"Big brother. What are those charms for?"
"Hm? Oh, those." The brother grinned and wiped his forehead. "I'm Ezra, by the way. I know we haven't talked much. My Thema is Taoist."
"Taoist?"
"Yep, yep, haha. It gives me skills to deal with the unseen."
Ashen tilted his head. "You mean ghosts?"
Now it was Ezra's turn to look perplexed. "Ghosts? Do you perhaps mean souls that turn resentful after death? That's part of it, I suppose. But mainly, I'm the one responsible for Oddities."
"Oddities?"
Ezra's pickaxe paused mid-swing. He lowered it slowly, and his cheerful expression took on a strange, almost mysterious air.
"Oddities come in all shapes and forms," he said. "Some have bodies you could touch. Others are so well hidden that a man could search his whole life and never find one. But what they all share, and what makes them so damning, is that they don't follow the rules of reality."
"Then what do they follow?"
"Their own." Ezra tapped the wall with the tip of his pickaxe and resumed digging. "They make their own rules and impose them on everything around them. Once an Oddity has set a rule, it doesn't matter how strong you are or what concept you carry. You have to play by it until you deal with the Oddity. Or until it decides to leave you alone."
Ashen felt a cold drop of sweat roll down his neck.
"And where do these come from?"
"From an Outer God. We call it the Lawless Lawgiver." Ezra resumed swinging. "It gives every one of its children a law of its own, and then it lets them run wild. They don't obey it, and it doesn't seem to want them to. As far as anyone can tell, it simply enjoys that they exist."
'Wonderful. An Outer God yesterday, a Sacred Beast today, and now even ghosts are real. At this rate, tomorrow I'll find out the bloody trees are sentient, too.'
He let out a slow breath, put his complaints aside, and went back to mining, completely forgetting that the existence of sentient trees was already a settled matter, and that one was growing in his own backyard, planted by his own hands, no less.
"So why are we only putting the charms up now?"
"Because Oddities are found most often in enclosed, abandoned places like this," Ezra said. "Even then, it's rare. There aren't many of them in the first place. Across all our expeditions, we've only ever found two."
The tension in Ashen's shoulders eased. 'Two. Across all those expeditions? What are the odds, right?'
He smiled at his brother. "Still, thank you for choosing this Thema, big brother. It feels like you're covering a weakness for the whole tribe."
"That's what family is for, little brother." Ezra laughed. "Covering each other's weak spots."
"But how does a Thema like that even appear?"
"Oh, that part's easy. You just need a steadfast belief in the Eternal. Seek His shelter in times of need, obey His commandments, and live an honest life. Haha."
Ashen squinted at him.
"Wait. Mom always bragged about some kid who memorized all of the Eternal's commandments when he was four. Don't tell me that was you?"
"Haha! Caught me."
They kept chatting and mining in an easy comfortable rhythm of two people with nothing to worry about.
Neither of them noticed that, in the deepest corner of the cave, one of the yellow charms had silently dissolved into nothing.
◉
Ashen didn't see it happen.
But some time later, as he swung his pickaxe into the rock again, he felt something.
It was so faint that he nearly dismissed it. A tiny hitch in his chest, like a step missing from a staircase in the dark.
He followed the feeling inward, carefully but persistently, and when he reached the end of it, only one word echoed in his mind.
Pure Heart.
'…Isn't that my trait?'
He frowned. He didn't understand why it would stir now, of all times, in the middle of mining. But he didn't dare dismiss it either. His intuition was a trait of its own, and it had never once led him astray.
So he kept swinging his pickaxe and turned his attention to the trait.
At first, he found nothing. Then, after a long time, he caught a faint trace of something.
Whenever he spoke to Ezra, he felt warmth and kinship, and the easy closeness of family. Beneath that warmth, so faint that it barely existed, something else stirred. A twinge of revulsion and disgust.
And when Ezra laughed about protecting the family and Ashen felt the urge to protect him in return, an almost imperceptible thread of killing intent rose beneath it, pressing upward as though it wanted to burst out.
"..."
Ashen's grip on the pickaxe tightened.
He turned his attention back to the trait that had made him aware of all this.
'Pure Heart.'
The name looked underwhelming. But according to its description, only a single mortal in all of history had possessed it before him, and that alone showed how difficult it was to attain. The trait allowed its bearer to cast everything aside and move with a single intent, a single sharpened will with the certainty to pierce anything.
And a conviction like that could never take root in someone who wasn't aware of his own emotions in the first place.
That was why Ashen could notice it, even something this impossibly slight.
'Ezra isn't the problem. Someone, or something, is tampering with my emotions.'
He set his pickaxe down.
"Big brother Ezra. I think something's wrong."
He explained everything. The faint disgust, the killing intent buried beneath the warmth. He didn't soften any of it, not even the part where the urge to kill was aimed at Ezra himself.
Ezra didn't get angry. His jolly expression simply vanished, as though it had been wiped away with a cloth.
"Is it…" Ashen hesitated. "Is it one of those Oddities we were talking about?"
Ezra looked at the charms on the walls around them. Every one of them was intact. None of them had so much as twitched.
He stayed silent for a long moment, staring at them.
Then he chose to trust his gut over the evidence in front of him.
"Most likely," Ezra said quietly. "Ashen, go inform the Patriarch. I'll try to find our sneaky little guest."
"Understood."
Ashen dropped the pickaxe and ran toward the front of the cave.
As he wove between the carts and his working brothers, he noticed another of his traits at steady work.
'Soul Bastion.'
Whatever was touching him, it wasn't getting through with its full strength. His soul had been resisting most of the effects without him even realizing it.
'Then what about the others…?'
He glanced around as he ran. The brothers looked completely normal. They were laughing, cursing at stubborn rocks and complaining about their backs. Nothing about them looked wrong.
That made it feel worse somehow.
He found Adam near the sorting piles and told him everything in a rush. His father didn't dismiss it as nerves or call it nonsense. He listened to every word.
And as Ashen spoke, he watched his father's face grow colder. By the time he finished, Adam looked completely expressionless.
Ashen looked at him, waiting.
When Adam finally spoke, his voice was as flat as his face.
"If the enemy can interfere with emotions, it would be lethal for the whole expedition if it took over my mind. The leader's."
"So…"
"So from now on, until we catch it, I'm going to mute every emotion I can."
Ashen opened his mouth to answer but a scream tore through the cave.
It was a raw, gurgling howl, so full of emotion that it seemed to claw its way into Ashen's chest. Every head in the cave snapped toward it.
Ashen froze. 'That voice…'
"Lucan!"
◉
Deep in the cave, Ezra had not moved from his spot.
He had been staring at the charms on the walls, waiting. As the scream echoed down the tunnel, every single charm swayed at once, but there was no breeze to pass through the cave.
Then every one of them dissolved… all of them, at the same moment, from the entrance to the deepest wall.
The blood drained from Ezra's face. He filled his lungs and shouted with everything he had.
"AN ODDITY!!!"