Anchors

The crystals had dimmed to night by the time the two of them were finally released from the hall.

The family had walked them to their door, laughing and whistling and throwing all kinds of blessings and lewd advice after them. Some of it from people who really should have known better.

Ashen closed the door behind them and let out a long breath.

“Finally…”

He turned around.

Lapis had vanished behind the dressing screen in the corner of the room. A moment later, the crimson wedding dress came flying over the top of it and landed in a heap on the floor.

“...What are you doing?”

“Changing, obviously~”

When she stepped out again, Ashen’s eyebrows climbed toward his hairline.

She had changed into another traditional garment.

It was technically the same style of dress the women of the tribe wore on their wedding nights, beneath the outer robes. Technically.

But this one had clearly been made by someone with a very loose interpretation of tradition. The silk was so thin it barely deserved to be called fabric, the neckline plunged low enough to make a priest faint, and the sash holding it closed looked one deep breath away from surrender.

Then, with the utmost seriousness, she knelt.

She folded her legs beneath her on the floor, set her henna-painted hands on her knees, and leaned her torso forward in a slow, deep bow.

“Lord husband,” she said gravely. “Your bride is ready for the taking.”

Ashen rolled his eyes so hard they nearly stayed there.

“Cut it out. Let’s just go to bed.” He pulled off his outer robe and tossed it over a chair. “Remember, we’re only pretending, little girl.”

“Is that so…?”

She lifted her head and pressed the back of her hand to her forehead, the picture of tragedy.

“It seems I’m being neglected by my lord on our very first night. What a pitiful wife I am, ah~”

Ashen watched her antics with amusement, shaking his head.

Then his eyes dropped.

She was still bowed forward. The plunging neckline had fallen open with the bend of her body, and from where he stood, he could see far, far too much.

And something inside him… snapped.

“Ahnn~”

He didn’t remember moving.

One moment he was standing by the chair. The next, he was on the bed, and Lapis was beneath him on her stomach, her face half buried in the pillows, both her wrists pinned in one of his hands against the small of her back.

His grip was tight… too tight… painfully tight.

He could feel it. Her fingertips wiggled weakly against his palm, and he knew he was hurting her, but he couldn’t let go.

‘What… the fuck… am I… doing?!’

Ashen screamed inside his own head, ordering his hand to loosen, his body to move back, anything!

But something enormous, hot and suffocating was pressing down on his mind. A lust so overwhelming that it blotted out thought, hammering against his reason like a battering ram against a gate.

His emotions twisted around each other into a tangled, writhing war.

His breathing grew harder.

“Huff… huff… huff…”

His eyes reddened, the veins standing out at the corners from the sheer effort of holding back what was clawing at him to tear into his little sister.

Beneath him, the little sister in question didn’t seem the slightest bit worried.

She turned her head on the pillow, glanced back at him over her shoulder with a slow, seductive smile, and wiggled her hips against him.

“Oh… oh…? What’s this, lord husband? Are you going to perform your duties after all?”

“...”

“If you’re going to do it, could you hurry up a little…? This position is kind of arousing… but it’s not stimulating enough on its own…”

“...Shut… up.”

“Hnng…?”

“I said shut up!”

“Ah!”

He pressed down harder, using his whole body to hold her still.

And Lapis, engulfed beneath him, finally realized that her brother was not in his right mind.

Only then did she start listening to Tend to My Husband. The skill had been pinging away at the back of her skull the whole time, and she had cheerfully ignored it.

What it told her was startling.

This tale has been pilfered from NovelPhoenix. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

There was lust radiating off him in overwhelming waves, enough to drown in. But there was something else holding it down: a force of control just as vast, pressing down on the lust like a lid on a boiling pot, its edges rattling but holding.

She probably should have tried to calm him down.

But in truth… deep down… she was perfectly fine where she was.

So she relaxed into the mattress and waited curiously to see which side would win.

Ashen ground his teeth in frustration at his sister’s nonchalance.

He wasn’t that dense.

From the night they got drunk under the manaweave tree, he had known her feelings for him.

She had made sure of it, utterly crushing any chance he had to play dumb. The teasing that followed every time they were alone, and the kiss she had given him before he left with Cain, had sealed the deal beyond any delusion he might have tried to cling to.

And knowing all that… he hadn’t been revolted.

He hadn’t rejected the strange, burning love she had laid at his feet, the kind that went far beyond what a sister should feel for her brother.

Since leaving Esperra for the first time, he had seen relationships of every kind and shape. He had peeked into minds with Lucid Dreamweaving whose contents could redefine the meaning of scandalous. That was bound to happen in a civilization that took the seven Sins as its power system.

What’s more, he had lived almost two decades in a tribe that used incest as its means of survival. He had treated these people as his family. He loved them. He respected them. Some of them he even looked up to as his guides. His own sister had been given to him as his wife in front of all of them, just this evening.

What revulsion could he possibly muster at this point, at the thought of coupling with his incredibly beautiful sister?

None.

Even before all of this, back when they were both ordinary humans in Esperra, if she had confessed to him, he was certain he wouldn’t have felt disgusted. He might not have accepted her. But disgust? Never.

She was his cute, lovable little sister. Whatever she said, whatever she did, he would never despise her.

‘But… but… not like this.’

He forcibly shut that train of thought down before it could lead him to do far more than pin down the girl slyly wriggling her legs beneath him.

There was a reason he hadn’t sealed the deal yet.

‘Think… think… think of them… please.’

Seraphine. Alice. Lucia.

His three lovers, waiting for him beyond this fragment of history. The women who had given him their trust, whom he had already caused grief by making them share him in his selfishness.

He had sworn never to cause them that same grief again.

‘They’ll probably forgive me… if I did it now… I’ve already cuddled her, and even kissed her twice… does it really matter anymore…?’

“Huff… huff… haaahhh…”

‘No. No, no! Shut up!’

‘Shut up.’

“Shut up!”

“I’m being quiet, though…”

Wiggle… wiggle…

“Not you! And stop moving!”

SLAP!

“Ahn…~”

‘Damn minx… making this harder than it has any right to be…’

Ashen let out a heavy sigh.

Then he closed his eyes and pictured it.

He didn’t picture ravaging his sister… he pictured their faces.

‘They’ll act helpless. They might scold me, get mad at me… and eventually, they’ll forgive me, and accept Lapis as one of them…’

‘But inside… they’ll feel miserable.’

‘And I, the one who caused that misery, will feel miserable too.’

‘And Lapis… if she ever noticed our turmoil… she’d never forgive herself for being the reason.’

‘Everyone… every single one of us… would end up miserable.’

That was why he was holding back. At the very least, if he was going to do anything, he had to ask all three of them first to ease them into it and make sure they truly accepted it.

‘And what’s more… if I’m going to do something, it should be by my own will.’

‘These fucking emotions aren’t entirely mine…’

He paused.

‘No… they are mine. But they’re being magnified. Infinitely.’

The moment he found the source of his strange state, Ashen grabbed onto that realization like an anchor. Bit by bit, slowly, painfully, he used it to pull himself back.

His grip loosened… his weight lifted…

Then, he sat up and moved off her.

“Aaah, ah! You’re not doing it? What a bummer~”

SPANK—!

“This is all your fault.”

“Ouch, my butt, brother… not so hard… and how is any of this my fault?!”

“Stop seducing me…”

“Why should I?”

Ashen looked at her with exasperation. Even now, she was sprawled across the sheets in the most seductive way possible, gazing up at him through her lashes.

“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” he said. “But someone, or something, is tampering with my mind. Do you really think I’d turn into a beast out of nowhere otherwise?”

“...”

Lapis blinked.

“…Now that I think about it… you were unusually aggressive.” She finally dropped the playful act and sat up properly, pulling the sash of her dress closed. “Are you alright?”

“…I’m fine now. I managed to hold it in. But I don’t know if it’ll come back.” He ran a hand through his hair. “Maybe it was a one-time thing.”

“Hey… we should take this seriously. Should we tell Father?”

“Let’s hold off for now. If it comes back, I’ll tell him.”

“…Alright.”

Lapis nodded. She moved closer, reaching for him the way she always did, ready to hug him to sleep. Then she stopped halfway, her hands hovering in the air, and looked at him questioningly.

He smiled helplessly and opened his arms.

“Come here. I’m fine now.”

“Okay~”

And so, on their wedding night, the newlyweds simply held each other and fell asleep.

Neither of them had any idea what was coming.

◉◉◉

Not long after the wedding, Ashen gave away the three fruits.

One went to Adam.

One went to Anastasia.

And the last went to Lapis.

It caused a stir in the tribe. Everyone had assumed the fruits would go to children, to give the next generation a chance at blooming early.

A few people quietly wondered why the patriarch and matriarch, whose Late Bloomers had already bloomed years ago, should get them over a child whose manaweave might grant a whole new Concept.

Ashen’s reasoning had very little to do with emotion.

Despite two decades in this era, he hadn’t lost track of his priorities.

This place was, in the end, only a dimension woven by the Beholder to mirror the past. Nothing here was truly real except for him and his sister.

So their priority had to be their own survival above everything, and preparing for the turning point that would come for this fragment sooner or later.

The first two fruits went to the two people most vital to the tribe’s survival. Even with their Late Bloomers already bloomed, the fruit carried their comprehension of their Concepts to ripeness in days instead of decades.

Adam broke through a bottleneck he had been stuck at for twenty years within a week. Anastasia didn’t say what hers had done for her, but she started humming while she healed, and her healing grew noticeably faster.

The third went to his sister. If the worst ever happened, she had to be able to survive it.

Lapis slept for three days after eating hers. Ashen sat beside her the entire time, watching the manaweave in her heart with Patient Eye as it unfolded petal by petal. When she finally woke up, she stretched, yawned, looked at him, and said the only thing she would ever say about it.

“It tasted like you.”

He chose not to ask what that meant.

As for himself…

He had been thrown into the middle of seven Outer Gods and countless Narkals on the other side of the continent, and he had walked out alive. That experience alone gave him enough confidence in his own ability to escape any danger.

Besides, the tree hadn’t gone anywhere. There would be other harvests.

◉

But as time went on, Ashen found something slowly slipping through his fingers.

His detachment.

During the first fragment of history, he did not stay for long, so he had held onto it easily.

During the second, he had been trapped in a time loop. Forming meaningful bonds with anyone had been a pipe dream from the start, and even then, he had been forced to seal away the personality that had grown inside him.

But now… in this warm, loud, loving family…

He was finding it harder and harder to keep his distance emotionally. His love for them kept growing, day by day, and some nights he lay awake dreading the moment he would have to leave them all behind.

The only anchors keeping him from letting go completely were the people on the other side. His family. His lovers. His responsibility toward humanity, and to the territory that had taken him as its lord and depended on him to come back.

He held onto those anchors with everything he had.