The Confessions of a Martyr

Cain started trying out his skills the very next week.

‘Yeah… I’m just testing them… this is completely ordinary.’

One of his skills was the creation of a ritual, so he needed a suitable place. The most obvious option was the silk cave.

He had actually discovered it months ago, during one of the long scouting runs in the ravines, contrary to everyone’s belief. The moment he crawled through its narrow entrance, he knew it was special.

Hushweavers had been nesting there for what must have been centuries, and their webs filled the cavern from floor to ceiling in layer after layer after layer. Old silk was buried beneath new silk, and newer silk beneath that, until the whole cave was a single woven womb.

What cemented his choice, however, was that the cave was quiet in a way that had actually little to do with sound.

The webs swallowed everything.

The tremor of a footstep died in the silk before it reached the walls. Scent faded within a few paces. Even mana seemed to drown there, flowing into the strands and spreading thin until it vanished.

Anything resting inside those webs became impossible to sense, as though the cave had wrapped it in a shroud.

The Hushweavers instinctively knew it; that was probably why they had made their home there.

And because of the skill Cain had carried since his Fifth Step, the spiders never noticed him.

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Overlooked

Envy is born in the shade of someone brighter. You may stand in that shade.

The instincts, intuitions, premonitions and auguries of others pass over you as they would pass over something too unremarkable to note. You remain visible to the eye, yet you simply fail to matter to any sense that reaches beyond it.

Those who look deeper than the eye find only what you have already chosen to show them.

The brighter those around you shine, the deeper your shade grows.

A brave warrior walks into the enemy’s camp; you, however, walk into it unnoticed.

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The skill was how he had walked into demi-human outposts and stolen from beast dens that could threaten an entire expedition. It was how he would walk past every sharp instinct in the tribe for an entire year… and it was how he had his alibi.

Every few weeks, he would leave for the silk cave alone, with the full blessing of every woman in the settlement, and come back with a sack of silk. No one would ever ask what else he did there.

The deepest chamber of the cave became his altar.

He would kneel on the woven floor, cut his palm, and let his blood soak into the silk. Every single night for a hundred nights. On the nights when he was home, he cut himself in his room and carried the soaked cloth to the cave the next time he went. One drop, consecrated, was enough to count. For what he intended to do, a missed night meant starting over from nothing, so he did not dare miss a single one.

The silk easily drank it.

Hushweaver silk carried mana with almost no loss, and it turned out to carry blood the same way. His blood didn’t stay where it fell. It crept along the strands, slowly, steadily, from the floor to the walls to the ceiling, and wherever it went, the white silk turned a faint rose.

By the fiftieth night, the deep chamber was pink. By the hundredth, the whole cave was the color of the ring hanging in the sky.

The spiders didn’t seem to mind, completely ignoring his actions as they kept spinning. Strangely, the new silk they spun was red from the start.

Cain couldn’t bring a silk dripping with his blood, so he made sure to harvest only from the outer edges of the cave, where it was still white.

He missed one strand once and found out when Iris mentioned it at dinner, laughing. Surprisingly, he did not get nervous, as he laughed with her, saying that spiders sure ate strange things.

◉

What he needed next was sheddings, but that was much harder.

The rite demanded that he gather what Ashen had shed: Hair, nails, sweat, old blood… Things his hands had made and thrown away.

But Cain was many things, but impatient wasn’t one of them. He was a scout, and patience was his trade.

Lapis cut Ashen’s hair beneath the tree every few months. The clippings went into the compost at the edge of the farm. Cain took them from the compost.

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Ashen’s old, broken spear tips went into the scrap bin in the forge. Cain took one.

After every expedition, Lapis washed Ashen down with the same cloth, and the cloth went to the laundry stained with his sweat and blood. Cain took one of those too.

Weeks later, he heard Lapis complaining that one of her washing cloths had gone missing, and the sister in charge of the laundry shrugging and saying things got lost. His heart felt as though it had leaped into his throat, but he kept going.

In the deepest chamber, he wove them together with red silk. Hair for the head. Bone-white nail clippings for the teeth…

The broken spear tip for the heart…

The stained cloth wrapped around everything for skin…

After painstaking weeks of agonizing, disgusting crafting, he was able to finally look at his finished work; it sat on the altar facing him: A small, crude, lumpen likeness of a man, no taller than his forearm, with a tangle of black hair on its head.

It looked nothing like Ashen.

‘It looks exactly like him.’

◉

His work did not end after creating it; now he fed it.

The rite demanded one confession of envy each night, paid in blood.

So every night, he knelt before the effigy and told it aloud one thing he envied. Then he cut his forearm once and let the blood drip onto the silk.

“I envy that Father takes you to the forge and shuts the door.”

One cut.

“I envy that Mother looks at you first when you walk into a room.”

One cut.

“I envy your spear. I envy your personality. I envy that you never seem to try, and still win.”

One cut. One cut.

“...I envy that she sleeps beside you.”

Slikkk—!

That one took him a long time to say. When he finally said it, his hand shook so badly that the cut went deeper than he meant it to.

Cain didn’t know when his forearms were filled with these countless scars, and neither did he care. His confessions hurt his pride and esteem much more than all of these cuts combined.

He healed them as best he could, but it wasn’t enough for them to completely fade, so he had to start wearing long sleeves.

The brothers still noticed the fresh cuts when he came back from expeditions, but they just rolled their eyes.

“You take too many risks,” Bram was the first to remark anything about it, frowning at a half-healed gash peeking out from his sleeve. “You’re going to get yourself killed one of these days, you idiot.”

Cain smirked. “At least I’m doing something worth getting killed over.”

Bram looked at him with pity, then walked away, shaking his head.

◉◉◉

Time continued to pass unabated, but for Cain, every day felt harsher than the last, and the hardest part of his life was one: the acting.

Cain could not change. That was the rule he had made for himself on the very first night he decided to “test” the ritual.

If he suddenly became kind, calm, or quiet, someone would notice. Lapis would for sure, not to mention the ever-observant Ashen.

So he had to stay exactly who he had always been. The jealous brat. The snide, envious younger brother who made sharp comments at dinner and sulked when Ashen was praised.

…And every single time he did it, he wanted to tear his own face off.

Just like now…

“Oh, look, the farmer’s back,” he drawled once more when Ashen came home from an expedition and went straight to the tree. “Going to whisper sweet nothings to your shrub, brother? Don’t let us keep you.”

Some of the brothers groaned; Lapis gave him a cold look that could have frozen the river, while Ashen smiled faintly and kept walking, even greeting him with a casual wave of his hand.

“How many times did you call me that, brother? Are you running out of words already? I don’t think farmer is an insult in the first place. Haha.”

Cain’s only answer was a disdainful sneer, though Ashen noticed that his face was strangely red.

‘Hey… I didn’t even curse at you yet, why are you already angry…?’

Ashen tilted his head curiously, but just shrugged, not knowing that Cain’s current feelings were the furthest thing from anger.

That night, Cain locked himself in his room and hit himself in the face.

It wasn’t gentle taps but the strikes you’d only dished out at someone you felt deep-seated hatred for.

His cheek split against his teeth; that didn’t stop him. Instead, he hit himself again. He kept going until his ears rang and his vision swam, until he had to grip the edge of the bed to keep from falling over.

“Monster,” he whispered in a voice that came out so wet and broken that no one would recognize it was him anymore.

“Monster. Monster. What are you doing? What are you doing? He’s your brother!”

He hit himself again.

“He taught you to stand. Do you remember? You were five, and you couldn’t hold the blade straight, and he came over when Father wasn’t looking and fixed your grip. He fixed your grip, and now you’re going to—”

He curled up on the floor and sobbed into his own arms.

It went on for a long time.

Then, slowly, it stopped.

Cain lay on the cold stone with his face throbbing and his eyes swollen, staring at the ceiling.

“...I’ll stop,” he whispered. “I’ll stop. Tomorrow. I’ll go to the cave and burn it all. I’ll throw the doll in the river. I’ll stop.”

He lay there a while longer.

And then, slowly, his swollen face began to change. The despair drained out of it, making way for another more distasteful emotion.

“...”

Starting from his mouth, a small twitch at one corner, and spreading until his lips were pulled back from his teeth in a grin that looked nothing like a grin.

.

.

.

“No,” he whispered. “No, why would I stop?”

He sat up.

“Why would I stop? It was MiNe.” His voice rose, then fell again just as quickly, as though he were afraid of being overheard by himself. “She’s mY tWiN. We shared a womb!”

“If he had never been born, I would have been the strongest; I would have been Father’s prodigy… I would have been the one at the forge, the one everyone looked at when I walked into a room!!!”

“Everything he has, he took from me. Just by existing. He took it all.”

“...”

“...hehehehe…”

A small, cracked sound echoed in the cold room.

“I’m only taking it back. That’s all. Just taking back what was supposed to be MINE!!!!”

He stood up and began to pace.

“And it’s not like he’ll lose anything. I’m the one losing my body, not him.”

The despairing expression from when he was filled with self-hatred had returned, though now, it was filled with mad glee and unshed tears of ecstasy.

“His body will stay, right? His memories will also stay~ Everything he ever was, I’ll carry. His name will be the one that lives on. Ashen. Ashen, the prodigy, Ashen the favorite, Ashen who married Lapis.”

He stopped pacing… his grin stretched more grotesque.

“Cain will just be a dead brother, like all the others. Yes… just like Lucan. Mourned for a season, then forgotten in a couple of years.”

He started to laugh again, and this time, he couldn’t stop.

“Don’t worry, brother. Don’t worry. You won’t lose anything at all. I’ll live on as you. Hahahahaha…”

The laughter went on for a long time.

Then he washed his face, put a cold cloth on his swollen cheek, and slept like a baby.

The next morning, at breakfast, he complained loudly that Ashen had taken the last of the honey, and everyone told him to stop being a child.