Sleeping Storm

From that day on, something in Ashen hardened.

The horror of that moment with his mother, and the weight of his father’s faith, sharpened his conviction like a blade on a whetstone.

It was truly a miraculous transformation, as if all his struggles had been a lie.

When the lust came, he felt it, acknowledged it, and let it pass through him without so much as twitching. When it surged, he sat with it, breathing slowly, until it ebbed. He didn’t flinch from it anymore.

He didn’t let it touch his hands, his eyes or his tongue.

For a while, it worked.

And then, as though something somewhere was laughing at his conviction…

It got worse.

The lust didn’t fade; It grew, and now, other things began creeping in alongside it.

Resentment.

He was sitting in a council with the warriors, discussing an upcoming expedition, when his father made a decision Ashen disagreed with.

It was a small thing. Which route to take. But suddenly, hot and bitter, it rose in his throat.

‘Why does he get to decide everything? Why does everyone just obey him? Who made him king?’

He bit down on his tongue so hard that blood filled his mouth, and he swallowed it rather than let a single one of those words escape.

Arrogance.

On that expedition, one of the younger cousins froze during a Narkal ambush. He was barely eighteen, on his very first trip above ground.

Ashen saved him, of course. He killed the Narkal before it could touch the boy.

But as he turned around, contempt crawled up from somewhere in his chest; it was so cold that it dizzied his mind, and before he could catch it, the words were out of his mouth.

“If you’re going to freeze like that, stay home with the women.”

‘Fuck.’

The boy’s face crumpled.

Ashen apologized to him that night, twice. The boy simply said he understood, but Ashen knew that a simple apology didn’t fix it. That disgustingly superior tone he used made sure of that.

Proof of that: the boy never froze in front of Ashen again. He never spoke to him again either.

Irritation.

Misty, as usual, was slow to answer when he asked her a question over breakfast, blinking sleepily at him the way she had since she was a baby. And suddenly, out of nowhere, he wanted to grab her and shake her until her teeth rattled.

“Are. You. Deaf?”

He watched his twin sister flinch.

Misty, who never flinched… who had fallen asleep on his shoulder a thousand times… who had stood in the core chamber beside him when the hush finally settled over their home…

She looked at him as if she didn’t recognize him.

He left the table without finishing his meal, went to the forge, and hit his own head against the anvil until his forehead split open.

And rage.

The worst of them all was rage.

He was sparring with Cain in the training grounds. It was the first time they had sparred since the cave, and this one was a quiet, careful thing they had both been tiptoeing toward for months.

Cain struck, Ashen parried.

And then, from nowhere, rage swallowed him whole.

Pure and white-hot, burning through every thought in his head until only one was left. Kill him. Kill him. Kill him. Kill him. He tried to take your body, he tried to take your life, kill him, KILL HIM—

His spear moved.

It stopped a finger’s width from Cain’s throat.

The entire training ground had gone dead silent. Every warrior there had seen it. That was a killing thrust, stopped by a thread.

Cain didn’t flinch.

He looked down at the spear tip resting against his skin. Then he looked up into his brother’s red, trembling eyes, and recognition passed across his face.

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He had been inside that mind; he knew what lived there. And he knew, somehow, that the thing staring out of his brother’s eyes right now didn’t belong to him.

Cain slowly reached up, put two fingers on the spear tip, and gently pushed it aside.

“…It’s alright, brother,” he said quietly. “Good spar.”

“...”

‘I almost killed you. What’s alright, damn it…’

Ashen’s haggard expression hollowed even further. He dropped the spear and walked out of the training grounds without a word.

◉◉◉

He tried everything.

He meditated beneath the manaweave tree for days at a time, trying to empty his mind.

He tried thinking of happy things, of Esperra and Akidia and the smell of his mother’s kitchen, of Alice’s rare smiles and Seraphine’s laughter and Lucia’s mischievous eyes. He tried exhausting himself in the forge until he couldn’t lift his arms.

When none of that worked, he started hitting himself.

So now… he was locking himself in the forge and punching the anvil until his knuckles split.

THUD—THUD—THUD—!

He banged his head against the stone walls, praying it would miraculously knock these sickening feelings away.

It only made his skull ring in pain.

When Lapis found him, he was with a red-hot tong pressed against the back of his forearm, staring at the smoking skin with empty eyes.

She screamed so loudly that half the tribe came running.

…

When even pain stopped working, he tried to sleep it off.

He forced himself to sleep for days at a time, waking only when he was needed for an expedition. If he wasn’t awake, he couldn’t hurt anyone. If he wasn’t awake, his eyes couldn’t wander.

But even sleep refused him. A spike of lust or rage would drag him back to consciousness in the middle of the night, gasping, his whole body burning, and he would lie there in the dark, staring at the ceiling, with Lapis’s arms wrapped around him.

Through all of it, he never once acted on any of it.

…Not once.

‘But how long will I last like this, I wonder…’

◉

The new hellish live continued for years, and by twenty-three, he reached the Fourth Step.

[You have taken another Step toward Ascension. Congratulations!]

[You are now a Step IV, Spirit Tender.]

For the first time in years, a faint hope bloomed, and he allowed a faint smile to show on his pale face.

==============================

Still Pond

When you rest in stillness, your mind settles like the surface of a pond.

Thoughts, emotions and disturbances sink slowly to its depths, and the water above them clears.

The longer you remain still, the clearer the water becomes, and the clearer the water, the more firmly your will holds.

A sudden stir will muddy it again. Stillness must be returned to, patiently, as many times as it is lost.

==============================

Rooted Will

An intent that is tended patiently grows roots.

Each resolution you renew, day after day, sinks deeper into your spirit, until it becomes a vow that outside forces cannot easily pull loose.

The older the root, the stronger its becomes.

A root torn out by force leaves a wound in the spirit, which must heal before anything can grow there again.

==============================

These new Path Skills helped.

Every morning, he sat beneath the tree, let Still Pond settle his mind, and renewed the same resolution. I will not hurt them. I will not hurt them. I will not hurt them. Day after day, the root grew deeper.

On good days, he could feel the emotions sinking to the bottom of the pond, submerging there in the dark like stones too heavy to rise.

…On good days. But when had life ever been solely good days?

Just as his control grew stronger, so did the emotions, as if they were matching him step for step, as if whatever was feeding them could see exactly how strong his walls had grown, and simply made the flood that much higher.

◉◉◉

He was twenty-five now.

Ashen sat beneath the manaweave tree with his back against its trunk, his hands resting limp in his lap, his eyes half open and unseeing.

It was the only place left that gave him even a shred of peace.

Even now, inside his mind, the pond had boiled over.

The image of water inside his mind was thrashing and roaring. Emotions screamed at him from every direction: to rape, to kill, to tear, to indulge in every depraved and monstrous thought humanity had ever conceived.

They clawed and howled and pounded on the inside of his skull, louder and louder and louder.

He didn’t move a single muscle.

Except for the spasms. Every few seconds, his whole body jerked, a violent shudder from his shoulders down to his fingertips. His jaw clenched so tightly that his teeth creaked.

But he didn’t move.

A little way across the farm, Lapis crouched among the rows of crops, watching him.

Her heart ached so badly that she could barely breathe.

She wanted to go to him, to wrap her arms around him and pull his head into her lap the way she always did. But she knew what would happen if she did.

She would only be one more thing for his mind to scream about.

So she stayed where she was, frozen, not knowing what to do.

As she kept watching, she noticed his lips moving. He was muttering something, over and over.

She pulled a thread of mana into her ears to sharpen her hearing, and finally, she could make it out.

“Endure… overcome… endure… overcome… endure… endure… keep enduring… and you will overcome…”

“...”

Like a prayer… like a mantra... the words kept looping on his lips for hours.

◉

Inside Ashen’s mind, something strange was happening.

In the middle of the storm, he found himself remembering.

It wasn’t the recent years of hell he was recalling. He was remembering further back. His childhood in this tribe, every day from the moment he first opened his eyes in his mother’s arms, until the night this illness took hold of him.

How carefree he had been.

How peaceful.

He remembered the impatient, restless boy who had wanted to be at the Fourth Step by the time he was seven.

He remembered how angry he used to be, how volatile, how easily his old killing intent flared up, and he remembered how, little by little, all of that had softened.

Sitting beside his plants. Waiting for things to grow. Learning that waiting itself could be a kind of strength.

He had forged himself into something closer to his ideal back then. A personality that lived by its own kindness and virtue. One that never threw away its will, no matter how unreasonably harsh life became.

How had he done that?

‘I did it…’ he realized slowly, ‘…with Sloth.’

Yes.

Sloth had given him peace.

It had taught him to sit still and let things pass; to let things rest, and grow, and settle on their own.

‘So where are you…’ he whispered into the storm, ‘…my Sloth?’

Tsss…

Deep inside his soul, something stirred.

It stretched slowly, like a great lazy beast rousing from a long nap. It yawned. It blinked. It turned its heavy head and looked at the storm raging all around it with mild irritation, as though someone had been making far too much noise near its bed.

And then it reached out.

‘Ah…’

Ashen’s lips stopped moving.

‘Yes… thank you…’

‘This is… it.’

[You catch a Glimpse of the Concept of Dormancy.]

‘I can finally… have my peace of mind.’

The emotions began to fall asleep.

Every emotion disturbing its host was made to fall asleep, one by one, until eventually… for the first time in years… Ashen slept like a baby.