The drums of mourning had barely faded when the council gathered again. Smoke from the burial pyres still clung to the trees, a bitter veil that choked every breath. The air was heavy with both grief and suspicion, and in that thickness the Shaman—Sky-Torn—sat silent, a figure carved from storm-dark stone.
The System pulsed within him.[Villain Points: 72 → 73]The mistrust of kin fuels your ascent.
He should not have smiled, yet the corner of his mouth betrayed him. No one noticed; they were too busy hurling accusations across the fire.
Iron-Talon, chief of the Eagle Clan, lifted his spear as if it were a pointer for carving blame into the night. "The Wolf Clan withheld warriors. If they had stood with us at the ford, the raid would not have broken our line. The Elk would not be singing their dead."
White-Root of the Wolves rose, the sinews in his neck taut. "And if the Eagle Clan had listened when we told them the river sands were treacherous, your boys would not have stumbled knee-deep in mud while the Ash-Bandits circled like flies."
A hiss ran through the gathered counselors. Cinder-Song of the Elk struck the rim of her drum with a bone mallet, a single sharp knock. "This is not a court for peacocks to spread their tails. Speak sense."
Iron-Talon's jaw worked. "Sense is a proper levy of warriors."
White-Root's eyes remained cold. "Sense is hearing when you are told to wait."
Sky-Torn lowered his gaze, letting their words wash by as if he were hollow reed, not flesh. The System's interface unfurled: branching threads lit like embers, each one a temptation to pluck.
[New Villain Quest Unlocked: Fan the Flames of Division.Task: Seed three doubts with different leaders.Reward: +20 Villain Points, Skill Branch Unlock: Tongue of Serpents.]
His palm tingled. So easy. A joke whispered the wrong way, a comment left to sour. He could pull the confederacy apart like a poorly tied net. His grandmother's voice rose up from memory: Harmony is a braid, boy—don't be the knife. He swallowed that memory like bitter medicine and stood.
"Sit," Iron-Talon snapped. "Shamans speak when asked."
Sky-Torn kept standing. "The smoke asked."
That earned him a few glances, a few scoffs. Cinder-Song tilted her head. "Let him speak. The dead are nearer to him than to us."
Sky-Torn held up a carved bone charm, etched in ash spirals. "The ancestors say the greatest danger is not the foe beyond our borders, but the rot within our lodge. If you do not bind yourselves, you will fall apart before the next moon."
"The ancestors often speak in riddles," White-Root murmured, less confrontational now, tired lines etched in his face. "Give us more than wind."
Sky-Torn let his breath deepen. The System offered subtle augmentations, like a river offering a stepping stone. He tapped one.
[Voice of the Hollow Pine (Minor Rite): Your words carry a hush that gathers attention. Duration: one speech. Cooldown: until sunrise.]
The hush fell, almost visible, as though the pine boughs themselves leaned in.
"You blame each other," Sky-Torn said, "because it is easier to count another's failings than your own dead. But tell me, Iron-Talon, where was the Eagle's second spear line when the first recoiled? Had you placed it on the eastern bank, the Ash-Bandits would have found no flank."
Iron-Talon flinched, then puffed his chest. "We cannot be everywhere."
"And you, White-Root," Sky-Torn continued, turning slowly, "you told them to wait. True. Yet when the bands converged you allowed your runners to—"
"Our runners scouted," White-Root snapped.
"—to return late," Sky-Torn finished, "because you sent them too far. The river told you enemy feet were many, but you wanted to count them twice." He let that settle. "Each of you held to your way as if the way itself were your child. The ford did not break. You broke on the ford."
Cinder-Song's fingers relaxed on her drum. The bone mallet lowered. Iron-Talon's hand loosened on his spear. The council fire crackled and then sighed.
[Villain Points: +5]Truth wielded as blade cuts deeper than lies.
"Enough dressing of wounds with salt," said Red-Willow, matron of the Turtles, who had remained silent until now. "What do you propose, Shaman? Do not only rebuke us. Bind us."
The System shimmered. Sky-Torn could see paths like laces ready to be drawn tight.
[Rite Proposal Available: Covenant of Interlaced Spears.Effect (Temporary): In next conflict, allied clans gain +10 Cohesion. Cost: 1 Sacred Relic, 1 Day of Fasting. Warning: Requires trust among leaders ≥ 2.]
Trust was low. The warning flashed red like hot iron. He softened his tone. "A covenant. We carve a spear from each clan's sacred grove. We bind them with sinew and pitch. We fast a day. We teach our bodies hunger so our pride will learn the same."
Iron-Talon lifted his chin. "And who will hold this bound spear?"
"The one who steps back from it," Sky-Torn said. "If we are to hold together, we must first learn to let go."
Silence, then a grunt from White-Root that might have been approval. "I will lend a spear haft," he said. "But if a fasting day costs us our stride, we will be weaker for it."
"Weaker in belly," Cinder-Song agreed, "stronger in breath."
Red-Willow nodded slowly. "We will try this covenant. Better a rope made of many fibers than a single proud vine."
Iron-Talon stared at the fire. "If we try it, we do it soon."
"Before the next moon," Sky-Torn said, repeating the smoke's warning.
The council began to unclench. Arguments turned to logistics. They spoke of wood, of sinew, of fasting herbs. Sky-Torn let their talk fade and let himself fade with it, dissolving into the edge of the shadows as was his habit.
He left the circle before anyone realized he had gone.
In the forest the cool dark opened like a mouth and swallowed him, and he was grateful. The System's interface unfurled fully now, not just hints slipped into pauses. Glowing runes etched themselves in midair: a tree of forbidden futures, or a river delta of choices.
He traced the node from before, the one the quest had promised.
[Tongue of Serpents (Passive): Your words burrow deeper—turning suspicion into certainty, whispers into bonds or fractures. Influence chance scales with target's emotional intensity. Side-effect: Increased self-alienation.]
Side effect. He almost laughed. The System liked to label loneliness as if it were a rash.
He selected it. A coolness slid along his tongue and into his throat, a kind of slither his body did not have a name for. When he cleared his throat the sound carried differently: thinner, sharper, like a reed flute's note that could cut ice.
The owl hooted thrice. A sign. He turned, expecting only a rabbit or at most the shadow of a deer. Instead, in a small clearing where moonlight pooled like milk, a figure stood—the shape of a man, but dressed in foreign cloth: woven wool, not buckskin. Pale-skinned. Beard like wheat stubble. Hair the color of dry straw beneath a felt cap.
Sky-Torn did not move. The stories of his people named strangers with paleness as hunger-walkers: spirits that devoured ground and river rights, then called that devouring "settlement." Yet this one breathed steam into the cold, clumsy and human.
The man lifted his hands, palms open. He said words like stones rolling down a hill—hard edges, broken surfaces. "Friend," the stranger said, which was almost a word Sky-Torn knew, and then another that meant exchange. "Trade. Peace." He reached, not toward the Shaman, but toward his own belt, careful, slow, as if calming a skittish animal. From a leather pouch he drew a blade that captured the moon and threw it back, cruel and clean.
Sky-Torn's heart thundered once, then steadied into a fast drumbeat. The metal shone with an edge no flint could keep. He could see his own outline in it—distorted, like a fish seen through ripples.
The System quivered, eager.
[Villain Choice Detected.]— Accept the Blade and Seal a Secret Pact (Reward: +30 Villain Points; Unlocks: Foreign Tongue (Basic), Black Exchange).— Reject and Report to the Council (Reward: +10 Honor; Unlocks: Shield of Elders; System Disposition lowers by 1).
He swallowed. He heard his grandmother again: Never take the thing you can't repay. Yet the moonlight edged his hunger. Metal, hard and thin like cold dawn—his people had seen a few metal points on enemy spears, traded down river from whose hands no one had met. This was different. This was a knife that made the dark itself wary.
He lifted his empty hands to mirror the stranger: palm to palm, air to air. "Who sent you?" he asked in his own tongue, knowing the stranger wouldn't understand. "What tide pushes you here?"
The man smiled without showing teeth and said a cluster of words, one of which sounded like a name: "Thomas." He repeated the earlier words with patience, tapping his chest when he said "Friend," pointing east when he said "Trade," laying a hand on his own heart when he said "Peace."
Peace like a blanket pulled over a sleeping wolf, Sky-Torn thought. Still a wolf underneath.
"Thomas," Sky-Torn said, tasting the syllables, testing the weight. He pointed to himself. "Sky-Torn." He copied the gesture the man had used for friend. He watched carefully, because sometimes friendship in one mouth was a leash in another.
The man—Thomas—nodded eagerly. He extended the blade, handle first, a gesture so universal it nearly undid the Shaman. Sky-Torn did not reach immediately. He let the System's choices hang like spears over his head, weighted and deliberate.
"Trade?" Thomas coaxed. He fished in his pouch again and produced a bright bead like a captured berry, a small bell, a scrap of mirror. The baubles flashed. Sky-Torn's mind leaped forward: A mirror would teach his warriors to paint their faces more precisely. A blade would teach them to cut in new ways. Beads would teach their eyes that beauty could be bought.
He gestured to the knife and then shook his head, a small no. Then he tapped his own wrist where an old scar crossed it like a witness. He pointed back toward the lodgefires. "Secret," he said, in his own language, and then tried the stranger's in broken pieces: "No… others." He touched lips with two fingers and then pressed those fingers to his heart. A vow.
Thomas tilted his head. Understanding flickered. He mimed zipping his lips—a ridiculous motion—and nodded. "Secret," he repeated, mangling the sounds, not the meaning.
Sky-Torn's palm lifted of its own accord, a lazy leaf caught by a stronger wind.
[Confirm choice: Accept the Blade and Seal a Secret Pact.]
"Forgive me, Grandmother," he whispered.
He closed his fingers around the handle.
[Villain Points: +30]The first betrayal roots itself. History will never forget.[Unlocks: Foreign Tongue (Basic): Gain fragments of understanding for repeated words heard. Progress increases with exposure.][Unlocks: Black Exchange: You may initiate secret trades. Each successful exchange grants +3 Villain Points; each discovery by allies causes -10 Honor.]
The blade's weight felt both wrong and inevitable in his hand, like a memory he had not yet made. He slid it beneath his cloak. He drew out, for balance if not exactly for fairness, a packet of dried deer strips and two obsidian flakes wrapped in deerhide. He held them out, palm open. The stranger's eyes sparked. He took the meat as if it were gold, the flakes as if they were feathers—fascinated, respectful. They were both trading for knowledge neither yet could price.
Thomas pointed east again, then lifted two fingers and walked them through the air: a pantomime of days. He put his hand to his chest. "Thomas." He touched Sky-Torn's shoulder, carefully, like a person learning the taboos of a shrine. "Sky-Torn." Then he tapped the blade hidden under the Shaman's cloak and raised his eyebrows in a question that needed no words: more?
Sky-Torn drew a slow line in the dirt with his toe, a boundary. He pointed to the ground between them, then to the moon, then held up two fingers. Two nights. He patted his chest and nodded, then brought a finger to his lips again. Thomas copied the gesture with boyish seriousness and tapped his cap brim—some foreign courtesy—and retreated backward a step before turning into the trees.
The forest exhaled when he was gone. Sky-Torn did not, not yet. He listened. The owl hooted again, twice this time, like the shortening of some thread.
The blade against his ribs felt like a talking snake: whisper, whisper, whisper. The System purred.
[Tongue of Serpents synergy: When bargaining, your silences read as promises. Caution: Overuse breeds oaths you did not make.]
He tested the edge on a strand of grass. It parted without resistance. He sheathed the sound of his own admiration quickly, ashamed of its brightness. He was Shaman first; he told himself this the way a man tells himself to breathe.
On the path back to the lodgefires, the night leaned closer, listening. Each step echoed heavier. Each root felt like a question. He imagined the covenant spear bound with sinew and pitch, imagined it cutting nothing but air, because metal had taught his hand a new hunger.
At the treeline he paused. The council had broken. Only embers remained, a few guards humming to keep from drowsing. He skirted the glow and went to his lodge—the one of bark and hide and charms that had belonged to his grandmother and to her mother before her. He entered and set the blade on a woven mat, then covered it with a piece of deerskin, then covered that with a basket. Three layers did not quiet the blade's presence.
He knelt. He ground cedar into ash and ash into a paste, and he painted a ward across the basket's rim, a crooked fishbone line that meant forgetting look. He whispered the small charm that blurred a thing against its surroundings.
[Minor Glamour: Lost-in-the-Corner.Effect: An object is less likely to be noticed when in plain sight. Duration: one day. Cost: smudge of cedar ash.]
He sat back, waiting for guilt to come and take him by the shoulders. It did not come as guilt. It came as a bending of every old story he knew. In the Creation Song, Trickster had stolen fire to teach warmth to the people and was punished by the singe of his own tail. In the Hero's Tale, Flint-Walker learned how to turn stone edges keener than teeth and became so proud he cut his own thumb and bled to death laughing. Perhaps each gift has its story-tax.
The System, patient as a spider, offered a new branch.
[Destiny Tweak Available: "Name of the Pact."Description: Inscribe a hidden name into tonight's events. Future songs will remember the exchange by this name, altering how history frames your role. Options:— "The Snake in the Basket" ( +5 Villain Points; increases fear in future recollections )— "The Moonlit Knife" ( +3 Villain Points; increases fatalism in future recollections )— "The First Bridge" ( +2 Villain Points; slightly reduces animosity from foreign contacts in future scenes ).]
He stared at the options until they blurred. Naming was power. Names were the handles on reality's pots; without a handle you fumbled and burned yourself. He was tired of burning. Still—he was honest enough, at least with himself, to admit the Villain System rewarded the darker name with the richer coin.
He selected "The Moonlit Knife."
[Villain Points: +3]Fate acquires a sheen. Historians will later say the light made it inevitable.
Dawn filched color into the sky like a cautious thief. He had barely slept when the first raven started gossiping at the edge of camp. He took the basket and tucked it deeper beneath a cedar shelf, under bundles of sweetgrass and an ordinary stone axe that would keep any casual searcher satisfied. He washed his hands with cold water until his fingers stung and then went to the fasting place to prepare for the covenant he himself had proposed.
They gathered in the shadow of the Turtle grove where the old trees swayed as if remembering storms from centuries. Each clan brought its offering: Eagle a shaft straight as a spear of sunlight, Wolf a length of sinew oiled and strong, Elk pitch in a birch cup that smelled of lightning. They looked at one another and at him. Trust among leaders: not even 2, he sensed; the System's warning still pinned to his mind. He would have to braid more than wood today.
"Fasting is not punishment," he said, sprinkling crushed juniper into the air. "It is a turning of the bowl so the sky may pour into it."
White-Root snorted, but ate nothing. Iron-Talon scowled and did the same. Cinder-Song closed her eyes and hummed a drone that dozens of grandmothers had hummed to keep from eating until the boys returned from hunt.
They carved, bound, and pitched the covenant spear. It was ugly in the way only new things are ugly: honest about its seams. Sky-Torn lifted it to show them. The pitch dripped one sticky tear. He set it upright in the earth.
"Who will hold it?" asked Red-Willow.
"The one who steps back from it," he repeated, and stepped back himself. He had enough to hold already. He watched as Cinder-Song took one pace forward and then, unexpectedly, paused and retreated. Iron-Talon stepped, then stopped. White-Root frowned, not moving. It was Red-Willow who finally stepped forward—not to claim it, but to press her palm to the haft and then release. "Let it stand," she said. "A pole we tie ourselves to when wind grows loud."
Sky-Torn nodded. The System pinged.
[Covenant of Interlaced Spears: Established.Cohesion +10 in next conflict (Temporary).Honor among leaders: +1 (Temporary).Cooldown for Tongue of Serpents effects on council reduced (You learn their angles).]
He should have felt lightened. He did not. He felt like a man who had built a raft and then hidden a knife in his belt to cut its ropes at the right moment.
That night the blade called again—as objects do when they are more than objects. He went to his lodge as casually as a man might go to relieve himself, as unremarkable as any evening walk. He lifted the basket, lifted the deerskin, lifted the knife. Its edge hoarded moonlight.
He whispered to the System. "If I take this to Thomas again, what song will you play?"
[Black Exchange Progression:— Second meeting unlocks Gesture Lexicon (understanding improves for trade words).— Each secret trade grants +3 Villain Points.— Risk Meter: Low → Medium (if two council members suspect, Honor -10; if three, Exile Risk +5%).]
He weighed his own honor on one palm and the knife on the other. The knife did not weigh much, but it tilted the world.
He stepped to the lodge flap—and halted. On the packed earth outside, small footprints. A child's. He stiffened. He bent, studied. He recognized the pattern where the big toe dragged slightly: Red-Willow's grandson, Little Reed. The prints stopped near his door, circled once, and wandered away. A child's curiosity, perhaps, not the gods' omen he instantly feared. He let his breath out. He brushed the prints with a pine bough until they blurred into the general story of feet.
He slipped into the trees again, blade tucked beneath his cloak.
The night welcomed him like a co-conspirator.
At the clearing, Thomas was already there, as if the pale one had been invented by the clearing itself. He had brought more things: a length of cloth so fine it flowed like water through fingers, a metal pot whose lip shone, beads glossy as beetle backs. He grinned when he saw Sky-Torn, a smile like an open shutter.
"Friend," Thomas said. He pointed to the knife, then to himself, then held up three fingers. Trade—more—three somethings. He had a pack-strap mark grooved into his shoulder and a nervous energy like a deer that had taught itself not to spook.
Sky-Torn unwrapped from his pouch the things he had chosen carefully: three bundles of dried willow bark (for pain), a spool of sinew, a carved whistle that called fish toward a net (or so the boys believed; sometimes belief was the stronger bait), and—after a long pause—one of the Eagle Clan's arrowheads he had gathered from the ford's muddied ground, the losing side's iron and the winning side's story mixed into a single point. He arranged them on a flat stone, spaced like stars.
Thomas's eyes pulled wide at the whistle. He laughed softly when he blew it and no sound came; he understood that tools often hid their talk. He traced a finger along the sinew, testing its give, then shook his head when it wouldn't stretch like his woven cords. He pointed to the willow bark, then to his temples, grimacing—a pantomime of pain. He understood, or had learned from someone. He nodded. He pointed at the arrowhead, then at Sky-Torn, brows lifted: Where?
Sky-Torn drew a quick little map in the dirt with a twig: a river bend, a ford, small stick men like ants, arrows drawn like falling rain. He placed an X where the mud had clutched at ankles. He looked up to see if he'd done wrong by telling too much. Thomas's face had turned intent, not greedy, not gloating—simply hungry for knowledge the way we are hungry for stories. His kind of hunger was no less dangerous for being ordinary.
They traded. Cloth for bark, beads for sinew, pot for whistle, and for the arrowhead—a small file, metal-teethed, that purred when drawn over a branch. Sky-Torn held it like a small living animal. He pictured repairs he could make not in hours but in heartbeats.
[Villain Points: +3 (Black Exchange)][Foreign Tongue (Basic): +1 Progress → 2/10. You intuit new words: "knife," "river," "more," "north."][Risk Meter: still Low. Tracks: 0/2 suspicions.]
Then Thomas did something that punctured the clear, simple surface of the exchange. He touched his own chest, said a string of words—family-scented words, Sky-Torn guessed, because of how his eyes softened and because he gestured counting on fingers smaller than a man's. He pointed east and then lowered his hand slowly like a setting sun. Illness? Winter? He mimed shivering, coughing. He pointed at the willow bark again with urgency. The sound he made then was the same sound Cinder-Song made when describing the winter cough: a thick roughness.
For a moment the weight of the knife lifted and the weight of each breath returned. Humans begging medicine was older than trade. Sky-Torn broke the willow bundles and offered more than he had planned. Thomas placed his hand over his heart, head bowed, the gesture not from Sky-Torn's people but recognizable as sincerity chiseled thin.
The System hummed as if pleased by something he did not entirely understand.
[Complication Tag: Mercy applied to exchange. Future negotiations with this contact slightly reduce treachery risk. Villain Points unaffected.]
They fell into a rhythm: he pointed to things and said their names; Thomas repeated with strange vowels; Thomas said foreign names for things; Sky-Torn repeated with laughter at his own clumsy mouth. Language squirmed between them like a fish they were both trying to catch without breaking its spine. Words meant river, north, friend, knife, secret, return.
The owl called once. It was not a sign Sky-Torn knew, but he felt the gathering of consequence the way one feels the storm pressure drop before thunder.
They parted with gestures that neither owned. Sky-Torn retreated and did not turn his back until the trees took Thomas from sight. He returned to camp, to the covenant spear glistening with cooling pitch, to the hum of warriors who had not eaten since dawn and were now beginning to see visions along the edges of their hunger. He walked through them like an ordinary man and laid his ordinary body down inside his not-at-all ordinary lodge.
His dreams were crowded. He saw the covenant spear bound tighter and tighter until the pitch cracked like a river in frost. He saw knives flowering out of earth like strange bright leaves. He saw a boy with a dragging big toe walking straight toward his lodge and never pausing, lifting basket, lifting deerskin, lifting truth. He saw himself in a later season, older, thinner, turning the knife in his hands as if it were a star that had fallen, both omen and weapon.
He woke with the taste of iron in his mouth.
Morning would bring more talk, more binding, more fasting. Evening would bring the path to the clearing again. He did not know how many evenings he had before the covenant and the knife collided. The System did.
[*Fate Trajectory Updated: "The Moonlit Knife" now threads through the next three chapters of your life. Branch points:— Discovery by a child (20% likelihood)— Discovery by a rival (40% likelihood)— Weapon turned against kin (15% likelihood)— Weapon turned against foe (60% likelihood)Villain Points Potential: +45 total; Honor Loss Potential: -30 total.]
Sky-Torn lay back and counted breaths as if they could balance numbers. The blade did not need counting. It only needed use.
History would name him villain here, he suspected, not when he first raised the blade in open fight. Histories loved beginnings. They loved moonlite places and whispered vows. He closed his eyes and raised his hand, palm up, letting the dawn light pool there as if it were something he could pour over what he had done and wash it clean.
The light did not wash anything. It only made edges sharper.
And in that brightness, the first betrayal rooted itself deeper.