Supplanter

The deadline for the brothers’ bet had been settled long ago.

The original terms said that the bet would be decided when they reached eighteen. But Cain had been born ten months after Ashen. Bountiful Cradle had carried Lapis and Cain far sooner than any ordinary womb would have made possible.

So when Ashen’s eighteenth birthday came, Cain still had most of a year to go, and he had complained loudly that he was being robbed of time his brother got for free.

Adam had listened, sighed, and stretched the deadline to Cain’s nineteenth birthday. Both brothers would have a full year beyond their coming of age to prepare an offering.

“Fair?” Adam had asked.

“Fair,” Ashen had said, shrugging.

“...Fair,” Cain had muttered.

Nobody in that room had any idea what that extra year would be used for.

◉◉◉

The Hushweaver had become the most pampered creature in the settlement.

After it was brought home from the forest in its cloth-lined jar, the women had panicked for a full week over how to keep it alive. In the end, Ashen had solved the problem the way he solved most problems: by sitting next to it and staring at it with Patient Eye until it told him what it needed, which turned out to be a dark, still corner of the farm, damp moss, live insects, and above all, no one walking within thirty paces of its web.

The spider spun its first full web there two months later. Within a year, it was producing enough silk each season to keep the women busy.

Of course, the women knew exactly what to do with it.

The first thing they made was undershirts for the warriors, worn beneath the padding and the chainmail.

Hushweaver silk was cool against the skin, lighter than linen, and it carried mana from one end of the body to the other almost without loss. A warrior wearing it could push reinforcement into a struck shoulder in half the usual time.

Ashen remembered as Bram swore he could feel the difference in his first fight and refused to take his off for a week, until his wife, Rune, forced it off him for washing.

The veils were the next article to benefit. The women’s old veils had been woven from ordinary cloth, making them heavy and hot in the kitchens and stifling during long hours at the loom.

Woven from Hushweaver silk, the new ones were so light that a breath could lift them, cool even beside the ovens, and cleverly loose enough that a woman could see clearly through her own veil while no one outside could see in.

The sisters argued for days over who would get the first ones. Lapis won, because she simply took Ashen’s share of silk while he was on an expedition.

Anastasia took a spool for her healing work. Sutures stitched with Hushweaver silk carried her healing mana deep into the wound along the thread itself, and cuts that once took a week to close knitted in two days. Ezra took a spool to restring the charms around the sealing gems. Misty took a few strands to anchor her hush into the wards at the core chamber. Even the farm got a share: Monica wove nets of it over the seedlings, fine enough to keep pests away and thin enough to let the glow-stones’ light through.

But the real marvels came from another woman.

Iris was one of the older sisters, a soft-spoken, ink-fingered woman who spent most of her life at the loom. Her Path Skills had always been about fabric. When the Hushweaver silk reached her hands, she treated it the way Ashen treated his tree.

She even mimicked the way he called himself the tree’s dad, and acted like she was teaching the silk new tricks.

The first thing she taught it was to mend. A garment woven by Iris, if folded and left undisturbed overnight, would knit its own tears closed by morning. Whether they were torn sleeves or cut sleeves, they sealed and rejoined. The warriors came home from expeditions in shredded undershirts and woke up to whole ones.

The second thing she taught it was… to be quiet, or so she liked to describe it.

The silk’s source, the Hushweaver, was already a quiet creature, but Iris pushed that quality further, weaving cloaks that swallowed the rustle of their wearer’s movements, muffled their footsteps, and absorbed their scent.

Scouts loved them. The very first one she finished went to Cain, who had asked her for it with an unusual politeness.

The third thing was the one that made the wives cry.

Iris called it the heartstitch. A wife would cut a single strand of her own hair and stitch it into her husband’s undershirt, right over his heart, and Iris would bind it into the weave. If the husband ever took a blow that would have killed him, the heartstitch would burn away in an instant, and for that one instant, the silk around it would harden like plate steel.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to NovelPhoenix for the genuine story.

It only worked once. But once was still one more time than none.

Three warriors had already come home alive because of it. And each time, the wife back home had felt a sharp prick in the finger she had used to stitch it, sometimes in the middle of the night, sometimes in the middle of a meal. The prick was an indicator for the trigger.

Lapis had stitched one into Ashen’s undershirt the very first week. Though she refused to tell him which strand of hair she had used…

“How am I supposed to know if it’s still there?”

“You’ll know when it burns.” She smiled sweetly. “And then you’ll come home, and I’ll stitch you a new one, and you’ll owe me forever.”

“How can I owe anything to a parasite, huh? No matter how cute…”

“Ghosh hubby~ you’re not romantic at all~”

“...”

◉

The single spider in the farm was never going to be enough for the whole tribe. Everyone knew that.

Which was why, when Cain came back from his third expedition with a sack full of raw Hushweaver silk, the women nearly carried him on their shoulders.

He had found a colony. A whole cave of them, deep in a ravine a few days from the settlement. Hushweavers nested together there by the dozen, and their webs had been piling up layer upon layer for longer than anyone could guess.

Sadly, only Cain could reach them.

The spiders fled from anything that came near. When the warriors tried to approach the cave together, the colony vanished into the deep cracks before anyone set foot inside. But Cain had walked into that cave alone, and the spiders hadn’t so much as twitched.

Watching him saunter inside like it was his own backyard and come back out with silk every time challenged everyone’s common sense of Hushweavers' timidity.

“It’s my skill,” Cain explained with a bored air, though not forgetting to broadcast how impressive he sounded from tone alone.

“They can’t feel me. I don’t really know why. They just don’t notice I’m there.”

So that became Cain’s duty. Every few weeks, he would slip away to the ravine alone and come back with a sack of silk. The women adored him for it. Even Iris, who adored very few people, started saving him the best seat at dinner.

Once, sorting through a fresh batch, Iris found a single strand that was faintly pink.

She frowned at it, held it up to the light, and turned it over between her fingers. Then she shrugged, set it aside, and kept sorting.

Spiders ate strange things. It was probably nothing.

◉◉◉

Cain had known he would lose the bet a long time ago.

He had known it before the expeditions, before he saw the growth of that strange tree and the birth of its fruits… before anything happened at all, really.

He had known it on the day he turned six and sat in his parents’ bedroom and heard his father say the words ‘Lapis would take Ashen as her husband.’

On the surface, he fought like a man who still believed he could win. He took the hardest scouting jobs… he infiltrated places no one else could reach… he brought back silver veins, rare herbs and drake eggs...

He did everything a boy determined to win a bet would do.

But at nighttime, lying awake in his room, he would do the math, and the conclusion never changed.

First, there was Ashen himself. Cain was stronger than him in terms of Steps. It was Third Step against Fifth.

Logically, that was no contest. But Cain had watched his brother in the training grounds when Ashen thought no one was looking, and he had seen the way Ashen moved when he stopped holding back. What he saw made him recognize that logic meant nothing.

Second, there was their father. Adam loved all his children, and Cain knew that. But Adam admired Ashen.

He asked his opinion. He took him aside to talk about things he never talked about with anyone else. When they forged together, the two of them shut the door. And whenever Ashen brought home something new, the pride in their father’s eyes was something Cain had been chasing since he could walk.

Even if he set those two things aside, there was the third, and it was the one that hurt the most.

Lapis would never accept him.

Even if he won the bet, even if he brought home a mountain of treasure and their father declared him the winner in front of the entire tribe, she would never look at him the way she looked at Ashen. She would marry him because the rule said so, and she would look at him every day for the rest of their lives with those cold, bored eyes, while all her thoughts would still be consumed by his brother.

So no. The bet was never going to give him what he wanted.

He needed something else.

◉

The answer came to him when he reached the Third Step.

At the Third Step, a Pathwalker could choose a second Thema and fuse it with the first, bending their skills in a direction the old Thema could never have taken them alone.

Cain’s first Thema had been Brave Warrior. He had chosen it at six years old, puffed up with pride after killing his first shackled Narkal.

Unsurprisingly, under Envy, bravery had grown teeth in the dark. It had become another kind of courage; the type that dared to walk into an enemy’s camp alone and walked out again with something stolen.

Most people’s second Themas came from experience, the same way their first ones had. But talent could influence a Thema too, if the talent was strong enough.

Ezra had become a Taoist without ever having fought a single Oddity. The talent had simply been there, waiting.

Cain’s had been waiting too.

[Second Thema available: Thysiastis (Sacrificer).]

He stared at the window for a long time.

Truthfully, he had never sacrificed anything in his life, not even a night’s sleep for someone else’s sake, so he was bewildered by the unexpected choice.

But clearly… the System was telling him he had a talent for it.

In the end, as if possessed by something, he chose it.

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

[You are now a Step III, Supplanter.]

[Brave Warrior and Sacrificer will be fused to create a more suitable Thema.]

. .

[New Thema acquired: Martyr]

Cain didn’t know what Supplanter meant. He had to ask Ezra what it meant, later, casually, as though it had come up in a story.

“A supplanter?” Ezra scratched his chin. “Someone who takes another’s place by trickery, I think. There’s a very old story in the Eternal’s book about twin brothers. The younger one disguised himself as the elder to steal his father’s blessing. He wore goatskins on his arms so his blind father would think he was touching his hairy brother.” Ezra laughed. “Why? Where did you hear that word?”

“Nowhere,” Cain said. “Thank you, brother.”

That night, he read his new skills alone in his room.

When he finished, he dismissed the window and sat very still on the edge of his bed for a long time.

Then he went outside, found a quiet corner of the tunnels where no one ever walked, and threw up until there was nothing left inside him.

The answer had presented itself so perfectly that it almost felt like a joke.

He could not beat Ashen… he could never be loved by Lapis as long as Ashen existed.

But what if… He took his brother’s body? What if he took his memories, his place at their father’s side, his name inked on Lapis’s chest…?

Could he… alleviate this burning feeling then? He did not know, but there was a sure way to find out…

‘Make it happen.’

And so…

‘I would become Ashen.’