A Little More

Cain changed. Of course, it didn’t happen all at once.

It happened slowly, so slowly that most of the tribe didn’t notice until it had been going on for a long time.

He stopped making snide remarks at dinner. The sulking also disappeared. In fact, he didn’t talk much at all.

When the spiders finally crawled back to the silk cave, he resumed his runs and returned home with sack after sack of white silk. Every time he handed one to Iris, he mumbled something that sounded suspiciously like sorry it took so long.

Iris was so shocked the first time that she nearly dropped the sack.

He started helping in the forge without being asked. He started carrying the younger children’s training weapons back to the racks.

Once, Lapis found a bowl of honeyed dates sitting outside their door with no note, and when she asked around, one of the little ones said they’d seen Cain leave it there and run.

“Is he… sick?” she asked Ashen that night, frowning at the bowl.

“He’s growing up,” Ashen said, taking a date.

Lapis narrowed her eyes at him suspiciously. She didn’t know the details of what had happened in that cave. But she knew her brother, and she knew him well enough to see the shadow that passed over his face.

The whole tribe started whispering that the boy had finally grown out of it. Of course, the crybaby of the tribe, Anastasia, cried about it twice.

And Cain never once met Ashen’s eyes for more than a moment.

But whenever Ashen was struggling, whenever he came back from an expedition looking more worn than usual, or snapped at someone and then went pale with horror at himself, Cain was always somewhere nearby just watching quietly, like a guard dog who had decided, of his own accord, which house he would protect.

◉◉◉

It came back three days after the wedding.

Ashen was sitting at the dinner table when he glanced across at Lapis, laughing at something Misty had said.

He felt it hotly rise in his chest again, so thick and suffocating that his hand clenched hard enough to crack the cup he was holding.

‘I waited for one week… enough.’

Ashen decided to tell his father about this sudden malady he caught.

Adam listened without interrupting. When Ashen finished, the patriarch was quiet for a long moment.

Then he stood and went to gather the women.

The tribe had a handful of sisters whose Path Skills dealt with the mind. Some soothed, some cleansed, some could reach into a troubled heart and smooth its wrinkles flat.

They sat Ashen down in a quiet room, laid their hands on his head and shoulders, and poured their skills into him one after another.

Thankfully, it worked.

…For a while.

The heat faded and pressure lifted. For the first time in a week, Ashen slept a full night without waking up drenched in sweat.

Then it came back.

The second time, the sisters’ skills worked less well. As if whatever was tampering with him had learned to adapt and grown thicker skin. The relief lasted days instead of weeks.

The third time, their skills did nothing at all.

◉◉◉

High above the settlement, in a place that existed alongside the world and slightly askew from it, an Outer God sat cross-legged in the empty air and pouted.

“Stubborn,” Zelrathus muttered. “So stubborn…”

He tapped his crown with one long nail.

Tap… tap… tap…

He had taken his time with Cain.

Eighteen years of patient, gentle nudging. A breath of comparison here, a whisper of resentment there, so slow and so subtle that not even the boy himself had noticed the hand on his shoulder.

Sadly, he didn’t have that kind of patience anymore.

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He simply could not.

Every time he closed his eyes, he could still smell it. That scent from the cave. That pure, bottomless, exquisite despair that had leaked out of the brother’s mind for one single moment and knocked even him, the Outer God of Euphoric Misery, off his feet.

He wanted it.

He wanted to taste it again. He wanted to taste it properly. To sit down at the table and eat it slowly, savoring every bite, the way it deserved to be eaten.

He could practically feel his mouth watering.

“So let’s go faster, hm?” he murmured.

There was no need to plant seeds in this one. The brother already had all the emotions in the world inside him, buried deep, carefully kept in check. All Zelrathus had to do was reach in and turn them up.

Lust, first. In such a pure, loving tribe, what could be more delicious than lust in the wrong places?

But the boy wouldn’t break.

He had turned up the heat on that sister of his, and the boy had held himself back. He had turned it up further, until any normal man would have been crawling on the floor, and the boy had held himself back. The healers had soothed him. Zelrathus had simply waited for them to finish and pushed harder, until their skills slid off like water off oiled glass.

And still, the boy held.

“How… how are you still holding?” Zelrathus whispered, his long fingers digging into his own cheeks. Tears ran down his silver face. “It hurts, doesn’t it? It hurts so much… I can taste it… a little… just a little… it’s not enough…!”

His grin stretched wider.

“Then let’s add more flavors.”

◉◉◉

The lust didn’t stay pointed at Lapis. Soon, it began to wander.

Ashen would be sitting in the weaving hall, waiting for Iris to finish mending his undershirt, and his eyes would catch on the bare wrist of a sister working at the loom, stubbornly staying there.

His thoughts would wander somewhere he would have cut out his own tongue before saying aloud. When he finally tore his gaze away, he found the sister staring back at him, pale, her hands frozen on the shuttle.

He apologized, and she said it was nothing. But she never sat in the same room with him again.

It happened with other sisters. With his cousins’ wives. With his uncles’ wives. And the worst part was that he couldn’t hide it. Their tribe was full of people with sharp instincts, and every single time his gaze slipped, someone noticed.

Then came the day in the training grounds.

Rune had come to bring Bram his lunch, the same way she did every day. She leaned down to set the basket on the bench, laughing at something her husband had said, and Ashen’s heavy gaze followed the line of her back down to her waist.

Bram saw it.

His big, loud, cheerful brother, the one who had fought beside him for four years, who had cried at his wedding, who had stood guard over Lapis’s door when she was sick, saw it.

The punch came out of nowhere.

THUD—!

It caught Ashen square on the jaw and knocked him to the dirt.

“What the fuck was that, Ashen?!” Bram roared, standing over him with his fists shaking. “What the fuck was that?!”

Ashen didn’t fight back.

He sat on the ground with blood in his mouth, staring up at his brother, and couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

Rune pulled Bram away. The training grounds went silent. Every warrior there looked at Ashen with the same expression, a mixture of confusion and anger and something worse…

Disappointment.

Bram didn’t speak to him for two months after that.

It happened again, with a cousin, then with an uncle. Once, it took four warriors to pull a furious husband off him in the middle of the forge while Ashen stood there with his arms at his sides, letting the man hit him.

The atmosphere in the tribe grew colder.

It wasn’t exactly hostility. Most of them knew by now that something was wrong with him. Adam had made sure of that.

But knowing didn’t stop the women from shifting a little closer to their husbands whenever he walked past. It didn’t stop the men from watching him from the corners of their eyes.

It was Lapis who came up with a solution.

If his eyes were going to wander, she decided, they would wander to her.

So she made herself impossible to ignore. She draped herself across his lap at meals. She leaned against his side whenever another woman entered the room, put her hands on his face, and pulled his gaze down to hers.

It helped a little. At least when his eyes were full of his own wife, they weren’t anywhere they shouldn’t be.

But it meant fighting the same war all over again every time she touched him.

◉◉◉

It was a night like any other. He had been playing with his mother, the way he did every few weeks.

Anastasia had gotten frighteningly good at chess over the years. She sat across from him with her chin propped on one hand, studying the board with a little frown, her black hair falling loose over her shoulder.

She was taking a little too long to make her move, so Ashen looked up from the board.

It was a mistake.

That look; it started purely curious, but for one moment, it changed in a way no son would use to look at his mother.

It lasted less than a heartbeat. But in that heartbeat, something crawled up out of the deepest, most poisonous corner of his mind, and for the first time since this all began, Ashen felt true horror.

Before it could take hold, a pair of arms wrapped around his head and yanked it sideways.

Lapis, who had been leaning against his side, half asleep, had noticed. She pulled his face into her chest and held it there tightly, stroking his hair, as though she had simply been seized by a sudden urge to cuddle her husband.

“Mother,” she said brightly. “I’m sleepy. Can we finish the game tomorrow?”

She didn’t wait for an answer. She hauled Ashen to his feet by the collar, said goodnight, and dragged him out of the room so fast that the chess pieces rattled on the board.

They didn’t see Anastasia’s face as they left.

She had noticed.

Of course she had. She had known her son since he was a baby in her arms; there was nothing about him she ever missed.

But what filled her eyes as she watched the door close wasn’t disgust.

It was worry.

◉

Adam came to him that same night.

His father found him sitting alone in the forge, with no fire lit, staring at the cold anvil. The patriarch sat down beside him on the bench and didn’t say anything for a long time.

“Son,” he finally said quietly. “I don’t know how hard this is for you right now. I can’t know. But I do know how disciplined you are. How strong you are.” He paused. “If you’re struggling this badly, it must be hell.”

Ashen didn’t answer.

“But, Ashen…” Adam put a heavy hand on his shoulder. “I have faith in you.”

“...”

“You must control it. Control yourself.” Adam’s voice was steady. “Do you remember what I told you, that day by the graves?”

“...Yes.”

Ashen’s voice came out hollow.

“Emotional control doesn’t mean suppressing your emotions. It means feeling everything. Honoring it. And still choosing to live by your own values.” He stared at the anvil. “No matter what I feel, or how I feel it… I control what I do. And I act on what I believe.”

“Yes. That’s exactly it.” Adam squeezed his shoulder. “So stay strong, son. I believe in you.”