Kabru didn’t trust silence.

The dungeon was loud when it wanted to kill you — traps clanked, monsters roared, footsteps echoed in betrayal. Quiet was the real danger. Quiet meant something was watching.

So when he heard the faintest rustle — not leaves, but scales brushing stone — his hand was already on the hilt of his sword.

Then he saw it.

Half-concealed behind moss-covered pillars was a shape he didn’t expect.

A boy. No — something shaped like a boy.

From the waist up, he looked human: young, pale, with long hair tied in a lazy knot and faint scars crisscrossing his collarbone like spiderwebs. But from the waist down, a long, gleaming serpentine tail coiled like liquid obsidian. A male lamia.

Kabru frowned.

He knew monsters. He knew this dungeon. And he knew there were no known male lamias recorded in the bestiaries.

Yet here one was.

And he wasn’t attacking.

Just watching.

Eyes like slivers of gold met Kabru’s without blinking — not predatory, but curious. Quiet. Cautious.

Kabru didn’t lower his sword.

“A male lamia…” he muttered under his breath. “That shouldn’t exist.”

His brain worked fast, cataloging, calculating. Lamias were seducers, liars, killers. They didn’t help. They didn’t look at you like they remembered your face from a dream.

But this one…

He was just sitting there. A dried flower tucked behind one pointed ear, his massive tail curled neatly beside him.

Stillness wasn’t trust.

But it wasn’t aggression either.

“Are you alone?” Kabru asked, knowing full well he wouldn’t get an answer.

The lamia tilted his head. Not a threat — just acknowledgement.

Then, with a slow, deliberate motion, he shifted slightly and gestured with his chin toward a crack in the ruins behind Kabru.

Kabru turned just enough to spot it — a shallow pit hidden beneath dead leaves. Spikes glinted beneath.

He hissed through his teeth.

“A trap…”

So he was warning him.

Kabru stared again, this time longer.

“You helped me.”

No response. No change in expression.

But there was something… familiar in his stillness. Something that stirred a forgotten ache in Kabru’s chest.

Someone he had lost. Long ago.

He swallowed the memory.

“You’re not like the others,” he murmured.

He didn’t lower his sword completely — but he loosened his grip.

The lamia didn’t move.

They stood — or sat — in that strange, tense calm for a while. One breathing heavy from readiness, the other unmoving, unreadable.

“I’ll call you...weird”