*The rhythm of S'pun-duh's constant movement—three steps ahead, always three steps ahead—triggered something in memory. Another time, another brother who moved without thinking, who ran toward danger while others calculated odds...*
**[FLASHBACK - Four days before S'pun-duh meets Ora]**
*Day 5 - The Mining Roads*
Duh felt the corruption before he saw it.
Like acid on his soul. Like wrong-notes in the earth-song. His brother felt nothing—S'pun-duh never felt anything until it was already happening to him.
"Stop," Duh said.
"Why?" S'pun-duh was already three steps ahead, always three steps ahead, his twin brother who thought with his feet instead of his brain.
"Something's wrong with—"
S'pun-duh rounded the corner. Stopped. For once, actually stopped.
The refugees huddled against the cliff face. Five of them. Were five. Now...
The child's arm had crystallized. Not all at once—spreading. You could see the progression. Fingers first. Then palm. Now up to the elbow. The mother held him, crying, as her son became something else.
"Please," she looked at them. "Please, he's only six."
S'pun-duh stepped forward. Duh grabbed him.
"Don't touch—"
"Wasn't going to." Lie. The dwarf always touched first, thought later. "Can you—"
"Maybe."
Duh approached slowly. Each step, the corruption got louder. Not sound. Feeling. The sensation of things becoming wrong.
He knelt by the boy. Kid was conscious. Aware. Watching his arm transform with the simple curiosity children had about horror.
"Does it hurt?" Duh asked.
"No. Feels cold. Then nothing."
The crystallization pulsed. Spread another inch.
Duh knew what he had to do. Knew the cost. Did it anyway.
He placed his hands on the crystal infection. Opened the channels his grandfather had taught him—not for healing exactly. For exchange. For balance.
The corruption flowed into him.
Not the crystal—that was just symptom. The wrongness beneath. The force that convinced flesh it should be mineral. Duh took it. Pulled it from the boy like pus from a wound. The corruption settled in his bones with familiar weight—exactly 0.7 soul-grams, the precise measurement Theron had taught Ora to recognize. Soul weight wasn't just emotional mass anymore; it was corruption currency.
It burned. Ice-burn. Soul-burn. As the wrongness entered him, the air around Duh dropped exactly 3 degrees. Not the gradual chill of Ora's corruption, but a sudden, precise drop that matched the dragons' destruction pattern.
The boy's arm softened. Crystal became flesh. Pink. Healthy. Human.
Duh's left hand went numb.
"Brother—"
"I'm fine."
Not fine. His hand was gray. Not crystallized—something else. Something between. The corruption couldn't transform him fully—dwarven souls were too dense, too tied to stone to become stone. But it could sit in him. Accumulate.
The mother sobbed gratitude. The boy flexed his fingers, amazed.
S'pun-duh punched Duh in the shoulder. "Idiot."
"Says the idiot who runs into walls."
"Walls move out of my way."
"That's not how walls work."
"Is when you're fast enough."
They argued because arguing was easier than acknowledging what just happened. That Duh had taken corruption into himself. That it would stay there. That each time he did this, he'd lose a little more.
Fair trade.
The other refugees watched with hollow eyes. All damaged. All carrying pieces of the crystallization. A man with geometric scars. A woman whose hair had turned to fiber optic. An old dwarf with one eye made of prism.
"Can you—" the woman started.
"Some. Not all. Not without—" Duh flexed his gray hand, calculating the precise percentage of functionality remaining—73.2%, down from yesterday's 78.6%. Still moved. Still felt. Barely.
"We'll pay—"
"Don't insult me."
Duh spent the next hour taking what corruption he could—0.3 soul-grams per patient, the precise amount his research indicated as theoretically safe. Small amounts. Enough to stop the crystallization from spreading. Not enough to kill him. Yet. His internal calculations showed 4.2 soul-grams accumulated total—approaching dangerous thresholds.
Each extraction followed the same brutal pattern: touch, channel, pull. Wrongness settled in his bones like sediment—another 0.5 soul-grams here, 0.3 there, accumulating like entries in a ledger. He tried not to scream. Failed. Pulled anyway.
By the end, his left arm was gray to the shoulder. Moved wrong. Felt wrong. Was wrong.
But five people would live who wouldn't have.
Spun Duh hadn't sat still the entire time. Pacing. Jumping. Climbing the cliff and back. Motion was his meditation.
"We should find who did this!" S'pun-duh kicked a stone that shattered against the cliff face. "Or better yet, I'll find them. Right now. You coming or not?"
"We don't know who—"
"Distillatori." The old dwarf with the prism eye spoke. "Heard the name before the dragons came. Council was arguing. Someone said Distillatori. Someone else said impossible. Said they'd been destroyed, their black coins that hurt to perceive all melted down. But I saw one of those coins last month—same cold that nearly paralyzed Marcus Greysteel when he touched one years ago."
"Where?"
"South. Everything bad comes from the south."
S'pun-duh was already moving. Already packed. Already decided.
"We're going."
"Maintain minimum preparation protocols—" Duh's voice carried the precise cadence of academic lecture, even as his gray hand trembled.
"When has that stopped us?"
Never. It had never stopped them. Duh sighed, shouldered his pack with his good arm.
"You'll get us killed."
"Haven't yet." S'pun-duh was already three steps ahead, always three steps ahead, the rhythm of his movement a counterpoint to Duh's measured pace.
"Yet."
They left the refugees with what supplies they could spare. Headed south. Duh moving steady, careful, feeling the corruption settle in his bones like stones in a bag. S'pun-duh moving fast, doubling back, scouting ahead, never still, never careful, never thinking beyond the next step.
Brothers. Opposites. Idiots.
But idiots who might matter.
Because Duh could take corruption. Not cure it—take it. Move it. Redirect it.
And S'pun-duh could move faster than thought—tapping fingers, shifting weight, never fully still. Faster than planning. Sometimes, faster than consequences.
In a world becoming wrong, maybe that was exactly what was needed.
Someone who could absorb the wrongness.
Someone too fast to think about it.
Brothers of stone, walking toward a war they didn't understand, carrying skills that might matter.
Or might just get them killed.
S'pun-duh was already fifty feet ahead, shouting about something he'd found.
Duh followed, gray arm hanging heavy, corruption whispering in his bones.
Fair trade.
Maybe.
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