This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

Life in the secret realm had settled, by now, into something wonderfully ordinary.

There were no grand evolutions in progress, no maddening steps to crack, no surgeries that kept him up at night. For once, Elias had nothing pressing to chase—only a thriving world to live in and the small, daily business of tending the creatures he loved. And those creatures, left to their own devices, were never short on ways to fill the hours.

Mornings, as ever, belonged to Holly.

She was the most disciplined of the three queens by a wide margin—diligent, organized, ruthlessly efficient—and she had long ago appointed herself the manager of Elias’s entire existence. She ran the hive logistics, tracked the foraging schedules, and kept the whole vast colony moving like clockwork, but she also increasingly ran Elias. If he misplaced a research note, Holly knew precisely where it was and would lead him to it with an air of weary vindication. If he skipped a meal, she materialized to buzz stern reminders until he ate. If he stayed up too late, she would position herself directly between him and his work and refuse to budge.

“I’m the breeder here,” he informed her one evening, as she physically herded him away from his desk and toward his bed. “Technically, I give the orders.”

Holly’s answering buzz made it abundantly clear how little she thought of that argument. He went to bed. He always went to bed. There was simply no arguing with a queen who had decided she knew best, and the maddening thing was that she usually did.

Honey kept the realm’s peace, and there was a great deal of peace to keep.

Graceful, charming, and a gifted communicator, she served as the unofficial ambassador of the whole sprawling community—between the fifty queens, between the bees and the butterflies, between any two factions that had managed to find something to squabble over. And in a world this full of proud, opinionated creatures, something always had. A territorial dispute among queens, a butterfly caught raiding a comb, a knot of workers convinced another hive had claimed their flowers—Honey drifted through it all with unflappable sweetness, guiding every quarrel gently toward resolution before it could fester.

Her finest work, that season, was the Great Honey Truce. The butterflies’ habit of stealing honey had nearly sparked an all-out feud between the two populations, until Honey brokered an arrangement so elegant Elias hadn’t fully understood it: certain combs set aside as butterfly-permissible, certain territories made off-limits, a whole quiet treaty negotiated wing to wing. The thefts stopped. The peace held. Honey accepted the realm’s gratitude with the serene grace of a born diplomat, and went looking for the next dispute to soothe.

And Hope, of course, was busy inventing the future—or trying to.

Where Holly saw structure and Honey saw harmony, Hope saw possibility, endless and intoxicating. She was the dreamer of the trio, forever fascinated by some new idea, and many of the hive’s genuine innovations had begun life as one of her seemingly impossible suggestions. The trouble was that the ratio of brilliant ideas to catastrophic ones was, charitably, about even.

Over the course of an ordinary month she attempted: to train a squadron of butterflies and bees to fly in mixed formation (chaos, but beautiful chaos); to convince the Briar-clones to grow a hive suspended in midair from a flower bridge (which actually worked, to Holly’s visible dismay); and to choreograph the butterflies into spelling words with their rainbow light at sunset (an ambitious failure that nonetheless produced something close to a legible letter “E,” which Hope insisted stood for Elias and which Elias chose, gratefully, to believe).

Elias told her, watching her marshal a reluctant cloud of butterflies into formation, “Honey, you are sometimes absurdly stupid or a never-before genius.”

Hope did a triumphant loop as she took that as a compliment, scattering startled butterflies in every direction, and went back to her impossible work.

Briar, meanwhile, had grown thoroughly comfortable in its own gentle mischief.

The main body stayed near Elias as always, coiled at his shoulder or trailing his heels, radiating its bottomless contentment. But the countless clones across the realm had become a presence all their own—gentle, affectionate, and quietly, persistently playful. They had developed a real fondness for small tricks: growing a flower just out of a bee’s reach and easing it away whenever the bee got close; sprouting a soft cushion of moss exactly where Elias was about to sit, so subtly he never caught it happening; brushing a vine-tip against the back of his neck while he concentrated, purely to feel his startled laugh ripple down the bond.

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Its favorite game, though, was with the butterflies. A clone would bloom a particularly enticing, nectar-rich flower and let a crowd of butterflies gather—then very slowly, very gently, begin to sway it, sending the whole drifting flock swaying along after it in a hypnotic, helpless dance. The butterflies never seemed to mind being led about. Briar never seemed to tire of leading them. The two species, vine and butterfly, had struck up an odd and wordless friendship, and the realm was lovelier for it.

And then there was Valentine, who had antics of an entirely different and far more singular sort.

Valentine had precisely one interest in life, and that interest was Elias. It rode against his chest beneath his shirt, or perched on his shoulder, or wound its delicate legs into his hair, and it regarded the entire rest of creation with a flat, sovereign indifference. The bees bored it. The flowers bored it. The other butterflies—its own kind, its own siblings—bored it utterly. There was Elias, and there was everything that was not Elias, and only the former held any interest at all.

It had kept its quiet vow, mostly. It no longer tried to bite him for blood, content to simply be near the warmth and the pulse it loved, drinking only when he offered. But its devotion had a sharper edge that occasionally showed itself. Once, when Kyle had jokingly grabbed Elias by the shoulders to shake him during a visit, Valentine had erupted from beneath his collar in a sudden, furious flurry of crystal wings, and Kyle had spent the next ten minutes apologizing to a butterfly while it glared at him with the cold fury of a creature contemplating violence.

“He’s very protective,” Elias explained, retrieving the bristling Valentine and soothing it back against his neck.

“He’s terrifying,” Kyle corrected, eyeing the butterfly warily. “He’s a beautiful, terrifying little murderer and he hates me.”

Valentine, vindicated, settled smugly back into the warmth of Elias’s throat.

It was when they all came together, though, that the realm truly came alive.

Holly, Honey, Hope, and Briar had developed a working relationship of remarkable, ridiculous efficiency. The three queens had long since adopted Briar’s clone-network as an extension of their domain, and the four of them ran the realm between them like the world’s strangest management committee. Holly issued directives; the Briar-clones carried them out, growing hives where she wanted them, clearing overgrowth where she didn’t. Honey used the clones’ flowers as neutral ground for her endless diplomacy, brokering peace among the fragrant blooms. And Hope used them for her schemes, forever talking some patient clone into building a bridge, a swing, or a midair platform for whatever her latest impossible project required.

They bickered, naturally. Holly thought Hope’s constant remodeling of the landscape was an affront to good order; Hope thought Holly’s insistence on order was an affront to good fun; Honey spent a fair amount of her time mediating between the two of them specifically. And Briar, caught in the middle, simply did its best to please everyone, growing whatever it was asked by whichever queen had gotten to it first, occasionally producing some hopelessly compromised structure that was half Holly’s tidy design and half Hope’s wild ambition and satisfied absolutely no one.

Elias watched these negotiations with endless delight. His realm was governed, as far as he could tell, by a committee of three opinionated bees and an infinitely accommodating vine, and it ran better than anything he could have managed himself.

And then there were the days when all of them, every one, ended up together—and those were the best days of all.

It usually happened in the evenings, when the false sun dimmed toward its gentle moon and the work of the day wound down. Elias would settle in the grass somewhere in the flower fields, and they would gather to him, one by one, drawn by the simple magnetism of the person they all, in their different ways, adored.

Holly would claim his shoulder, supervising even his rest. Honey would settle near his cheek, sweet and serene. Hope would flit about overhead, too restless to land for long, narrating some new scheme through the wordless eloquence of her wings. Briar would coil warm about his neck, its clones swaying in the surrounding fields in their joy. And Valentine would press against his chest, over his heart, smug in its claimed place and indifferent to the crowd so long as it had the warmest spot.

There were, inevitably, small frictions even then. Valentine and Briar both wanted to be closest, and conducted a slow, silent, ongoing territorial dispute over the prime real estate of Elias’s neck and collarbone—a vine and a butterfly each quietly trying to edge the other out, never quite escalating, never quite resolving. Hope would try to get the butterflies to perform, inevitably disturbing a dozing Holly. Honey would smooth it all over. It was chaos, gentle and warm and constant, and Elias sat in the middle of it like the still point of a small, beloved storm.

He would look around at them sometimes—the disciplined queen and the diplomat and the dreamer, the gentle mischievous vine and the fierce devoted butterfly, his whole strange found family gathered close in the world he’d built—and feel so full he could hardly stand it.

Two lifetimes, he’d had. The first had been short, and lonely, and ended too soon in a hospital bed. This one had given him all of this: a family of blood and a family of beasts, a world of his own, work that mattered, and more love than he’d ever once imagined he’d be allowed.

“You’re all ridiculous,” he told them, lying back in the flowers as the false stars came out, a queen on his shoulder and a vine at his throat and a butterfly over his heart. “Every single one of you. I wouldn’t trade you for anything.”

The realm hummed around him, warm and alive and content, and that—more than any evolution, any discovery, any secret the world whispered about—was everything he had ever wanted.

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