"It's the third time this month."
Mark said it the way someone comments on the weather, matter of fact, already moving toward the pen with a shovel.
'Third time.'
Zelaine stood very still.
A piglet growing an extra leg overnight was not something that happened three times in a month in any world she was familiar with. She looked at Mark's back, at the unbothered set of his shoulders, at the complete absence of alarm in his movements.
'Is it a side effect of mind manipulation, or are they simply taking this too lightly.'
She watched him bury it without ceremony and said nothing.
On the walk back to the house she found her thoughts drifting sideways. It was only now occurring to her how quiet this family's life was in a way that went beyond simple rural detachment.
No neighbors stopping by. Mavine had recently come out of appendix removal surgery and not a single person had come to the house to check on her. No friends, no extended family, no casual well-wishers.
'Come to think of it, they are completely isolated.'
She glanced back once at the farm, at the fish ponds and the rice rows and the pig enclosure, all of it self-contained and turned inward.
'Maybe I am reading into it,' she thought, pushing through the front door. 'I don't know how things work in Ellejort. Maybe this is normal here.'
But the doubt had already settled in and she knew from experience that it did not leave easily.
She went to her room and sat on the bed and got to work.
Coding.
She summoned her yai circuit. A cube roughly three palms wide materialized in front of her, its surfaces covered in symbols, intricate and dense. She oriented it with a familiar turn of her wrist.
She had two yaicrafts. The one she was working on was her crystal yaicraft.
Well, on the surface.
'I have spent all these years upgrading it. Now only a single skill remains.'
Crystal yaicraft was fortunately just an application of heat manipulation yaicraft at its core. Once she understood that she had made a simple decision, trading her yai reservoir expansion in favor of upgrading the yaicraft itself.
Her initially maximum reservoir capacity sat at ninety four which was already an extremely rare, prodigal level figure.
However she traded her reservoir bringing it down to eighty just so that she could upgrade it and align it more with her other yaicraft.
The second yaicraft was a different matter entirely.
Time manipulation yaicraft.
An abstract and almost incomprehensibly powerful yaicraft that only three people in all of recorded history had ever successfully mastered.
For almost everyone else who received it the coding demands alone were enough to finish them. The tasks it set were often borderline ridiculous. Most yai users who attempted it did not come out the other side intact.
It was more or less a death sentence dressed up as a gift.
Zelaine adjusted the circuit symbols and kept working.
'I have designed the composition of her yaicraft to have extraordinary rotational speed, structural durability, quality of output, and fuel efficiency.'
Similar to Atiya she had various crests distributed across her body, yai nerves that functioned as numerical conversion points, taking raw yai and processing it into usable output for her yaicrafts. The architecture of it was something she had refined over many years.
Though her level of mastery and control over it was on an entirely different level compared to Atiya.
She kept inputting into the cube, her focus narrow and total, the rest of the room ceasing to exist in any meaningful way. The skill was nearly complete.
She could see the shape of it now, the way you can see the outline of something in fog before it fully resolves. Almost everything was in place.
Only a single strand of code remained and she had no idea what it was.
Cleak.
The door opened and Mavine leaned against the frame looking at her with the expression of someone who had walked in on this exact scene more times than they could count.
"Why are you always caught up in your yaicrafts."
'Because it is the only thing I can say I earned entirely by myself.'
Zelaine thought it and said nothing.
"Anyway, come down for lunch."
Lunch.
Zelaine's focus dissolved instantly and completely. She was already standing up.
Little did she know, what was going to happen that night.
****
"I heard he is quite devastated."
Fredo stood with his hands folded, watching the flames through the narrow opening of the enclosure.
"I did not expect him to be such a good and sweet boy," Leishna said.
She was watching too, though her expression was harder to read than Fredo's. The fires moved in clean columns, contained and deliberate, the smoke drawn upward through the architecture of the tomb itself. It was a well designed place. It had simply gone unused for a very long time.
The tomb sat inside an enclosed space entirely separate from the world outside its walls. No snow reached here except for what clung to the soles of their shoes when they entered, small wet prints that melted quickly against the warm stone floor.
"This tomb has not received bodies for thousands of years," Fredo said quietly. "Except for the sacrifice humans."
Leishna let that sit for a moment. Then she asked, in the same conversational tone she used for most things,
"If you want to be freed of the curse, why don't you all simply take this chance and die."
It was not cruel the way she said it, she was genuinely curious.
Fredo did not look at her. "We are immortal only in the absence of sacrifice. You know this."
"I know. Which means right now you are as mortal as anything. So."
"I would have killed myself long ago," Fredo said, "if not for the purpose of our existence."
Leishna tilted her head. "What purpose."
He was quiet for a moment, watching a column of flame shift and resettle.
"We are the last of our species. Entirely. What remains of us is what stands in this village and nothing more." He exhaled slowly.
"Our duty, the only duty that has ever truly mattered, is to continue. To populate. To carry the species forward until the curse ends, however many centuries that requires. Simply surviving is not the point, the continuation is the point."
It was his family's charge, handed down in the final years of the previous head's life.
The weight of an entire biological lineage pressed into the hands of one man and told, simply, do not let it end. Fredo had not chosen it. But he had never once considered putting it down.
The fires burned steadily.
"And when the curse does end," Leishna said.
"Then we will finally have something worth populating for."
Leishna was quiet for a while, turning something over behind her eyes.
'Unfortunately the sacrifice this time might make your race extinct.'
She did not say it out loud. She thought it and let it sit there in the private space behind her expression.
She remembered the moment clearly. How Atiya had unsummoned Sajibu when he could have ended Kellen cleanly and quickly with it. Instead he had used his hands.
She had watched him make that calculation in real time, the deliberate choice of method, tearing rather than cutting, making the wound read as something the creature had done rather than something a weapon had done.
He had thought clearly enough under that kind of pressure to stage it properly.
She found that more interesting than the killing itself.
"Kellen was fun to hang out with," Leishna said, pouting slightly. A small and genuine sadness. She would not be meeting her again.
"When will he be healed?"
Fredo's concern had already moved past mourning and back to the living. Specifically to the one whose life currently mattered most to the village's future.
"His injury? Soon enough, though he did lose some blood." Leishna paused. "As for his mind, I cannot say. He may be traumatized. Possibly forever."
Fredo flinched at that.
Meanwhile inside Screja's house something else was unfolding in quiet. Atiya lay on the bed, bandages wrapped around his midsection where the spider's projectile had caught him.
In the chaos of the fight he had not coated himself with yai in time and the shot had found flesh instead.
Screja moved around the room, and they were alone.
Every trace of yai on him was carefully concealed.
Since his yai was uncoated and concealed, he had fallen into Screja's trap without knowing it yet.
"I lost my friend today trying to save you," Screja said, moving around the bed, her hands occupied with the bandages and medicine. "And yet here I am nursing you back to health."
'She must be talking about Kellen. And probably some of the guards too.'
Atiya did not let himself think further down that road. He was already familiar with where it led and it was not a useful place to visit right now.
He stared at the ceiling instead.
His life had always revolved around deaths. That was simply the truth of it, unadorned.
When he first arrived at the 49th belt he had not known what murder was. Had not known that death was permanent, that once gone something did not reassemble itself and continue.
He had operated entirely on instinct, the way something feral does, he had learn to shredd people into pieces before he even learned a language.
He had killed and killed and killed. For resources, for passage, for food, for no reason that could be articulated beyond the immediate pressure of survival.
He had plotted to kill and killed to gain and killed because nothing had yet told him there was another way to move through the world.
He had also once poisoned a whole gang of people thinking they mistakening they would kill him.
Morality had not touched him. He had not known it existed. What even was the meaning of it to someone completely foreign when it acted nothing no more than hypothetical shackles created by society and imposed by society.
No one had taught him yet, not about love, family, blood, life. How to wear a clother properly.
How to conduct oneself properly, how to.....
Then someone had appeared.
Just like a saviour, a hero from legends.
Far above him in every sense. She had looked at what he was and decided, for reasons he still did not entirely understand, to adopt him as her son.
She forgave him for the sins he didn't understand.
Inteja V Pharsa. His mother.
She taught him language. Human language first, then others.
She had taught him yaicraft, shaped and refined and deliberately exposed him into a better world. She had given him the architecture of a self, the scaffolding of a person rather than a creature.
Though Inteja was not against killing. She had simply labelled the distinction between killing and murder.
If it was for a purpose with real weight in it, then of course killing was okay for her and that's what Atiya learned from her too.
Purpose versus savagery. A step taken deliberately toward something versus destruction for its own sake.
What he had done to Kellen was purposeful. A single small step on a road that stretched far further than this village, this mountain, this cold enclosed world he had found himself trapped inside.
'I will pave my way with corpses if I have to,' he thought. Simply as a statement of fact about himself that he had long since made peace with. 'As long as in the end I am back home.'
Atiya Pharsa, a foreigner. A man who wanted nothing complicated from the world. Just himself, his family, his friends, and the ordinary life that had been interrupted.
Everything between now and that life was simply the road.