Gifts (supernatural abilities)

Gifts (supernatural abilities) are powers associated with the gods but experienced through people who host or embody them. They shape private choices as well as public conflict: a Gift can save a life at the cost of the healer’s own, become a means of coercion, or form part of a proposed attempt to reverse history.

Identity and Forms

The novel presents Gifts as varied abilities rather than a single uniform force. Jesse hosts Echo’s Gift and, after extensive practice, can shift into any animal. His example links supernatural capacity to training: the Gift enables transformation, but practice develops his command of it.

The narrative also distinguishes people who host divine powers from those who have the gods within them. Phillip explains that Dorian and Draco belong to the latter category, unlike people who merely host their powers. This difference matters beyond terminology: it shapes who might be able to participate in an attempt to turn back time.

Healing and Its Cost

Esme’s Gift allows her to heal, but the power is not consequence-free. A faint gold line running over her vein marks her lifeline. When her twin Eli becomes gravely ill with leukemia, she knows she could heal him, yet he refuses her intervention; he fears that accepting it could take away the future she might otherwise live. Their conflict establishes that possessing the power to save someone does not settle whether using it is right.

Esme later uses her Gift on Charles and Leon when both are near death, and heals Charles’s spine so that he can use his legs again. She keeps these interventions secret from Hero Society and seeks no recognition, accepting that helping them may have cost her several years of life. The healing is therefore both practical and relational: it saves people who had previously helped her, creating a debt she repays without making the act public.

That cost becomes most stark when Esme heals Dorian after he is near death. She removes the metal bar from his chest and channels her power into him; as the gold color drains from the line at her vein, she understands that saving him will use what remains of her life. Her Gift makes rescue possible, but it does not erase mortality. Instead, it transfers the consequence of survival onto the person who heals.

Hosting, Blood, and Control

Gifts also enter the story through blood. To remain immortal, Dorian infuses his own blood with blood from a gifted person, a process that takes several hours and leaves him bedridden during the procedure. The blood is donated by people who do not consider their powers when they give it; because the hospital has accumulated a supply, Dorian no longer needs to take donations from people on the streets. The contrast makes the process both systematic and ethically troubling: the donors’ blood sustains his immortality, although they may not understand the significance of their Gifts to him.

A Gift can also be directed against another person. Monica’s power attempts to influence Dorian’s mind, but he says he is immune. The encounter shows that supernatural abilities do not guarantee control over every other gifted person; their effects can meet limits in their intended target.

Gifts and the Larger Conflict

The powers are bound up with the struggle between gifted people and the human society around them. Dorian urges his opponents to abandon Hero Society, arguing that humans have persecuted and abandoned them. His appeal presents Gifts as a basis for freedom and solidarity, but also as a political boundary he uses to recruit others. The conflict is not only over what powers can do, but over who may use them and what obligations gifted people owe to one another and to society.

The distinction between hosting a power and having the gods within oneself finally acquires a temporal consequence. Phillip believes that Asher’s magic, together with Dorian and Draco’s blood, could turn back time to before the war and its defining losses. The proposal treats Gifts not simply as tools for action in the present, but as part of a possible intervention in history itself. Across healing, blood infusion, mental influence, and the prospect of time reversal, the novel makes power inseparable from cost, consent, and responsibility.