This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

A month passed.

During that time, his father named her Floria, and the two grew close.

It was a quiet sort of closeness, unhurried and genuine. Damien did nothing clever or calculated to court the little bee’s trust—no special rituals, no performance of affection staged for the evolution’s sake. He simply did his honest best by her, day after day, and let his sincerity speak for itself. He believed, deep down, that this was what mattered most. Not some hollow, surface-level kindness performed to satisfy a requirement, but the real thing—because a willing heart could not be faked, and Floria, bonded to him through the contract, would feel the difference in an instant.

And somewhere in those weeks, Elias confirmed one last reassuring truth. He spent a question on it, needing to be certain: would the first evolution grant Floria genuine healing abilities? The answer came back yes. His father had gambled on faith—but the gamble, at least, was sound. A healer’s partner would become a healer in her own right.

By the second week after the contract, Damien judged that they were ready.

Elias did not agree.

He stopped them at once, fussing and fretting that it needed more time, that the bond wasn’t deep enough yet, that they shouldn’t rush something so important—sounding, for all the world, like an overprotective mother lecturing her children about love and marriage and the dangers of rushing into either.

“You’ve barely known each other two weeks,” he insisted. “Trust takes time. Real trust. We are not gambling Floria’s evolution on a fortnight’s acquaintance.”

Damien, who had been ready, sighed and submitted to his son’s nagging with the patience of a long-suffering saint.

Kyle, meanwhile, had concerns of his own.

“Honestly,” he announced around a spoonful, “I’d be fine waiting longer if it means more of this honey. It’s better than the stuff you brought last time. What are you feeding these things?”

Elias gave him a long, flat are-you-serious look.

But beneath it—quiet, and small, and impossible to fully hide—there was a flicker of pride. His bees, his common, unremarkable little bees, had made honey good enough to fight over. The smile tugged at the corner of his mouth before he could stop it, and his family, who missed nothing, saw it plainly and said nothing, letting him have it.

So, thanks to Elias’s endless nagging, it was a full month after the contract before they finally judged the time right.

Through all of it, Damien never changed his approach. He didn’t try to force a bond or manufacture some grand display of devotion. He simply kept showing up, kept being kind, kept being honest with the small creature who now shared a corner of his soul. He trusted that sincerity would carry them where cleverness couldn’t.

He’d kept the contract itself quiet, too, in those early days—not out of embarrassment, and certainly not out of any doubt in his son. The opposite, in fact. He’d hidden it precisely because he was so confident: confident the evolution would succeed, and quietly aware of just how enormous a sensation it would become once the world learned that the humble Amberwing Bee could rise. Some part of him had wanted to hold that secret close a little longer, like a man savoring the calm before a storm only he could see coming.

During the long wait, Elias spent nearly all of his daily questions chasing the smallest details, determined that nothing—nothing—would go wrong at the final hurdle.

Little of consequence turned up. The answers, reassuringly dull, amounted to the same gentle counsel each time: let it run its course. The process would unfold on its own. It would help if the human partner healed the life essence as it was drawn away—but even that was a comfort rather than a necessity, and there was no danger in it regardless. The bee, by its very nature, would never drain so much as to truly harm its partner; the moment it began to hurt the human, it would simply stop. Floria could no more injure Damien than she could wish herself back into an ordinary bee.

It was, Elias had to admit, an almost absurdly safe process. Which only made sense, in hindsight. An evolution built entirely on mutual trust would hardly be one that let either party come to harm.

And so, at last, under the watchful gaze of the whole family, it began.

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Damien sent a single quiet thought down the contract—and Floria answered. She drifted from the air and settled onto his forearm, shifting her tiny legs until she found her balance. Then, with no hesitation at all, she pressed her stinger gently into his skin.

And then she went utterly still.

That was all.

No burst of light. No swell of music. No dramatic surge of power. Just a small bee, motionless on a man’s arm, and the faint, invisible flow of life passing quietly between them.

“…That’s it?” Kyle asked, vaguely let down. “That’s the whole thing?”

Elias asked a question to be sure. The answer confirmed it: yes. It had begun, exactly as it should. The anticlimax was the point.

So life simply… resumed.

Kyle and Selena, who had lingered a few extra days just in case, eventually returned to their work in the outskirts once it was clear there would be no dramatic moment to witness. Damien went back to his own routine as well, a perfectly still Floria riding on his forearm, tucked discreetly out of sight beneath the fall of his long sleeve.

Only one thing about him changed. Damien tired more quickly now, and needed more sleep than usual—the slow, steady draw of his life essence taking its small, constant toll. It was never anything serious. And in any case, he was hardly without help: Amia remained ever at his side, her gentle healing waters easing the weariness from him each day, replenishing what Floria quietly borrowed. Between the bee that drew his life and the guppy that restored it, Damien carried on much as he always had, only a little more fond of his afternoon naps.

Elias watched over them both like a hawk, of course—spending his daily question on Floria again and again, checking and re-checking that nothing had gone wrong, that the process was unfolding as it should.

It was.

And then, a week and a half in, it happened.

In the dead of night, while the apartment slept, Floria began to change.

Small specks of light welled up from her tiny body—soft green, threaded through with flecks of shimmering gold. They gathered and lengthened, drawing themselves out into fine, luminous threads, and those threads began, slowly and deliberately, to wind about her. Layer over delicate layer, they wrapped and folded and enclosed, until the little bee had vanished entirely from view.

And there, resting in the curve of Damien’s sleeping arm, lay a cocoon—beautiful and impossibly delicate, glowing faintly with a quiet inner light, woven all through in shades of emerald green and soft, gleaming gold.

Damien was the first to notice, naturally.

He woke to the faint warmth and the gentle weight of it against his arm, and went very still, taking in the delicate green-and-gold thing where his bee had been. He didn’t startle. He didn’t cry out. He simply looked at it for a long, quiet moment with an expression of calm, almost reverent wonder, the way a man looks at something he has been waiting for and somehow still cannot quite believe.

Elias noticed second—and Elias did not take it nearly so calmly.

The first time he laid eyes on the cocoon, he forgot himself entirely.

“YES!”

The shout tore out of him at full volume, in the dead of night, loud enough that it earned an immediate, irritated complaint from the apartment downstairs. Elias was far too overjoyed to so much as register it. He was already half-vibrating with excitement, circling his father and the cocoon, peering at it from every conceivable angle while babbling a stream of half-finished observations. It fell to Damien—calm, patient Damien—to step out and offer the downstairs neighbor a sheepish apology on his son’s behalf.

Selena and Kyle surfaced soon after, drawn by the commotion, and both were instantly fascinated.

“Can I touch it?” Kyle asked, hand already drifting toward the glowing thing. Beside him, Selena was reaching with the exact same thought.

“No!” Elias swatted both their hands away like a man defending the last dish at dinner. “No touching. Nobody touches it. Do you have any idea how delicate— no. Hands off. All of you.”

Kyle and Selena exchanged a look, but for once, wisely, obeyed.

And then it was a matter of waiting.

A week passed, and to the eye, nothing changed. The cocoon simply rested, quiet and luminous, in whatever careful cradle Damien could give it. But he felt the difference, even if he couldn’t see it. The slow drain of his life essence had begun to ease—and, for the first time, a thin trickle of it flowed back to him. A sliver of life returned, as though the cocoon, no longer merely taking, had begun in its own small way to give.

From there, it only grew.

Day by day, as that gentle current of life spiritual energy flowed steadily into Damien and left him feeling better and stronger than he had in weeks, the cocoon swelled—slowly but surely, larger and larger with each passing day. Before long it had outgrown any hope of hiding it beneath a sleeve, and Damien was forced to take a short leave of a few days from his work, unable to carry the glowing, ever-growing thing discreetly about the district any longer.

Finally, in the third week since the evolution began, the cocoon reached the size of a grown adult’s head—and stirred.

It began to shine.

A soft, beautiful green light spilled out from within it, scattered through with speckles of shimmering gold, brightening by the moment until it lit the whole room in gentle emerald and amber. The family gathered close, drawn in around it, every one of them silent now—Damien and Selena, Kyle and Elias, even the beasts—all waiting, breath held, for the moment they had worked and hoped and gambled toward.

The light swelled to its peak.

And the cocoon burst open.

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