No Choice But to Become a Demon

The war inside him did not abate after that day.

It happened again a week later, then three days after that, then again.

Cain would play the brat during the day and fall apart in the dark. But by the time everyone woke up, he would claw his way back up through the same rationalizations, sporting the same delirious laughter and the same creepy grin.

What drove him mad was that, each time, he came closer to convincing himself to stop.

But each time… he didn’t.

‘I am a demon.’

That was the conclusion he arrived at when he looked at the dead eyes gazing back at him in the mirror.

◉◉◉

Overlooked was the only reason he survived that year.

He didn’t understand the details, but he knew the tribe was full of people with sharp, almost beastly instincts, and two of the sharpest slept in the same room. If his skill hadn’t been hiding him, he would have been caught within a week, no matter how perfectly he played his part.

Even with it, it wasn’t perfect.

He could feel Lapis’s gaze on him more often, and it was becoming colder than before.

It wasn’t suspicious, exactly; more like the way a cat watched a dog it didn’t trust, even when the dog was lying perfectly still.

Sometimes, when he walked past her room, her hand would drift toward her katana, and she would frown at nothing as if she’d heard a sound she couldn’t place.

And Ashen…

That man also watched him. More than anyone else, truthfully.

It was never in front of anyone, always when no one else was looking. Cain would glance up from a meal, or turn a corner in the tunnels, and catch his brother’s golden eyes resting on him.

Unlike the catlike, wary gaze of their sister, it wasn’t cold or angry. But Cain felt it was countless times more dangerous.

Like a patient predator, leisurely observing a clownish prey. Or like the way he looked at his plants….

Cain wasn’t sure, but if he had to venture a guess, it would be that, the skill he had heard much about: Patient Eye.

So he just let him look.

‘Look all you want, brother. You’ll only see what I let you see. My envy, resentment, and me… the spoiled younger brother sulking over a girl.’

The beauty of it was that all his observations were true. It was all part of Cain after all.

‘You’re right to be suspicious of me,’ he thought, smirking as he held his brother’s gaze across the dinner table. ‘But what can suspicion accomplish if you never act on it?’

◉◉◉

On the night before his nineteenth birthday, Cain knelt before the effigy one last time.

The hundred nights had long since passed. The cave was red from floor to ceiling. The doll sat on its altar, fat with a year of confessions, its stained-cloth skin dark and stiff with old blood.

There was only one thing left before the final step.

This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there.

Cain pulled off his shirt.

He took his knife and held it over his chest, right above his heart.

His hand was steady.

He thought of Lapis… especially of the night she had stood in his doorway and smirked as she spelled it out for him, letter by letter. A. S. H. E. N. S.

It was the name she had carved into her own skin to make sure he knew he could never have her.

He had told himself he would wipe it out.

He laughed softly.

“I don’t need to wipe it out,” he murmured. “I’ll just become it.”

And he began to carve.

A. S. H. E. N.

He didn’t make a sound the entire time, and his expression didn’t so much as twitch.

◉◉◉

It was finally the day when the bet’s conclusion between the two brothers would be observed.

The offerings were presented in the gathering room before the whole family.

Cain went first.

He walked into the room with something huge on his shoulder, wrapped in a cloak. When he pulled the cloak away, the children screamed and then cheered.

It was a drake.

A young cliff-drake, already the size of a large dog, with slate-gray scales and wings folded tight against its back. It sat on his shoulder calmly, its reptilian eyes rolling around the room, its claws gripping his armored pauldron.

“I took three eggs from a nest in the northern cliffs last year,” Cain said. “One of them hatched. I raised him myself.”

He had, indeed…

He had raised the drake in a hidden ledge outside the settlement for a whole year, feeding him by hand, getting clawed and bitten and burned with acid spit, sleeping in the cold beside the creature so it would imprint on him.

His hands were covered in old scars that had nothing to do with the ritual.

“He’s imprinted on me,” Cain went on. “He’ll fly where I tell him and come back when I call. In a year or two, he’ll be able to scout from the sky. We’ll see Narkal hordes coming from a day away. If I can find another nest, and another hatchling, we can breed them.” He paused. “That would make flying scouts a thing. And maybe one day, flying warriors, even.”

The room was silent, but it was a silence of blessing and endorsement.

Then the warriors began to murmur in approval. The usually sulky Bram was whistling with an impressed smirk. Several of the brothers clapped Cain on the back. Even Adam looked prideful, his eyes moving slowly over the drake as though he was the one who caught it.

It was a good offering… a very good one.

Cain smiled. It was the first honest smile he had worn in a year.

‘Please,’ he thought. ‘Please let it be enough.’

Under his inner prayers, Ashen stepped forward.

Unlike him, he didn’t carry anything on his shoulder. He walked to the center of the room with his hands empty except for a small cloth bundle, and he set it down on the table before their father.

He unwrapped it.

Inside lay a small, plump fruit… translucent gold, glowing faintly from within. Something slow and bright moved inside it like light through honey.

Ashen explained what it was, not embellishing or hiding anything. And why would he.

A Concept of its own, born from the tree he had tended for fourteen years… The power to bring a person’s growth to ripeness in a single bite… The power to carry a child’s Late Bloomer to full bloom, and maybe, with enough compatibility, grant them a derivative Concept, saving decades that would have otherwise been spent slowly comprehending it.

And finally… a seed that could grow another tree.

When he finished, no one in the room said a word. For poor Cain, the reason was the same as the one behind the silence that had greeted his own offering.

Adam stared at the fruit for a long time; Anastasia had both hands pressed over her mouth. Ezra’s eyes were wide. Even Bram, who never stopped talking, had gone quiet.

Finally, Adam looked up.

“Ashen’s offering is accepted,” he said. “The bet is decided.”

The room erupted in cheers, less for celebrating Ashen’s victory, and more for the existence of such a wondrous fruit.

Cain stood very still in the middle of it.

He had known… he had known for a year… no.

‘I’ve known since he was six years old… so what was I even hoping for?’

At least, now it was all real, so he wouldn’t waste his time on delusions of grandeur.

The brothers and sisters around him were cheering, hugging Ashen, crowding around the fruit. Lapis was looking smug, as if she was feeding on the praise. Misty was softly smiling from the edge of the crowd.

…Cain’s head drooped.

He looked so sad. Everyone could see it. A few of the brothers glanced at him sympathetically. Ashen himself turned his head and looked at him from across the room, and for a moment, he felt a gentle feeling pass over him.

‘Pity, maybe. Or apology?’

Cain did not know for sure. But there was something else he was sure of.

‘Haaah… you think I’m sad because I lost.’

He looked back at his brother, and his eyes stung.

‘And you’re right.’

‘I am sad, brother. I’m so sad.’

‘If I had somehow won… if Father had chosen me… I could have latched onto that…’

‘I could have told myself it was enough. I could have stopped all of this madness and walked away and burned that cave to the ground.’

But now…

‘Now I have no choice but to become a demon.’

He bowed his head and congratulated his brother in a quiet voice. He even let them pat his shoulder. Then he left the room early, saying he needed to settle the drake down for the night.

‘How lamentable. How saddening.’