Becoming One

He fell without a sound.

The silk swallowed the rush of air around him. The cloak swallowed his scent. Overlooked swallowed every flicker of intent he had.

He dropped straight at the back of his brother’s neck with a long knife in both hands, carrying the full force of Covetous Valor behind it, a blow that could have split a hill down the middle.

Ashen’s spear was already there.

He hadn’t turned; he hadn’t even looked up. He simply tilted the shaft back over his shoulder, as casually as a man reaching to scratch an itch, and Cain’s blade met the wood at an angle. It skidded. The force behind it, enough to crack steel, slid off the shaft and continued straight past Ashen’s ear and down into the floor.

KRRAAAK—!

The knife plunged through layer after layer of ancient silk and into the rock beneath, punching out a crater as wide as a cart wheel. Chips of stone sprayed in every direction.

Cain hit the ground beside it, rolled, and came up into a crouch.

His brother hadn’t moved from his spot.

‘How?’

Cain didn’t wait to find out.

He yanked the lantern’s hook strand with one finger. The flame sputtered and died, and the chamber plunged into darkness so complete that even his own hand vanished in front of his face. The deep red silk drank the last of the light.

Now, darkness, silence, and nothingness consumed the cave.

Cain melted backward into the web, then he went to the central knot he made to control the silk. Or what he called the loom.

He had spent months preparing this chamber. Night after night, after feeding the doll, he had strung red silk across the room at neck height, at wrist height, at ankle height. Dozens of strands, each one soaked in his own blood, each one tied to a knot only he knew how to find.

He pressed his palm against the knot and poured his mana into it.

In the space of a heartbeat, his mana raced out along every strand in the chamber, and every strand snapped taut at once.

They hardened, their edges sharpened into razor wire. Then they tightened from every direction toward the place where Ashen stood.

Throat, wrists, knees, ankles. It was a cage of blades closing from fifty angles at once.

Cain felt the wires bite.

…Then he felt every one of them go slack.

‘...What?’

He pulled the knot again, but nothing answered. The wires hung limp.

He reached out with his senses along the silk and felt it: every single strand that had been closing on his brother had been cut. All of them. In the same instant. In a perfect circle around a single point.

In the dark, Ashen’s voice spoke softly.

“You forgot something, brother.”

Cain’s blood ran cold.

“The silk carries mana both ways.”

‘He felt it coming before the wires even moved?’

Cain didn’t let himself freeze. He kicked a knot by his foot.

Above Ashen, three sections of the ceiling let go.

They were slabs of rock the size of tables, held in place for months by nothing but silk. Now they dropped straight down at the spot where his brother stood.

Ashen took two neat, unhurried steps, one to the left, one forward, and he stood perfectly still between where the slabs landed.

BOOM— BOOM— BOOM—!

The cave shook. Dust and silk exploded into the air. The impact rolled through the floor and up into Cain’s teeth.

And under the cover of the dust, Cain threw his needles.

Twenty of them flew at once, each one dipped in a paralytic he was meant to use against the beasts but was hurling in his family’s way.

He threw them in a fan, from three different positions, so they would come at Ashen from three different angles at once.

Through the dust, he heard it.

Tak-tak-tak-tak-tak-tak—

A rapid, rhythmic clatter, like hail on a wooden roof.

When the dust settled enough to see, Cain’s breath hitched.

“...”

His brother stood in the wreckage with his spear held upright before him. Twenty needles were stuck in its shaft, lined up neatly in a row like pins in a cushion.

Ashen glanced at them, sniffed one, and wrinkled his nose.

“Nightbane? Don’t you know how expensive this stuff is?”

He flicked the spear once. All twenty needles shot out of the wood and buried themselves in the silk wall.

Cain stopped hiding.

There was no point anymore.

He stepped out of the web, and he reached for the last weapon he had. It was also the one he hated most.

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Coveted Arts

What you envy, you may learn to wear.

Any technique you have watched with envy long enough becomes yours to imitate, its form carved into your muscles as though you had trained it yourself.

The imitation can never surpass its source.

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From a fold in the web, he pulled out a spear.

It was one of Ashen’s own. A spear he had forged two winters ago for the armory, borrowed by Cain three months earlier for a “scouting run” and never returned.

Cain moved.

Thrust.

Slash.

Parry.

His feet moved through stances he had never practiced in his life; it was Ashen’s spear art, with every detail perfectly reproduced.

And behind it was the overwhelming strength of Covetous Valor. Every thrust tore the air apart. Every slash left a gouge in the silk walls deep enough to bury a fist in.

For the first time since the fight began, something moved across Ashen’s face. He looked almost… touched.

“So that’s what you’ve been doing, hiding when I train,” he murmured.

Then he met Cain’s art with his own.

Their spears crashed together. The first exchange shook the chamber. The second sent silk tearing loose from the ceiling. Cain was stronger, so much stronger, and every collision drove Ashen’s feet back across the floor.

But Cain’s thrust became a slash, and between the two, there was a seam.

It was barely a hair’s width. A tiny pause where the thrust ended and the slash began, the place where Cain’s body had to remember what came next.

Ashen’s art had no seam in it. His thrust didn’t become a slash. It was a slash, already, the way a wave was already the next wave.

And his spear slid straight through that hair’s-width gap.

CRACK—!

The shaft slammed into Cain’s forearm, and the bone snapped like a dry branch.

Cain screamed.

The spear fell from his hand. He staggered back, clutching his arm, staring at the white splinter of bone that had punched out through his skin and his sleeve.

Then he did something that made even Ashen’s eyes narrow.

He grabbed his broken forearm with his other hand and, with a sickening crack, shoved the bone back into place.

“AAAGH—!” He laughed through the scream. “Hah… hahaha… GAAH—!”

Blood poured down his arm and dripped onto the silk. The silk drank it greedily.

Covetous Valor flared again.

Cain felt it surge through him. The wider the gap between him and his brother, the stronger he became. And right now, the gap was a canyon in his perception. His muscles bulged. Veins stood out on his neck like ropes. His broken arm throbbed, but it worked.

He lunged with his bare hands.

Ashen thrust his spear at his brother’s shoulder. Cain didn’t bother dodging. He let the point slide into his flesh, grabbed the shaft with both hands right behind the blade, and wrenched it toward himself with all the strength of Covetous Valor.

The wood groaned. Ashen’s arms were jerked forward.

So Ashen let go.

Cain stumbled back, holding a spear that wasn’t held by anything anymore, the point still lodged in his own shoulder.

Then the spear tore itself free from his flesh and his hands, flew backward across the chamber along a line of mana Cain couldn’t even see, and slapped back into his brother’s palm.

Cain stared at his empty, bleeding hands.

Strips of skin hung from his palms where the wood had ripped through his grip.

And his brother was looking at him with exactly the same expression he’d worn when the fight began.

Nothing.

‘Where’s the anger, where’s the hurt, where’s the surprise…?’ Cain thought in self-derision. ‘Do you know how much I agonized over this…? And you don’t even pretend to be politely interested?

Ashen simply looked at him the way he looked at weeds he was about to pull.

“ha…haha…”

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Cain acknowledged it. ‘None of it matters to him.’

‘He’s not even trying.’

He laughed again. It came out wet.

Then he ran at his brother one last time.

He was faster than he had ever been since the start of this so-called fight. He was so strong that the silk floor tore under every step. He ran straight at Ashen’s chest with nothing in his hands at all, like a man throwing himself off a cliff.

Ashen’s feet shifted to meet him. It was the same footwork Cain had watched a thousand times with the same step to the side, the same pivot, and the same damned sweep. His brother’s finishing move.

Cain knew it better than he knew his own name by now.

Which was why, exactly one step before his brother’s pivot, he had strung a single strand of red silk across the empty air at the height of a man’s cheek. It was almost invisible in the dark, finer than a hair.

Ashen turned.

A thin line opened across his cheek.

He didn’t even seem to care. His spear was already moving. The butt cracked against the inside of Cain’s knee and swept his legs from under him, and before Cain could hit the ground, the point of the spear was resting in the hollow of his throat.

Cain lay flat on his back on the red silk, gasping.

Ashen looked down at him. The spear didn’t waver.

For a long moment, the only sound in the chamber was Cain’s ragged breathing.

Ashen opened his mouth, then closed it when he saw tears running down Cain's face

‘He lost his marbles.’

The creepy laugh that followed reinforced Ashen’s statement. It started as a small, breathless hitch in his chest, then grew until his shoulders were shaking. Tears ran from the corners of his eyes.

“Haahaahahaha… kugh… haha..”

He was laughing so hard he could barely breathe, staring up at his brother with an expression of pure, open admiration.

“I knew it,” he gasped. “I knew it. You’re so much more than I am. You’re the real deal, brother. I wasn’t wrong about you. My eyes were never wrong. Hahahahaha…”

Ashen said nothing. His thoughts were unreadable.

Cain kept laughing, but his eyes had drifted away from the man’s face and toward the floor. His voice dropped to a rambling murmur, as though he were talking to himself.

“But you’re too careless, brother… too careless. Did you think I didn’t know? I knew you would beat me. I’ve known since I was six. Do you really think I’d come here without having that prepared?”

He was staring at the silk beside Ashen’s boot.

A single drop of blood had fallen there from the thin cut on Ashen’s cheek. It sat on the red silk like a bead of dark glass.

The silk slowly drank it.

Ashen unconsciously ran his thumb across the wound and looked down at his hysterical brother.

But Cain’s eyes had already glazed over. All that remained in his mind were the Path Skills that were about to make his dream come true…

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The Martyr’s Altar

Consecrate an altar with your own blood.

It must be fed every night for one hundred nights. A single night missed undoes everything that came before.

Whatever your consecrated blood soaks into becomes part of the altar, and the altar’s bounds stretch as far as your blood has reached.

Within those bounds, every offering you make is accepted, and every drop of blood that falls is received.

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Birthright of Blood

Upon a consecrated altar, you may lay down your own life to take the life of one who shares your blood.

The rite demands:

That you gather what he has shed, and weave it into his likeness.

That you feed his likeness your envy, one confession each night, each one paid in your own blood.

That you carve his name into your own flesh, over your heart.

That a single drop of his living blood fall upon the altar.

And that you lay your own life upon it.

When the rite is complete, your soul follows his blood into him.

There, you must endure the worst of his memories and the deepest wounds of his soul, until you stand above them as their master.

Then you must take up his duties, his burdens and his dreams, and desire them with your whole heart.

Should you prevail, his body, his memories and his name become yours. Your Concepts are reshaped in the image of his own. Where his Path differs from yours, Envy shall mimic it, so that the two may become one.

Should you fail, his soul shall devour what remains of yours, and the altar shall keep your body.

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{Activated Path Skill: Birthright of Blood }

One would think that with such stringent conditions, Cain would surely fail…

But the second condition didn’t frighten him at all. Ashen’s duties, burdens, and dreams were obvious to anyone who knew him. Protect the family. Make the tribe thrive. See them all survive the Darkness. Cain wanted the same things.

…He had always wanted the same things.

He only wanted to be the one doing them.

And the first condition…

Endure the worst of his memories. The deepest wounds of his soul.

Cain almost laughed every time he read it. What wounds could his brother possibly have?

Ashen had grown up beloved, praised and admired since the cradle. His worst memory was probably the day two of his precious plants died. Maybe a few expedition horrors, and a few dead brothers.

Cain had seen those things too. He could endure them.

“Yes,” he whispered. “All I needed was a single drop… hehehehe…”