Pity

The cave woke up.

It started where the drop had fallen with a pulse that rolled out across the floor in a fan shape.

The silk beneath Ashen’s feet went taut. Then the next layers followed. The pulse raced across the floor, up the walls, over the ceiling, and everywhere it passed, the red silk lit with a dull, wet glow, as though blood were flowing through it.

Every drop Cain had shed in that fight, and a hundred nights before it, was lighting up.

The whole cave was the altar.

Ashen had been standing inside the ritual from the moment he stepped into the chamber. All it had needed was a single drop of him.

The spiders fled. They poured into the cracks in the walls by the hundreds like a pale tide running from the light.

On the far side of the chamber, something Ashen had taken for a lump of webbing tore loose from the wall.

It was a doll.

A crude little figure sitting on a raised shelf of silk, black hair matted on its head, its body wrapped in a stained, stiff cloth he recognized after a moment. One of Lapis’s washing cloths. A broken spear tip jutted out of its chest where a heart would be.

The doll turned its head and looked at him.

“…Cain,” he said quietly. “What is this?”

Cain didn’t answer; he was tearing open his own shirt.

Beneath it, carved deep into the skin over his heart, five letters gleamed wet and red in the light of the cave.

ASHEN.

Ashen stared at it.

“Brother…” Cain whispered, smiling up at him with tears running freely down his face. “Let’s become one~”

The silk erupted.

◉

Strands tore themselves loose from everywhere and lashed out at both brothers at once.

Ashen exploded.

Mana burst out of him like a dam breaking. All three cores of Trinity Harmony roared at once, heart, belly and head, flooding his body until his skin glowed faintly blue. His spear became a blur.

He cut the first wave of strands to ribbons before they could touch him. The second wave died on the spear’s edge. The third, the fourth…

There was no end.

For every strand he cut, three more peeled loose from the walls. The cut ends didn’t fall. They writhed on the floor and knotted themselves back together.

When he pushed his mana outward in a blast to shove them back, the silk simply drank it, every drop of it, and glowed brighter for the meal.

A strand caught his ankle.

He severed it.

Two caught his wrist.

He tore his arm free so hard the silk shredded his vambrace.

Five caught his waist. He hacked at them, and his spear came free of the third with a red strand already wrapped around its shaft, crawling up toward his fingers.

Then something under his armor caught fire.

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

A charm.

One of the dozens of charms his sisters had stuffed into his armor before his very first expedition. He’d laughed at them back then. Now one of them flared white-hot against his ribs, and the silk wrapped around his waist shriveled and turned to ash. Another charm burst at his shoulder, and the strands crawling over it recoiled as if burned.

Ashen didn’t waste the opening. He ripped himself free and kept fighting.

But the silk kept coming relentlessly, more than he could count… more than he could cut. And this time, the strands didn’t stop at his skin.

A thread slid into the cut on his cheek.

He felt it immediately. Something crawling through his blood. Heading for his heart.

And over his heart, something burned. The heartstitch.

The strand of Lapis’s hair flared bright as a star and was gone in an instant. For an instant, the silk around his chest went hard as plate steel. The cold thing in his blood slammed into that sudden wall, and it recoiled, retreating back up the thread, writhing.

◉

Three days away, in a room deep underground, Lapis jerked awake with a cry.

She was clutching her finger. A single bead of blood had welled up at its tip.

She knew what it meant; every wife in the settlement knew it too.

She reached for the tether in her chest, the invisible rope that always told her where her king was and how far he’d gone, ready to tear through every ounce of love she had ever stored and throw herself to his side.

But she found nothing.

The tether hadn’t snapped. She could still feel it tied to something somewhere. But it had gone muffled. Swallowed, as though someone had wrapped her brother in a veil so thick that even she couldn’t find him.

“…Brother?”

There was no answer.

◉

The heartstitch had bought him a breath but the cold thing came crawling back down the thread.

It was slower and more careful, as though it had learned. And the silk kept coming. Ashen fought it for an hour.

An hour of cutting, burning, tearing. Of pouring out mana until his cores ached and his arms trembled.

The charms under his armor burst one after another, each buying him a few seconds. His vambraces were shredded. His armor hung from him in strips. Every cut he made healed itself, and every strand he severed came back.

And through it all, Cain lay on the floor, pinned down by that same silk.

But the bleeding man clearly didn’t mind the silk’s embrace, judging by how passively he watched everything unfold.

His wet eyes gleamed with hungry glee as they locked onto his brother, and a soft giggle escaped him every time another charm went dark.

“It won’t break,” he whispered. “It won’t break, brother. A hundred nights, brother. Every night. I didn’t miss a single one~”

Ashen didn’t answer him.

His spear moved slower now. Not because he was tired, though he was. He had begun to look.

‘Patient Eye.’

He had been reading the cave since the moment he entered it. Now, for an hour, he read the ritual itself.

Slowly, the longer he looked, the more it revealed itself.

◉◉◉

[ PATIENT EYE ]

Target: Rite of Supplanting (Active)

Sacrificer: Cain Hunt

Condition: Binding (Near Complete)

Observed Conditions:

The rite has been fed for over one hundred nights without interruption. It cannot be broken from within its bounds.

The target is nearly bound. When binding is complete, the sacrificer must lay down his life to begin the crossing.

Upon crossing, the sacrificer’s soul will enter the target and face trial.

Trial: The sacrificer must endure the worst of the target’s memories and the deepest wounds of the target’s soul, until he stands above them as their master.

◉◉◉

“...”

Ashen’s spear stopped moving.

The silk took his arm at once. Then his other arm. Then his waist, his chest, his legs. He didn’t fight it.

He was looking at a single line.

The sacrificer must endure the worst of the target’s memories.

‘His memories…’

The silk crawled up his neck. He let it.

He turned his head, slowly, the last part of him still free, and looked down at his brother.

Cain was beaming up at him with his face wet with tears and his chest red with the name he’d carved there, gleeful, triumphant, almost loving.

Despite all of it, Ashen couldn’t muster any rage or feelings of betrayal.

What filled his golden eyes was something Cain had never seen in them before. A deep, heavy, and almost overwhelming emotion.

Pity.

“…Why?” Ashen asked softly. “Why would you do this to yourself…?”

Cain’s smile froze, then it cracked.

His face twisted, crimson, the cords of his neck straining against the silk binding him, and he screamed.

“DO NOT PITY ME!!!”

His voice tore itself apart.

“I HAVE DECIDED THIS! I AM A DEMON! DEMONS DO NOT DESERVE PITY! BROTHER… YOU are the pitiful one! DO YOU UNDERSTAND?!!!”

Ashen looked at him a moment longer.

“You’re about to meet a hell even demons don’t deserve, brother,” he said quietly. “So, despite myself… I can only feel pity for you.”

The silk closed over his mouth… his nose… then his eyes. The last of his face disappeared beneath the red cocoon.

Cain stared at it, panting, the echo of his own scream still ringing off the walls before the silk swallowed even that.

‘A hell…?’

He didn’t let himself think about it. There was no time.

The rite was ready. He found the knife beside him. The silk strangely moved aside, letting him reach it.

He placed its point at the center of the carved name…

“…You won’t lose anything, brother,” he whispered.

…and drove it in.

The red light swallowed the chamber whole and Cain’s mind plunged into darkness.