This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

With the Dream sheep understood, Elias turned his attention to their darker siblings.

The Nightmare sheep, it turned out, were nearly mirror images of the Dream sheep—the same abilities, the same gentle creatures, only with everything turned toward fear instead of comfort. Where a Dream sheep wove pleasant dreams, a Nightmare sheep wove terrors. Where one gave off a drowsy, soothing aroma, the other’s carried something colder. The shape of the two was the same. Only the substance differed.

But there were differences worth noting, and Elias took care to note them.

The first was strength.

The Nightmare sheep’s Shout—the ability to force a person into sleep—was markedly more powerful than the Dream version, harder to resist, quicker to take hold. Whatever else nightmares were, they had teeth the dreams did not.

The second was a matter of control. A Dream sheep was protective by nature; it guarded the dream it made, but it gladly shared the dreaming, letting others enter and move within it. A Nightmare sheep did the opposite. Once it had built a nightmare, it seized full control of that nightmare and let nothing else in—no other beast, no other mind, nothing permitted to enter or intervene. The nightmare was the sheep’s alone to govern, sealed tight from the outside.

And the third was the most telling. Where a Dream sheep ate a dream and gave cultivation back to the dreamer, a Nightmare sheep ate a nightmare and kept everything for itself—drawing strength from the terror it consumed, and storing the worst of it away, banking nightmares like ammunition to be shaped later into weapons against the mind.

Comfort that gave. Fear that took and kept. Two sheep, one root.

When the research was finished, Elias called everyone together to explain what he’d found—and, more importantly, what he meant to do with it.

“I want to keep a few of each for ourselves,” he began, “and donate the rest to the Sagittarius frontier. The way I did with the turtles.” His eyes went to Cassian. “But I’ve been thinking about how. And I don’t think the dream sheep and the nightmare sheep should go to the same people.”

That got their attention.

“The Dream sheep,” he said, “should go to civilians. And to retired soldiers—the ones who’ve left the fighting behind. The nightmare sheep are what the frontline soldiers actually need.”

It was, on its face, backwards. He saw them think so. So he explained.

“A dream sheep is perfect for someone trying to heal,” Elias said. “Someone who’s done fighting, who wants to put it down and build a peaceful life. A good dream every night, real rest, cultivation while they sleep—for a person stepping away from the war, that’s a kindness with no cost.”

He hesitated, then went on, more carefully—keeping it general, because the specifics belonged to a life no one here knew about.

“But for someone still in it—still fighting, still going back to the line every day—I think a happy dream might be cruel. Because you have to wake up from it. You spend a night somewhere warm and safe and whole, and then the morning comes and takes it all back, and the contrast only makes the real thing harder to carry.”

It was not a thing he could explain how he knew. He only knew it. Somewhere behind his calm expression sat a memory he never spoke of—nights, in another life, when he had dreamed of an ordinary body and ordinary days and a normal family with nothing wrong with him at all, and then woken to find none of it true. Those had been the worst mornings he could remember. The dream had not been a mercy. It had been a better world he had to lose again the instant he opened his eyes.

He kept all of that to himself, and said only, simply, “A dream you have to wake up from can hurt worse than no dream at all. I believe that. So I don’t want to hand those dreams to people who still have to wake up on a battlefield.”

The room had gone quiet anyway. Elias cleared his throat and pressed on, back to the practical, where he was more comfortable.

“So—the nightmare sheep, for the frontline. And not for cruelty. Hear me out.”

He held up a hand and counted the uses off on his fingers.

“First: soldiers on a frontier like yours already have nightmares. Plenty of them. A nightmare sheep can eat those—draw the bad dream right out of a sleeping mind and devour it, and the soldier simply rests. The sheep grows stronger, the soldier sleeps clean. Everyone gains.”

“Second: if you don’t want to simply erase them, you can use the sheep the other way—have it build a lighter nightmare, a smaller version of the thing that haunts someone, scaled down to a size they can actually face. A way to walk back through the fear in manageable pieces until it loses its grip. And it’s safe, because the sheep holds complete control of the nightmare the whole time. The moment it becomes too much, the sheep steps in and ends it. No one gets lost in there.”

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He paused.

“And third—this one might be too much, but it’s an option. You can use a nightmare sheep to train. Ask it, and it’ll construct a perfect combat scenario inside a soldier’s mind—any enemy, any terrain, any situation you want to drill, as real as a true battle and with none of the dying. A training ground with no casualties.”

He ran out of fingers and out of certainty at about the same moment.

“That’s—that’s all of it,” he finished, a little awkwardly. “And I’m sorry if any of that was nonsense. I’ve never been a soldier. I’ve never set foot on a frontline. I don’t really know what those nights are like for the people who live them, so I might be completely wrong about what would help. You’d know far better than me.”

He looked, for a moment, like a student who had handed in an essay on a country he’d never visited.

But Cassian was not laughing.

The commander had listened to every word with grave, complete attention, the way he listened to scouts reporting from the field—and what he had heard, he was now turning over with the seriousness it deserved.

It was not nonsense. None of it was. Elias, who had never worn a uniform, had reasoned his way to things Cassian had watched destroy good soldiers for years. The cruelty of waking from a kind dream—he had seen that, seen men come apart not from the horror but from the brief, unbearable mercy of forgetting it. The value of eating a nightmare whole; the careful, controlled re-facing of a fear; a battlefield to train on that took no lives. Every use the breeder had laid out was sound. More than sound—some of them, Cassian suspected, would save lives the turtles couldn’t reach.

And as he sat with it, his mind already moving ahead to the frontier and how he would put each one into practice, another thought surfaced—one that fit a little too well.

His frontier. The psychic wasteland the Sagittarius Legion had held for generations. A place that bred demonic beasts not of fang and claw but of Illusion and Mental energy—creatures of fear and false memory and waking nightmare.

A place, Cassian thought slowly, absolutely overrun with the very attributes these sheep were made of.

And for the first time, looking at the gentle young man who had just handed his legion a new weapon against madness without seeming to realize he’d done it, the commander began to wonder whether the Nightmare sheep’s usefulness to the frontier had only just begun.

Because there was a particular kind of enemy on his frontier that nothing had ever answered well.

The psychic wasteland bred demonic beasts of Illusion and Mental energy by the thousand, and many of them attacked through the mind—flooding a soldier’s thoughts with terror, turning his own memories into weapons. Those were bad enough. But there were stranger things still. Some of those beasts did not merely inflict nightmares; they lived inside them. Creatures that existed within the dreamscape itself, that could only be truly reached—truly harmed—from within a nightmare. On the waking battlefield they were almost untouchable, slipping back into sleep and shadow whenever they were pressed. For generations they had been among the frontier’s most maddening foes, fought to a standstill and never truly beaten.

Cassian sat very still as the pieces fell together.

The Protector Turtles had been a miracle, but they had limits he understood better than anyone. A turtle defended a relatively healthy mind—it shielded against negative emotions, against mental and illusion attacks, holding a sound mind sound. What it could not do was reach a mind that had already broken. For the soldiers who came off the line hollowed out, sleepless, locked every night in the same returning horrors—the ones already too far gone—the turtle had little to offer. It was armor, not medicine. It could prevent a wound. It could not heal one.

The Nightmare sheep could. A sheep that ate a soldier’s nightmares clean, or walked him back through his fear in pieces small enough to survive—that reached exactly the men the turtles couldn’t. Where the turtle guarded the whole, the sheep could mend the shattered. Together they would cover the entire span of it, from the first night on the line to the last.

And then there was the training.

That alone, Cassian thought, would make these creatures beyond price. A nightmare sheep could construct a perfect battle inside a soldier’s sleeping mind—any enemy, any ground, real as death and costing nothing. No wounds. No fatalities. No irreplaceable veterans lost to a training accident. Soldiers could drill against the exact demonic beasts they would face, a hundred times over, and wake unharmed and better for it. Every frontier in the empire would want that. Every military on Blue Star would want that. It would make the Nightmare sheep priceless in a way that had nothing to do with healing at all.

He sat with all of it, his mind already moving ahead to the frontier and how he would put each piece into practice. And then one more thought surfaced—one that fit a little too well.

He needed to know the numbers.

"How quickly can the population grow?"

Elias said, after a moment’s thought. “The nightmare path only shows up in roughly one sheep in five—about twenty percent choose it. So out of the thousand, that’s how many turned.”

He must have read something in Cassian’s expression, because he added, gently, “But don’t worry about the number. Once the dream sheep are out in the world and people see what they can do—real rest, cultivation while you sleep—there’ll be enormous demand, and where there are dream sheep, the nightmare ones will follow. Twenty percent of a great many sheep is still a great many. Within a year or two there’ll be no shortage of them on the market. You’ll be able to get however many the frontier needs.”

Cassian nodded slowly, and said nothing.

But inwardly his heart had begun to beat faster.

Because if even half of what he was imagining proved true—if these gentle creatures could eat his soldiers’ nightmares, rebuild their broken nerve, train his troops without bleeding them, and corner the unkillable things that lurked in the dreaming dark—then the Nightmare sheep would not merely help the Sagittarius frontier.

They would change it. Again.

It would be the second time. First the Protector Turtles had ended the slow bleed of madness; now this. Two revolutions on the worst frontier in the empire, both from the same quiet source, both handed over without a price or even, it seemed, a full understanding of what had been given.

Cassian looked at Elias—already distracted, crouched to scratch a content nightmare sheep behind the ears, entirely unaware that he had just rewritten the future of a war—and felt the old, familiar awe settle over him once more.

Another miracle. Another, from him.

And Cassian was beginning to suspect there would be no end to them.

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