By the time Ashen reached Lucan, it was already too late.
His eldest brother lay beside the crate of blasting charges, his fingers still curled around the trigger stone he had used all morning to set off the blasts. His knife lay in the dirt beside him. There was blood everywhere.
Ashen stood there, unable to breathe.
The trigger stone was half-activated. Its runes still glowed a dull red, as though someone had begun to wake it and then stopped.
Lucan had stopped. With the last scrap of himself, he had stopped his own hand.
Ashen didn't understand yet, but he would only understand later.
Regardless, at that moment, all he knew was that his brother was dead, and that something cold and enormous was rising in his chest.
Grief.
He felt it swell. It was natural, he thought distantly. Of course he would grieve. Then it kept swelling, far past anything natural, until it filled his ribs and pressed against his throat. And then, without warning—
It flipped.
The grief turned over inside him like a coin, and the other side of it was relief. A light, sweet, airy relief, as though a burden had finally been taken off his shoulders. As though Lucan's death was the best thing that could have happened today.
Ashen staggered.
He felt Soul Bastion slam down thickening the robustness of his soul. The relief cracked, sputtered, and fell away, and the horror of what he had just felt crashed into him so hard that his knees nearly gave out.
'What… what was that…?'
All around him, the same thing was happening to his brothers.
Their faces twisted with grief and fury at the sight of Lucan's body. The fury swelled, far too much and far too fast. Then it turned, and Ashen watched in horror as their expressions slackened into something soft and dreamy.
Slowly, one by one, they turned toward the back of the cave.
She was sitting on the mithril vein.
A woman, and the most beautiful woman Ashen would have ever seen if he hadn't already seen Lola first. Pale, slender and perfectly shaped, with long white hair cut straight across her brow and down along her cheeks, falling like a silk curtain down her back. Her eyes were the soft blue of a clear morning sky that Ashen had longed to see for years.
She sat on the jagged ore with her legs crossed, and she looked bored.
"Another one broke," she said to no one in particular. Her voice was flat and completely devoid of feeling.
A brother near the front lowered his weapon. Then he walked toward her, smiling like a lovesick boy, and knelt at her feet.
The woman looked down at him. She reached out, almost lazily, and pushed her hand straight through his chest.
He was still smiling when he died.
She pulled her hand free, looked at the blood dripping from her fingers, and wiped it on the rock beside her.
"They always come in through the front," she said. "So rude."
The brothers who had been gazing at her a moment ago jerked as though they had been struck. Their love for her turned back over. And now their hatred had something new beneath it… something rotten and sour.
Self-loathing. For having looked at the thing that killed their brother and loved it, even for a moment.
Ashen saw it on their faces. The fury, the shame and the disgust, all feeding into each other like a snake swallowing its own tail.
The woman tilted her head and watched them suffer like she wastching rain run down a window.
Then… beasts appeared.
◉
The first one rose out of the brother who had been closest to the kneeling man.
His self-loathing seemed to bleed out of him in a dark mist, and the mist knotted itself into a shape. A lean, hairless hound, its skin stretched tight over a face that looked uncomfortably like his own. It turned its head, looked at the brother who had created it, and lunged at his throat.
Another formed from the grief of a younger brother. It was a long, pale thing like an eel with a woman's arms, and wherever it drifted, a thin wailing came from its body. Everyone who heard the wailing felt a fresh wave of sorrow, and from that sorrow, more beasts began to stir.
Then a third, a fourth and a fifth. The cave was filling with them.
And their strength varied wildly. The beasts formed from younger brothers in the lower Steps were small and clumsy things that a single swing could disperse. But a monster built from the rage of a Third Step brother rose up like a bull of molten iron, its horns scraping the ceiling, and when it charged, it went straight through two timber props and nearly brought the roof down on them.
"Don't fight them with bare weapons!" Ezra roared. He was already running, yellow strips of paper fanning out between his fingers. "They're made from what you feel! Your blades will go right through!"
He flung the charms. They flew straight and true as arrows and slapped onto the blades of the nearest brothers, wrapping around the steel. The red script on them lit up.
"Now! Cut!"
A man swung at the hound gnawing on his arm. His charmed blade bit into it, and the beast burst like a soap bubble.
That bought them a few breaths. Ezra used them.
He pulled out a single charm, bit his thumb and smeared blood across it. Then he held it up before his eyes and let it burn.
Ashen saw the ash rise from the burning paper and drift into the air, forming lines. Script. Words in a language he didn't know, hanging in the air before Ezra's face like smoke.
"Heaven-Reading," Ezra muttered, his eyes racing across the ash. "Show me your law…"
The words twisted and reformed.
"Whatever burns within a heart the White beholds, the White may turn."
Ezra's lips moved silently as he read. Then the ash shivered, and a second line began to form below the first.
His face went completely white.
"Whatever is turned, the Black may wear."
He took a step back.
"It's not one…" Ezra's voice cracked. "It's TWO!!!"
As if his scream had been an invitation, something stepped out from the darkness behind the white-haired woman.
A second woman. The same pale, perfect figure and the same face. The same straight-cut hair, only black as the sky outside. With the same soft blue eyes.
She looked at the chaos, at the beasts tearing into the brothers, at the blood on the floor.
"So noisy," the black-haired one said flatly.
"Mm," said the white-haired one.
The Black twin lifted one finger, and a brother's terror bloomed out of him into a towering, many-legged thing that swallowed the light around it.
◉
The next stretch of time became a blur that Ashen would never fully piece together afterward.
He remembered the twins talking as they killed.
"They broke in again," the White said, stepping over a body.
"There's always someone breaking in," the Black agreed. She caught a man's sword in her bare hand and pulled him close. "They take our stones."
"The shiny ones."
"The ones we like."
"Last time they took a lot." The White twisted a man's head around with one hand. He didn't even have time to scream. "I counted."
"I know. You told me."
"I'm telling you again."
They spoke like two sisters complaining about a leaking roof. Their voices never rose and never changed. And all the while, the White's eyes moved from face to face, and each face she looked at twisted and broke as the emotions inside it were caught, swelled, and flipped.
Ashen remembered Bram, his rage swelling until his whole body shook. Then it flipped, and his face went soft with longing as he looked at the White, and he took a step toward her.
Then his own hand came up and slammed into his face so hard that blood sprayed from his nose. He did it again, and again, grinding his teeth, until the love broke apart under the pain and the hatred came back.
He remembered Orin on his knees, laughing and sobbing at the same time, his own emotions flipping so fast that his face couldn't keep up. A pale wailing beast was coiled around his shoulders, feeding.
He remembered a man who simply stopped. He stood in the middle of the cave with his weapon hanging from his hand as hatred and love and self-loathing spun through him, faster and faster, and then his eyes emptied out. He sat down on the cave floor and didn't get up again. When Ashen attempted to drag him back, he realized that he was no longer breathing.
And there wasn't a single wound on him.
Another… a young man whose name was Joel, hacking at the White with a charmed blade. His cuts landed. They sliced deep into that pale flesh. but every one of those cuts closed again in a breath, as if it had never been there.
The White didn't even look at him. Joel's strikes grew wilder and wilder, and then, all at once, he stopped and stared at his sword.
Before anyone could reach him, he turned it on himself.
The Black twin watched him fall and said, "That one gave up."
"They do that," the White said.
Through all of it, Ashen's Soul Bastion held. It wasn't perfect. Every time the White's gaze swept over him, he felt something inside him flip, making him harbor a flash of fondness for her, or a sudden sweet calm, gone as soon as it came. Each time, his soul clamped down and his will crushed it,
But each experience left him nauseous and shaking.
He threw spells from the back. A charm from Ezra was wrapped around the shaft of his spear, and he cut down every beast that came near him. And all the while, he kept his eyes on the twins.
He watched them for a long time.
'Patient Eye.'
It was the only thing he could think to do that wouldn't feed them.
Slowly, the twins revealed themselves to him.
Their bodies were filled with threads. Countless thin, glowing threads that ran out of them and into every brother in the cave, and along those threads flowed a steady stream of something warm and bright. Every time someone in the cave raged or wept or loathed himself, the threads flared, and the twins' wounds closed.
'They're eating… everything we feel, they're eating it.'
Then he noticed his father.
Adam was in the middle of it all, wrapped in charms, his sword swelling and shrinking as he cut through beasts and twins alike. He had split the White in half twice, and taken the Black's arm off at the shoulder once.
His expression never changed.
The thread running from the twins to Adam was so thin that Ashen could barely see it. And the wounds Adam left on them healed the slowest of all.
Ashen watched his father look at the twins, two of the most beautiful creatures he would ever lay eyes on, and the way Adam looked at them was the way he looked at rocks on the side of the road.
'Father's starving them.'
He swept his gaze back to the twins and kept observing with his Path Skill, searching for anything else. A weakness, a need, anything at all.
Inside them, he found almost nothing.
Their hearts were hollow. Whatever flat irritation they voiced about being bothered was a habit with nothing behind it. They felt nothing for the men they killed and nothing for each other's words.
…Almost.
There were two places where something faint stirred, so faint that a lesser observation would have missed it.
The first was the ore. Every time a stray pickaxe or a falling body struck the mithril vein, both twins' eyes flicked toward it with a tiny tug, like a cat's ear twitching toward a sound.
The second was each other. In the middle of the slaughter, the White reached over and smoothed a strand of the Black's hair back into place. It was a small, automatic gesture, and the Black leaned into it without looking.
Ashen's eyes went from the ore to the burning words still hanging in the air before Ezra.
Whatever burns within a heart the White beholds, the White may turn.
Whatever heart.
He grabbed Ezra by the arm and dragged him back behind a toppled cart.
"Big brother. The rules. Do they bind everything? Even the ones who made them?"
Ezra's eyes were bloodshot and wild. Charms were burning down between his fingers. "Rules bind everything within their reach. That's what makes them rules."
"Then their hearts are empty. Almost. They care about two things." Ashen pointed. "The stones. And each other."
Ezra stared at him. Then he followed Ashen's finger to the vein, to the carts of mined ore piled near the back wall.
He understood. And for the first time in this whole nightmare, Ashen saw something like a smile on his face. It was ugly.
"Patriarch!" Ezra shouted. "The ore! Break the ore! In front of them!"
Adam didn't ask why, nor did he hesitate.
He turned his back on the twins, ran over to the carts of mithril his men had been mining all day, raised his sword, and let it grow.
The blade swelled to the size of a fallen tree. Adam brought it down.
The first cart exploded into a spray of rock and silver dust. He swung again, and the second went with it. He didn't stop there. He turned to the vein itself and slammed the sword into the wall, again and again, shattering the shining ore into pieces and grinding it into the stone.
The very thing they had crossed a dead world to reach. The thing that would have armored their children. His face didn't so much as twitch.
The cave went silent, safe for the explositons coming from Adam's gigantic sword colluding with the mithril carts.
The Black twin had stopped moving.
She stood perfectly still, her blue eyes fixed on the silver dust drifting through the air, and finally, something else passed over her flawless face aside from apathy. It was miniscule, like a muscle that had never been used before.
"Our stones," she said.
Something burned in her heart. A small, new and clumsy feeling…
And her sister, standing right beside her, beheld it.
The rule moved by itself. It didn't ask the White's permission. It caught the Black's fury and swelled it until her slender hands shook. Then it turned it over.
The Black twin's face went slack. She looked at Adam, the man who had just destroyed her home, and her soft blue eyes went warm.
"…Sister," she said in the same flat voice. "Something is wrong with me. I love them."
The White looked at her.
"That's disgusting."
Then the White's own heart stirred. Something tiny moved inside her as she watched her sister sway. Perhaps it was worry, or something that wanted to be worry?
And her own rule beheld her too.
Both twins went still. The beasts filling the cave flickered and sagged like candle flames in a draft.
"NOW!" Ezra roared.
Ashen was already moving.
He let everything go. The grief for Lucan, the horror, the rage, the sick shame of every false warm feeling the White had forced on him. All of it fell away behind him, until only a single thought was left, small and sharp as the tip of a needle.
Pin her.
There was no anger or hatred in it to grab onto and nothing to turn. He had become a single intent, sharpened until nothing else remained.
He crossed the cave in three strides and thrust his spear through the Black twin's chest, driving her backward and nailing her to the rock wall behind her.
She looked down at the spear, then up at him. Her face was still soft with that forced, sickly love.
"…This one's empty," she said.
At the same moment, Adam's sword came down on the White. It swelled and grew heavier as it fell until it pinned her to the floor under the weight of a hill.
Ezra was already there. He pressed a black gem to the Black twin's forehead, then another to the White's, and began to chant. The words came fast and low, running together until they no longer sounded like words.
The gems drank them in.
The twins' bodies began to thin. Their pale skin turned translucent, their hair drifted apart like smoke, and they were pulled into the gems.
The last thing the White twin said before she vanished was, "So noisy."
The gems went dark and cold, right after that, the beasts dissolved into mist.
And the cave went quiet.
◉◉◉
They counted the dead afterward.
Ten.
Lucan. The brother who had knelt at the White's feet. Joel. The one who had sat down and stopped breathing. Three taken by the beasts. Two torn apart by the twins' bare hands. One more who had followed Joel.
They laid them out side by side near the mouth of the cave and covered them with their cloaks.
Later, as the survivors sat in exhausted silence, Ezra finally explained what Ashen had seen with Patient Eye.
They had tried to destroy the gems. They had struck them with every weapon and every spell they had left, and nothing had so much as scratched them. Whatever was inside could not be killed. Not as things stood.
"They eat what we feel," Ezra said hoarsely. "As long as there are people around them feeling something, they'll keep healing. Forever."
"Then how do you kill them?" someone asked.
"Two ways." Ezra held up a shaking finger. "Cut off their food completely. Find a way to kill them while everyone around them feels absolutely nothing."
He held up a second finger.
"Or kill enough people that the damage outpaces the meal."
No one said anything after that.
Ashen looked across the cave at his father.
The only reason any of them were alive was that the strongest man among them had been the one feeding the twins the least. Adam had suppressed his fear, his hatred and his desire to kill with a patience that bordered on inhuman. He had looked at those two creatures the way he looked at stones on the roadside, and he had kept looking at them that way while his sons died around him.
Ezra told them about Lucan, too.
He had pieced it together from the trigger stone and the open crate of charges. Lucan had been the first one the White had looked at. And Lucan, the eldest, the one who had always carried the concealment orb and stood between his younger brothers and the world, had felt one thing more strongly than anything else at that moment.
Love for his family.
It had swelled until it filled him. Then it had turned.
And with all that hatred inside him, his hand had reached for the trigger stone that would have brought the whole cliff down on top of the people he loved most.
He had stopped it the only way he could: by stopping himself permanently.
One had to wonder how much willpower it took to escape that overflowing hatred, even for a moment, and find the resolve to end one's own life amid that very same hatred, in that very same moment.
When the others finally lay down to rest, Ashen couldn't. He sat with his back against the wall, staring at the row of covered bodies.
Near the end of the night, he saw his father walk over to them alone.
Adam knelt beside the first cloak and pulled it back just far enough to see Lucan's face. He stayed like that for a long time. His shoulders never shook, and he made no sound.
But his hand rested on his eldest son's hair, and it did not move until morning.
✦⟡⟲⟡✦
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A/N: Just in case you guys missed it, the white-haired Oddity basically flips and amplifies emotions, while the black-haired one can use those emotions to conjure beasts from them. The beasts' strength depends on the intensity of the emotion and the strength of its source.
[Picture Of the Oddities]