The twins became prisoners in the two black gems, and they were put on a flat rock near the mouth of the cave.
The way every man in the expedition behaved so carefully, not daring to look at them for too long, was an indicator of the particular placement.
Ezra had wrapped each gem in layers of charms and set them on a cloth. They looked like ordinary jewels, and if you asked a woman, she'd spend an evening praising their beauty.
Even so, the brothers found reasons to sit on the other side of the fire, and when someone needed to walk past the rock, they walked a little faster in a jittery, almost comical manner.
That was just the visible extent of the trauma the Oddities left them with.
"So," Bram said on the morning after the funerals, breaking a long silence. "What do we do with them?"
Nobody needed to ask who he meant.
The question had been hanging over the camp since the gems went dark. The Oddities fed on the emotions of whatever lived near them, so as long as the expedition stayed close, the twins would be sitting at a feast, sealed or not.
And the expedition had a great deal of grief to offer.
"How about we bury them?" one of the men proposed. "Somewhere so deep nobody will ever walk. Let them starve."
A few heads nodded.
"And who guarantees nobody walks there?" Ezra asked quietly. He looked worse than any of them, his round face hollowed out and gray. "A wandering Narkal tribe… a beast digging a den… any lifeform passing through on its way somewhere else… in the first place, does a place 'nobody will ever walk' even exist?"
"That's why I said we bury them deep. Even if they are found, it will be hundreds of years later."
"And what if they break out on their own?" Ezra shook his head. "I don't know how long those gems will hold them without someone tending them. Years, maybe, maybe a few months. Then we'd have two loose Oddities a few days away from home."
That ended the argument.
Nobody needed to imagine the twins wandering into the settlement and looking at their mothers, sisters and children with those empty blue eyes. And if they ever broke free, there was every chance they would come looking for the people who had put them in there.
"We're bringing them," Adam said at last, putting an end to the argument. "Ezra will keep them. Nobody else touches them."
There was one more reason the decision came so easily, and it surprised everyone, Ashen most of all.
The night before, while Ezra was renewing the charms, Ashen had sat beside him and let Patient Eye analyze the gems out of curiosity. He had expected to see nothing since gems were stone, and his skills were made for metal.
Surprisingly, he found a reaction. It was buried deep in the crystal, threaded through it in fine veins like ore through rock.
Many gems carried traces of metal; even if the behavior had nothing metallic about it, it turned out.
The black stones Ezra used were precious stones with an unusual talent for holding mana, and he had spent years tending and refining them until they could hold far more than mana. Over all that time, he had only managed to cultivate fewer than a dozen.
And the ones he had chosen happened to be among those whose crystal held metallic veins.
So Ashen's path skills could apply to them.
He had to waste more than one hour getting permission to try it, but when he fed Living Temper into the first gem, the metal inside it drank the nurturing mana, and the whole stone grew denser and steadier around the thing it held.
Through Patient Eye, he watched tiny hairline flaws in the crystal slowly knit themselves closed. Then he wrapped both gems in Resting Forge, and the faint pressure seeping from them dimmed further.
Ezra had stared at him for a long moment afterwards, then pulled him into a hug so hard his ribs creaked.
So that became Ashen's new duty. Every evening, he would sit beside the black gems and reinforce them, layer by layer, so that the twins would have no hope of ever getting out.
'I guard the prisoners, and I build the prison. Jailer and mason at the same time. Way to go, Ashen…' he smirked.
He didn't mind. If anything, he was secretly grateful.
From the moment he had seen those gems drink the twins in, an idea had started brewing in the back of his head. He wasn't sure of it yet. It needed time.
…But everything truly worthwhile did.
◉◉◉
The expedition members stayed at the cave for three more days.
Adam had smashed the carts and a good stretch of the vein during the fight, so the first day was spent clearing the wreckage and shoring up the walls again. The silver dust ground into the floor was swept up by the handful, because nobody was willing to waste a single grain of it. Then they set the charges, cleared the rubble, and mined.
Nobody laughed much while they did it. But the carts filled, one after another, until every carriage was loaded to capacity.
On the fourth morning, Ezra hung fresh charms across the mouth of the cave, the brothers rebuilt the concealment veil, and the expedition set off for home.
Adam did not lead them back the way they came.
"We know that road," he said when Ashen asked. "We've walked it enough times. What I don't know is what's moved in around it since the last expedition."
So they took a wide, looping route that circled through land the tribe rarely touched, swinging close to home from a different direction.
Like a lord inspecting his territory, Adam wanted eyes on everything within reach of the settlement. After the mechanical force had turned up in the ruins without anyone noticing, Ashen couldn't blame him.
For the most part, the journey back was uneventful.
That was only true compared to what they had gone through to reach the cave, of course. There was still the corruption to filter every waking hour and the black sky staring down at them without end.
There were still beasts that took a liking to the smell of fresh meat in the carriages, and still the occasional Narkal band, which the brothers greeted like old friends showing up with free food.
Then, on the sixth day, something new came.
Zombies.
◉
That was what Ashen privately called them, anyway. The brothers called them the Rotborn.
But the moment Ashen saw the first one lurch over a ridge, its jaw hanging loose and its eyes milky white, his mind went straight back to Esperra, to the nights he had spent watching the dead walk across a glowing screen with a bowl of snacks in his lap.
'Zombies. It's zombies. This world has zombies, too….'
The ambush came from three sides at once, and there were hundreds of them.
Most of them had once been Narkals. Their gray hides had gone mottled and soft, splitting open in places to show black, wet flesh beneath. But mixed among them were beasts, a few things Ashen didn't recognize at all, and here and there, things that walked on two legs with faces that still looked far too human.
"No contact!" Adam barked. "Weapons and spells only! Nothing touches your skin!"
The brothers fell into formation as smoothly as breathing. The backline began throwing fire. The front line held its distance, cutting with long reach, and every man pulled his collar up over his mouth and nose.
Ashen learned why within the first minute.
The Rotborn spread their sickness through everything. Bites, blood, and spit, that much was expected. But it also traveled through mana, so a spell held too long against one of them could carry the rot back up the mana weave into the caster. And worst of all, it rode on the air itself. The bloated ones gave off a faint, sweet stench, and that stench carried the sickness.
That was why there were so many of them. They didn't need to breed. They only needed to exist.
And they didn't die easily. A Narkal-zombie took a sword straight through the chest and kept coming. Another lost both legs and dragged itself forward by its arms. The only thing that put them down was crushing the brain completely, and even that wasn't enough. One of the brothers smashed a skull flat, turned to the next, and the body behind him began twitching back to its feet.
"Burn them!" Adam shouted. "Burn the bodies!"
As the fight went on, Ashen started picking out the differences between them, and the brothers named each kind for him between swings.
The Husks were the bulk of the horde. Slow, mindless shells that shambled forward with their arms out, alone, they were nothing. In the hundreds, they were a wall.
The Gnashers were the ones that made Ashen's skin crawl. They looked like fresh corpses; they were faster, as their muscles had not yet rotted. They ran on all fours, whatever they had been in life, jaws snapping, and they went for the throat most of the time.
The next type of the Rotborn were Pallbearers. They were huge and bloated, as they were composed of the remains of troll-sized Narkals and big beasts, and they did the strangest thing of all.
They didn't even fight. They lumbered through the chaos, scooping up the bodies of anything that fell, living or dead, and hauled them away toward the hills.
The next and rarest type among the Rotborn that attacked them were called Heralds by the men. They were only a handful, and they hung at the back of the horde.
Ashen looked at the thin, tall things with stretched throats, and when they opened their mouths, he could hear a low, droning moan rolling out across the field.
Every time a Herald moaned, more Rotborn came over the ridges.
"Kill the Heralds first!" Bram roared, already charging for them.
It took most of the afternoon. The plain was littered with burning bodies by the time the last Husk went down, and the smoke was thick and greasy with a suspicious sweet scent.
Ashen stood breathing hard behind his collar, his spear blackened with soot. He was waiting for his father to call the march.
Instead, Adam was looking toward the hills where the Pallbearers had dragged the bodies.
"Tobias," he said. "Silas. Gideon."
Three brothers stepped forward.
'…What march,' Ashen thought. 'Of course, we're following them.'
*
*
*
[The Husks]
[The Gnashers]
[The Pallbearers]
[The Heralds]