Cain's cruelty grew quieter over the years.
He had found new ways to hurt. And one of the people he hurt most was the one who had done nothing to deserve it.
Misty.
His twin by the rules, his promised bride. The quiet, sleepy girl he had declared boring when they were six. Cain had never stopped making it clear that she was the prize he didn't want.
And at some point, he had started using her.
He would send her to deliver small gifts to Lapis. A carved comb. A ribbon. A pretty stone he had found near the stream. Misty would carry them dutifully to Lapis's door, and Lapis would accept them, because she couldn't bear to send Misty away empty-handed, and then she would throw them into a drawer and never look at them again.
Ashen only found out when he saw Misty standing outside the door one evening, a ribbon in her hands, staring at it with an expression he had never seen on her face before.
He gently took the ribbon from her, set it aside, and took her to the farm.
They sat together under the tree for a long time. She didn't say much.
She had always been a little ditzy and airy, but Ashen considered that part of her charm. Which man didn't appreciate an airheaded, softly spoken woman?
His own Seraphine had the same air about her, though she was much less soft-spoken.
Ashen smiled fondly as he remembered that blonde troublemaker, only to notice an extra weight against his side.
Misty had already leaned her head against his shoulder and let out a long, tired sigh, as if she could finally rest easy.
After that, he made a point of spending more time with her.
He would bring her to the farm while he tended to the tree. He would sit with her during meals. Sometimes, she would sleep with her head on his lap while he read. And slowly, as he spent more time with her, he began to notice things about her skills that he had never paid attention to before.
Misty had chosen Sloth, just like her twin.
Her Thema was Nanourisma, which translated to Lullaby.
When Ashen first heard it, he had assumed it was a soft, domestic Thema, the kind that soothed children and calmed nightmares. He had been half right.
Misty's lullabies didn't put people to sleep; they put attention to sleep.
Her first skill, gained at the Seventh Step, let her lull to sleep any gaze that pried too deeply into her. A watcher's eyes would grow heavy, their focus would drift away from her, and the secrets they were trying to see would blur and fade like a dream upon waking.
Her second made her name drowsy. Whenever someone spoke her name with the intention of finding her through it, the name would fall asleep before it could reach whatever was listening, and the call would go unanswered.
And as she climbed her Steps, her skills grew stronger. At first, they only covered herself. Then her closest kin. By her Fifth Step, she could extend them over the entire family, and she gained a third skill that let her lay a hush over divination itself. Any augury that turned toward her, her kin, or her home would find nothing but an empty, sleeping room.
When she showed him that third skill, Ashen went very quiet for a long time.
He thought of Adam's warning at the edge of their territory and of the things that could sense their presence when enough people thought of them, talked about them, or knew their names.
…He thought of Secrets.
'Even this wouldn't stop him,' he told himself. 'Not if he truly asked. Taboo doesn't care how quietly a name is spoken.'
But every wall between his family and the things that hunted names was one more wall a curious god would have to climb before finding them.
"There's only one problem," Misty said sleepily, curling into his side. "It costs so much mana, big brother. Just covering myself tires me out. If I tried to cover the whole family all the time, I'd be asleep for a week."
Ashen looked down at her.
Then, slowly, he started to smile.
"Misty. How would you feel about having an infinite supply of mana?"
◉◉◉
Ashen had started a new project after understanding the true extent of Misty's skills, and it took nearly a year to set up properly.
The heart of the underground base was situated in a deep chamber beneath the gathering room, where every ward, veil, and barrier protecting the settlement came together like the roots of a great tree.
For many years, the wards had been kept alive by the family responsible for them: Ezra, his wife, and their grown children, who took turns feeding their own mana into the chamber every single day. They had never once missed a day aside from Ezra himself, who had to go on expeditions.
Ashen brought them the metal core.
Vera, Ezra's wife, stared at it for a long time, then slowly began to cry.
With the help of his sisters, they installed it at the center of the chamber, where every line of the wards converged. Its rings spun quietly in the dark, and its glow spread through the threads of the barriers like blood through veins.
The defenses of the base more than tripled overnight.
For the first time in two decades, Vera and Ezra slept through an entire night without having to worry about the wards.
But Ashen had a bigger idea.
He wanted to weave Misty's skills directly into the wards, so that the entire settlement would be hushed, its name drowsy, its existence asleep to any divination, powered by a source that would never run dry.
It was much harder than it sounded.
Misty had to master her skills well enough to imbue them into objects first. Then into fixed structures, like doors and walls, then into the intangible weave of the wards themselves, which were half mana and half intent and impossible to hold.
There were months of failures, with Misty falling asleep from exhaustion halfway through and Ashen carrying her back to bed.
But eventually, it worked.
The day the hush finally blanketed over the entire settlement, Ashen felt it pass over him like an actual blanket being drawn over his head.
The world became quiet in a way that had little to do with sound.
Misty stood beside him at the center of the chamber, her eyes half-closed with fatigue as she stared at the spinning core.
"It's warm," she murmured. "Like someone humming."
Ashen put an arm around her shoulders. "We're working it to the bone. Of course it's going to heat up, hehe…"
"Big brother… bullying is bad."
"It's okay. You've been bullying it alongside me this whole time, so we're accomplices. I'm not alone, dear twin sister of mine."
"Euuuu~"
Ashen smiled gently at the squirming seventeen-year-old girl acting like she was seven.
Then he closed his eyes and heaved a relieved sigh.
'The thread hasn't become a rope… but maybe it's a little thicker now.'
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[Misty Hunt (NSFW)]