the Feral Prodigy script: talent is a dark gift
talent is sort of a dark gift, that talent is its own expectation: it is there from the start and either lived up to or lost.
Context
Himself's inherited doctrine, delivered mid-jog: "talent is sort of a dark gift" that "is its own expectation," present from birth and thereafter only "lived up to or lost." This is the athletic body's founding curse in the anthology — the gift arrives as a debt, a standing demand the body must keep answering or forfeit. It reframes the whole regimen as service of an expectation you never chose and can only fail, the feral prodigy's talent a thing that owns him rather than the reverse. (The father-and-grandfather lineage is fathers-sons'; OURS is the talent-as-athletic-doctrine.)