re monsters.”

I took a breath and then shrugged a shoulder.

“Hardly a surprise,” I answered evenly.

“They think we’re monsters, Keter,” He repeated, voice growing as he rose from his seat. That anger seemed to allow him to push through the feelings that had been distracting him and I could see him clinging to it. “They hate us—and they hate each other, hate themselves, hate this world!”

“Hopefully not all at the same time,” I replied, tilting my head. “But Malkuth, think of what we are to them—immortal and unspeakably powerful, guided by what are, to them, unknowable whims. At times we appear and get involve, forcing order on the chaos before things get too bad, but then we leave and fade away. They know we’re real, but they don’t know us, so why wouldn’t they be afraid? They don’t know our motivations and intentions, so what must our actions seem like to them? We’re all but gods to them, Brother, and that must be terrifying.”

“After everything we’ve done,” He continued, as if he hadn’t heard me. “After all the times we’ve helped them and protected them, after the things we’ve saved them from, they hate us. We were the ones who saved them from fates they can’t even imagine in this happy, healthy world. When the Angels ruled—“

“The Angels died hundreds of years ago,” I interrupted. “No one alive remembers them except us.”

The reminder silenced him for a moment, probably because what everyone else had forgotten had long been a sore point for him. I used that opportunity to continue.

“People don’t judge the quality of their lives based on some grand external measure,” I said. “They judge it based on what they have and don’t have. They’re lives may be wonderful compared to what they were, but they aren’t perfect. They fight with each other, still, and when they wake up and look to the sky, they think of us—beings who could tear down their world at any time, for any reason, without them being able to do a thing to stop it. If we were there for them to see, people they could speak to and understand, that might be one thing, but we didn’t. We walked away after getting tired, doing only what we feel obligated to, and otherwise left them be. We didn’t care to do more than what we had to so we didn’t.”

“Are you saying we’re to blame?” Malkuth asked, sounding tense.

I shook my head.

“We don’t owe them anything,” I said. “The only people we ever owed anything died to create us and we laid them to peace when we killed the ones responsible. What we’ve done since, how we’ve taken care of them, has been because of what we felt was right or remembered—but we don’t have to do anything. I’m merely saying that if we do little, it should be expected for some people to see us that way. Why do you care? They have their reasons to hate us, so let them hate—it doesn’t change what we’ve done or who we are or anything. It doesn’t mean everyone things that, either. While some people might loathe us constantly, others likely just go one with their lives; you would know that better than anyone, I think. So Malkuth…tell me. What’s this really about? Tell me what’s wrong and I’ll try to fix it.”

He was silent again for a long moment before answering.

“It hurts,” He said, making me frown.

I considered what he’d said, shifting roles a few times to fill in the blanks and put the pieces together in context. Empathy was a known but largely undesirable ability, owing simply to the fact that…well, if you could know what everyone around you was thinking at all times, would you really want to? Worse, because of the simplicity of the ability at its most basic level—reacting to fluctuations and changes in surrounding Auras, effectively reading the body language of the soul—most recorded Empaths had a fairly extensive range, often covering kilometers at the low end. More than large enough to encompass good-sized chunks of cities and countless people as a result; generally, that alone was enough to drive most such people away from civilization. I figured that alone would be enough to harm Malkuth on the scale I’d detected.

But what if there was more to it than that? This wasn’t conventional Empathy—it was like calling to like. The manifestations of the Qliphoth that Malkuth and I had created…the could sense manifestations of themselves in others and they were drawn to them. It wasn’t particularly relavent since they were all tied to each other through Malkuth anyway, but I was willing to bet they could sense each other fairly well, too.

And it occurred to me that perhaps being an empath who could effectively only sense negative things might have unfortunate side-effects on a person. If it had been me…well, I probably would have any more difficult than I did with normal Empathy; I was above such things, generally speaking, just as Keter was the crown above the head. But Malkuth and I were very different in a lot of ways, however similar we were in others.

Even so, I hadn’t expected it to affect Malkuth this way. His memories of his past lives gave him an enormous amount of experience at resisting such things, both from what he’d gone through in those lives and this one. While he didn’t have the blatant immunity to mental assaults I enjoyed, he was about as resistant as he could otherwise be, a mental fortress of countless lives.

But perhaps that was the problem here. The same thing that had given him peace had left him vulnerable, opening holes and forging a connection that let things in.

That…could be problematic.