A Most Repulsive Kindness

Two figures walked out of the ravine, side by side.

The taller one moved with a light, lazy stride, wiping at the blood crusted beneath his nose every few steps. The shorter one walked with his head hung so low that his chin nearly touched his chest, his arms wrapped tightly around himself, as though he were trying to fold up and disappear.

Neither of them noticed the third.

He walked right beside them, close enough to touch, close enough that his long, silver fingers brushed through the air a hair’s width from Cain’s shoulder.

He was tall, far too tall, his body almost human but stretched just past the point where it felt natural. His arms hung a little too long, and his joints bent with a languid, boneless grace. His skin glowed a faint silver, like moonlight on frost.

And on his head sat a crown.

It was made of broken glass. Hundreds of splintered shards fused together in a jagged ring, and on every shard was a face. Men, women, children. Every face twisted into the same grotesque grin, mouths stretched wide in a silent, endless laugh, and eyes running with tears that never fell.

Zelrathus, Outer God of Euphoric Misery.

One of the seven strongest slaves of Her, the Goddess of Fated Freedom.

He bent at the waist, folding his long body like a mantis, and peered into Cain’s face from barely a palm’s width away.

They didn’t see a thing.

The Outer God straightened, looked at the two brothers walking ahead of him, and shook his head with a bittersweet smile.

“Another failure, huh…”

He sighed theatrically, the way a scholar sighs over yet another experiment gone sour among countless others, and shrugged as though it didn’t matter in the slightest.

“And this one was so close, too… I could feel it… I could even smell the misery that was about to unfold…!”

The shrug turned into a shiver, then a tremble.

Then his long arms wrapped around his own shoulders, hugging himself tightly as his whole body began to shake, and his nonchalant expression twisted into something deeply, genuinely anguished.

“Why… why…?! You were so close, dear Cain… how could you falter just like that?! You were THIS close…!” He held up two elongated fingers, pinched together. “…this close to serving me the most exquisite dish in the last thousand years! How lamentable! How LaMeNtAbLe!”

Cain’s failure itself hardly mattered to Him. Failure, success, stalemate… to the Outer God, they were all merely steps in a process. As long as the process birthed misery, any outcome would do.

No. What tormented Him was something else entirely.

“...But… to dare…” His voice dropped. “Dare… DARE…!!!”

His shoulders slumped. He looked utterly defeated, and when he finished the thought, it came out as a broken mutter.

“…To dare accept something as repulsive as kindness…? To go as far as to feel grateful for it…? To silently swear to repay it…?”

He had felt it. Back in that cave, when the brother had dropped Cain at his feet and dusted off his hands, something disgusting had flickered deep in the boy’s chest. A tiny, trembling seed of gratitude, and wrapped around it, a vow.

“Ahh… what a failure indeed, my dear Cain…”

Then, abruptly, he lifted his head and stared at the brothers’ retreating backs.

“Wait… you’re not dear anymore…”

His eyes widened, and his voice rose until the faces on his crown seemed to shriek along with him.

“YOU BETRAYING, WRETCHED CREATURE!!! How DARE you betray ME?!”

Tears spilled down his silver cheeks. They were real tears; the sorrow behind them was real too. He truly felt the sting of this so-called betrayal.

And even as he felt it, he savored it.

He tasted his own sadness the way a connoisseur rolls a vintage wine over his tongue, slowly turning it, drawing every note out of it, until the sorrow melted into something sweet and dizzying. Euphoria. That was why, even as he wept, his lips couldn’t help but curl upward into an ecstatic grin.

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“After all the times I silently nudged you in the right direction…!”

The nights he had leaned over the boy’s bed and breathed comparisons into his ear. Look at your brother. Look at how Father smiles at him. Look at how she looks at him.

The day he had walked beside the boy through the ravines and simply… wandered a little to the left, so that the boy, without knowing why, wandered a little to the left as well. Straight to the mouth of a narrow crack in the rock, behind which slept an ancient cave of silk.

The talent that had been sleeping inside the boy’s soul. He had watched it for years, tickled it, coaxed it, fed it, until one day the System had looked at the boy and seen a Sacrificer looking back.

“…After the many years of watching over you! After I chose you among all the tribe members! You! The chosen one!”

“...”

“Haah…”

The Outer God’s shoulders sagged again, and he waved a long hand dismissively in the air.

“Well… it matters not. You might have been the most successful one of them all, but it’s my own fault for getting my hopes up.”

He reached up with one elongated nail and tapped the crown on his head.

Tap… tap…

The faces on the shards grinned wider.

“…After all, I knew from the start that plunging such a pure-hearted tribe into the misery of betrayal was never going to be a simple task.”

◉

He had been here a long time.

Much longer than the Hunt tribe had existed. He had found them before that, back when they were still part of the old tribe Adam and Anastasia were born into. A great tribe, by mortal standards, numbering in the thousands.

His concept fed on misery. The crown on his head, the core of his being, could even anchor the souls of those he damned, chaining them there forever to act as batteries for his ever-growing strength. Grinning, weeping, laughing faces, each one a soul feeding him its endless anguish.

So when he found a tribe he could have squashed with the tip of a single nail, he didn’t squash it.

He decided to make it miserable instead.

He had learned long ago, from countless worlds and countless feasts, that misery born from within was infinitely more exquisite than the plain anguish of death. A man slaughtered by a monster suffered for a moment. A man betrayed by his brother suffered for the rest of his life.

So he used his minor concepts, the ones he had devoured on his long journey with his Mistress before they ever landed on this world, and planted seeds.

Jealousy. Hate. Bitterness. Resentment.

He tried them all.

And these humans… these stubborn, infuriating little creatures… they triumphed over every single one. With their bonds... With their feelings for each other…

Every seed he planted, they choked out with something warm and sickening, and they kept on standing shoulder to shoulder against him.

It was such a repulsive sight that the Outer God had lost control for a moment.

…Just a moment.

When he regained his senses, the tribe was gone. Thousands of them, cut down like wheat beneath a scythe.

It was a terrible waste, born from a momentary tantrum.

Fortunately, two humans had been spared, simply by being away from the tribe at the time. He had been so glad. Overjoyed, even.

He had watched those two rebuild, slowly, painfully, bringing life after life into the world, until a new tribe stood where the old one had fallen.

And this time, he had sworn he would do it right.

How many years had it been now…? A hundred? Two hundred? He had lost count somewhere along the way. He had tried child after child, seed after seed, and among them all, Cain had gone the furthest.

And even he had been subdued by this so-called kindness.

The Outer God’s long fingers twitched. His eyes fixed on the brothers’ backs, and something black began to coil in the air around him. The silk-colored dust on the ravine floor began to tremble.

“No… no… stop it…” he muttered to himself, pressing a hand against his forehead. “If I destroy this toy… I’ll have to look all over again…”

He took a long, slow breath.

“In the first place, isn’t it our fault that they’re like this…?”

It was only because of the Outer Gods’ pressure that these mortal creatures had banded together. That they had thrown away their pettiness and their differences and focused everything they had on resisting.

Such was the power of the threat of extinction.

As his thoughts reached that point, the Outer God finally let go of his failure. The black weight in the air dissipated, and the dust settled. With a sigh of magnanimous generosity, he reined in his burning desire to squash them all over again.

There were many humans in the world. But very few as pure as these, in their love and their unity.

And the purer something was, the more cathartic it was to sully it.

The power born from such pure misery would be equally great… though Zelrathus didn’t care much for power. He never really had. All he wanted was that moment. That fleeting, blissful moment of happiness when he fed on such an emotion.

“Such a feast… but sadly, I’m not a qualified enough cook to prepare it yet,” he lamented. “But I want to savor it… even just a taste…”

As the words left his stretched mouth, his gaze slid from Cain’s slumped shoulders and finally settled on the back of the other brother.

His smile widened until it split his face.

“You will be it. My next partner…!”

His mind drifted back to that moment in the cave. The moment Cain’s mind touched his brother’s through the ritual.

In that moment… Zelrathus had tasted something.

Misery. So pure, so overwhelming, so utterly bottomless that for a single moment, the Outer God of Euphoric Misery himself had blanked out completely.

He had only come back to his senses when the feeling vanished. By the time he did, the brother called Ashen had somehow used a strange spell to locally rewind time itself.

Zelrathus hadn’t been in his right mind to care about that. All he had wanted was to know where that taste had come from, or whether his senses had simply been deceiving him.

He had crossed Cain off immediately.

He had watched that boy since the day he was born. He knew him inside and out, and the boy had never carried an emotion of that quality in his entire life.

And if somehow he had… he would have been a broken, empty shell long ago. The Outer God himself had lost his mind for a moment just from the scent of it. What was one Cain beside that?

“So it can only be you…!” Zelrathus whispered, his tears running freely, his grin ecstatic. “Don’t disappoint me now… dear Ashen…”

The faces on his crown grinned wider.

…And the Outer God kept walking beside them contentedly.