Clatter… clink… slurp…
The dinner hall was as loud as it always was at the end of the day.
Children were running between the long tables. Somebody's baby was wailing. Bram was arguing with an uncle over who had killed more Narkals on the last expedition, which happened roughly every third night.
Under the warm evening amber of the crystals, the smell of stew and fresh bread drifted through the air.
Ashen sat at his usual place, a bowl in front of him, a spoon halfway to his mouth.
Currently, he was conducting an experiment.
A sister walked past behind him carrying a jug of water. The edge of her sleeve brushed his shoulder. Just like that, as it had a thousand times over the past six years, thick lust came crawling up his spine, pulling his eyes after her.
But this time, he didn't turn his head. He reached inward instead.
'Dormancy.'
The heat stopped climbing.
He could feel every bit of it, just as large and just as hot as it had been a second ago. Its size hadn't shrunk by so much as a hair, but it had gone motionless.
The lust lay in his mind like a great beast curled up in its den, eyes closed, breathing slowly.
'It's asleep.'
Ashen took a sip of stew.
'Phew…'
It was the strangest sensation.
Ah, so that's lust. That's what it looks like. He could acknowledge it, look at it, even appreciate how big it was… all while he ate leisurely.
It was easy, ridiculously so.
After six years of clawing and screaming at himself just to keep his sanity intact, it felt almost like cheating.
'So this is what it's like to have normal emotions… I almost forgot.'
Beside him, Misty let out a jaw-cracking yawn.
She was sitting on his left, as she often did these days, her spoon drooping in her hand, her head slowly sinking toward his shoulder. She looked about three breaths away from falling asleep face-first in her stew.
Ashen glanced at her, and a curious thought struck him.
"Misty."
"Hm…?"
"Can I test something on you?"
She nodded airily, without even bothering to open her eyes all the way.
"I'm going to put you to sleep."
"...Thanks."
Ashen's lips twitched.
He reached out, very gently, with the concept.
Misty's head finished its slow descent and landed on his shoulder. Her breathing deepened at once, and her spoon slid out of her fingers and clinked into her bowl.
Within a few moments, she was sleeping so deeply that a Narkal horde could have charged through the hall and she probably still wouldn't have twitched.
'It works on people too?'
He turned to his right, where Lapis was busy tearing a piece of bread in half.
"Lapis."
"Hm?"
"Can I try the same thing on you?"
She stopped mid-tear and looked at him as if he had just asked whether he was allowed to breathe.
"...Since when do you ask?"
He took that as a yes and reached out with the concept again, gently, the same way he had with Misty.
Nothing happened.
Lapis blinked at him. Then she tilted her head, as though tasting something.
"Hm… I felt like dozing off for a second there," she said. "But then it just… went away. I think I brushed it off."
"Try not to resist this time."
"Okay~"
She set her bread down, scooted closer, and leaned her head against his right shoulder with a contented hum. Ashen reached out a third time.
The moment she stopped pushing back, she went out like a candle.
Ashen sat there, a sister asleep on each shoulder, and thought it over.
'So that's the condition.'
It only worked when the person had let their guard down completely.
Misty was already half asleep and trusted him so completely that she had never once kept her guard up around him in her life.
Even Lapis, who trusted him just as much, had shrugged it off the first time on pure instinct, the way any warrior's body brushed off a threat before the mind even noticed.
Anyone who was alert, even a little, would shake the concept off without realizing it had ever touched them.
'Well. I've only caught a Glimpse. It makes sense that it's this weak.'
He reached for a piece of bread, and his hand trembled slightly.
It had been doing that for weeks. The tremor came from the invisible pressure on his body, which had been there ever since Lethargy of Time and Crimson Torpor crawled back out of whatever corner of his soul they had been hiding in.
His flesh still wasn't built to carry concepts of that weight.
'It's like carrying two sacks of stone on my back at all times.' He looked at his trembling hand for a moment.
'Wait.'
If Dormancy could put an emotion to sleep… if it could put a person to sleep…
What about a concept?
He reached inward again, this time toward the heavier of the two weights: Lethargy of Time. Carefully, as if coaxing a skittish animal into its den, he laid Dormancy over it.
Slowly, the weight began to ease.
The concept sank deeper and deeper into slumber, and as it did, the pressure on his body lightened, like a sack of stone being lowered gently to the ground.
His hand stopped trembling, and more importantly, the faint ache in his bones that had been with him for weeks began to fade.
Ashen let out a long breath.
Then, curious, he dipped a finger in his cup and let a single drop of water fall.
He applied Lethargy of Time and tried to slow the drop.
It slowed, but only barely, around a fraction of what it should have been.
'Ah. So that's the price.'
The deeper the concept slept, the less of its power answered his call. It made sense. A sleeping beast couldn't fight. But the trade was more than fair.
He could let them doze until his body was strong enough to carry them, and wake them a little at a time as it adapted.
He did the same with Crimson Torpor, letting it sink halfway into sleep. The last of the weight on his shoulders lifted.
'I feel so light.' Ashen smiled in a carefree manner.
Then he gently released the concept holding Lapis down.
She stirred on his shoulder, let out a long yawn, rubbed her eyes, and sat up. For a moment, she looked around the hall in a daze, as though she had forgotten where she was.
Then her eyes landed on his bowl.
"Brother, you're not eating," she said, frowning. "You haven't touched your bowl since I fell asleep."
"Mm. Thinking."
"Thinking is for after dinner. Eat." She dangled a chunk of meat from her plate in front of his mouth. "The stew's from the old stores, so it's a bit tough. But it's still good."
Ashen chewed the meat thoughtfully.
'True. This is tough.'
Old stored meat always was. Even with the chilling mana in the carriages and the mana still lingering in the beasts' flesh, it only kept for about a month before it began to turn. After that, they had to salt it, dry it, smoke it…
'…Rot is a process too, isn't it?'
His eyes lit up.
If he could put rot to sleep…
He could keep fresh meat fresh for months. Maybe longer.
And not only meat… Seeds he wanted to keep for next season. Herbs that wilted before they could be used. Embers in the forge, banked overnight and woken in the morning without wasting a single scrap of fuel. Pain in a wound, laid to sleep long enough for a warrior to walk himself home…
'The possibilities are endless…'
There was so much this concept could do; he just had to get better at it first.
◉
From that night on, Ashen played a game.
Back in Esperra, there had been a game in the arcades where little moles popped up out of holes in a board, and you had to whack them back down with a mallet before they could escape.
He had loved it as a kid, even though Lapis had always beaten him at it.
Now his mind had become that board.
Lust popped up. Whack. Dormancy laid it down.
Irritation popped up when a cousin chewed too loudly at breakfast. Whack.
Arrogance. Whack. Resentment toward his father during a council. Whack.
But he never put them all the way to sleep.
Of course, he could have. He had done just that on the night he first glimpsed this concept.
If he pushed hard enough, he could put every single one of them into a slumber so deep they would never wake again.
But he deliberately left them dozing lightly, still half awake and pushing against him with just enough strength that he had to fight them back himself.
Because he had realized something.
Whatever was doing this to him was handing him the best training tool he could ask for.
Every emotion it pushed up was a chance to practice.
Every surge was a sparring partner. Still Pond, Rooted Will, his own control, all of them grew stronger every time he faced one of those spikes and held it down with his own will. Dormancy simply made sure none of them ever got strong enough to overwhelm him.
'Thanks for the training, whoever you are,' he thought, whacking down another surge of irritation. 'Really. I mean it.'
There was only one emotion that didn't stay down.
No matter how many times he put it to sleep, it woke up again. And every time it woke, it had grown a little bigger.
It didn't flare and spike the way the others did. It simply grew, quietly, steadily, like magma rising slowly beneath a mountain that looked perfectly calm from the outside.
His resentment toward the thing doing this to him.
When was the last time someone had played with his mind so thoroughly?
'The last guy who did this was False Mercy.'
Ashen's lips curled slightly.
'And he ended up beaten to death with these very fists.'
'And now another audacious thing dares to…'
He watched a sister pass by the weaving room, the one who had never sat in the same room with him again after that day at the loom. She caught his eye and quickly looked away.
'Making me act like a beast… making my family look at me with that much disappointment…'
He remembered Bram's fist… the young cousin's crumpled face… Misty flinching… his mother's face across the chessboard…
'Now I'm even getting flashbacks to my deadbeat bum era… damn it.'
Those years in Esperra, when he had been the one breaking his family's hearts, over and over, while they watched. That was the feeling this thing had dragged back up out of him.
The feeling of being the source of the pain in the eyes of the people he loved.
He hated it.
…The magma rose a little higher.
◉
And the more his mind cleared, the more a few things about all of this began to bother him.
Chief among them was the timing.
It had all started right after his little two-man expedition with Cain.
Of course, it could have been a coincidence. Maybe an Oddity had latched onto him somewhere along the way without him noticing, or some insidious creature in the ravines had laid a curse on him while he was bleeding, half-blind and barely able to see three steps in front of him.
'But what if…' His eyes narrowed. '…this was more targeted than an unlucky encounter?'
In his chest, the dormant rage and resentment stirred together, making something hot and bright shimmer behind his eyes.
'What if… I wasn't the first target?'
His gaze slid down the table.
Cain was sitting at the far end, eating quietly, his shoulders hunched.
A little girl had climbed onto the bench next to him and was chattering at him about something, and he was nodding along patiently, a small, shy smile on his face.
When he noticed Ashen looking, he flinched a little, then ducked his head.
Ashen studied him.
Six years ago, that boy had been snide, loud and petty. He had sneered at dinner, complained even about honey, and nursed a grudge so big it had driven him to carve his brother's name into his own chest.
And now…
'Can a person really change that much, that fast, just from guilt?'
Ashen shook his head slowly.
If guilt was enough to change someone overnight, then Cain would have changed long before he tried taking over his body.
He didn't think one speech and one beating from his big brother would have done the trick either.
'But what if Cain had to deal with this before me?'
What if the same thing had been sitting on Cain's shoulder for years, whispering in his ear, turning his envy up and up and up until it boiled over into that ritual? And then, after the cave, it had simply… gotten bored? Let him go?
Then it would finally make sense; the change in him would make sense too. So would that shy, quiet personality.
'No… maybe that's who he really was. And now that nothing is pushing on him anymore, he's simply going back to it.'
And following that same thread of logic…
'If this thing let go of Cain… it would have needed a new target.'
And who else had been with Cain that day?
"Ha."
The laugh escaped him before he could stop it.
It was a small, absurd sound. Lapis glanced up from her bowl beside him.
"Crazy motherfucker," Ashen muttered under his breath, shaking his head in genuine amazement.
"Huh? Who?"
He didn't hear her.
'You really want to die that badly? Messing with my mind wasn't enough for you? You had to put your grubby claws on my family too?'
The rage spiked so high, so suddenly, that it flipped right over on itself and came out the other side as an amused chuckle.
"Well…" he murmured. "Don't let me catch you."
"Brother?" Lapis was staring at him. "You're scaring the kids."
He glanced down the table. The little girl sitting next to Cain was gaping at him with her mouth hanging open, a piece of bread frozen halfway to her lips.
Ashen cleared his throat and smiled at her.
"Sorry. Just thought of a joke."