This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

“Valentine—no—what did you do?” Elias was on his feet, staring at the scatter of jade on the dish, his stomach dropping. “You killed it. That was—it was alive, Valentine, it was living, and you just—” His voice cracked with real distress. “Why would you do that?”

It was the thought of it as a death that got him—not the ruined work, but the small living thing he believed he’d just watched cut apart. He had spent weeks making certain these creatures never suffered, and now one of his own beasts had killed one in front of him in a single careless stroke. Valentine, for his part, had no idea what he was upset about, and, more to the point, did not care. The Blood Crystal Butterfly drifted back to Elias’s neck with serene unconcern, folded his crystal wings, and settled in as though nothing at all had happened.

Elias was somewhere between grief and a truly spectacular outburst when the bees arrived.

Holly, Honey, and Hope came whirring in on the noise, drawn by the commotion, and instead of joining the general alarm, they did something odd. They hovered over the ruined guppy on the dish and buzzed—insistent, pointed, circling the scattered jade pieces in a way that was unmistakably a summons. Look, they were saying. Look at this.

Elias, still simmering, looked.

And then he stopped being angry.

Because three of the larger jade fragments were warm. Not cool and inert like broken stone, but warm, faintly, the way a living thing is warm—and when he laid a fingertip against one and went still, he felt it. A heartbeat. Small, and slow, and certain, pulsing inside a shard of what he had thought was a dead jade fish.

He looked from the warm fragments to the butterfly at his neck, and back again, and the whole shape of the last few days rearranged itself in his head. The stiffness. The hardening. The way the guppies had gone still as carved stone and yet refused to die. He had been treating it as a problem to solve, a wrong turn to correct—and it had never been wrong at all. He had simply been standing at a locked door, hunting for a key, when the door was only ever meant to be broken down.

He asked the question with his heart already climbing into his throat.

And there it was. The fourth step. His fourth step, the one that had eluded him for days: the jade guppy was meant to be broken. That was the whole of it. The hard jade shell was not the failure he’d taken it for—it was a cocoon, a chrysalis, and the creature inside could only come out if the shell was cracked open. The change finished not by growing, but by breaking.

Of course it did. He almost laughed. Everything about his own path had been about being gentle, about never forcing, about coaxing each small life forward without a drop of pain—and the final step, the thing his careful mind had refused to consider, was the one violent act in the whole process. It had needed a creature who didn’t overthink things. It had needed Valentine.

Elias sat back in his chair and let out a long breath, feeling several things at once, most of them variations of relief.

He turned to the butterfly at his neck.

“I’m sorry, Valentine,” he said, entirely sincere. “I yelled at you, and you were right. You were completely right. I don’t know how you knew, but you did.”

Valentine accepted the apology by ignoring it, which was his way. He had known, or sensed, or simply acted on instinct the way Blood Crystal Butterflies did—and he plainly considered the matter closed and beneath further discussion.

Somewhere in that small, sharp mind, he had looked at a jade fish going nowhere and understood, in whatever way he understood things, that it wanted cutting. And he had been right, and Elias had shouted at him for it, and he was not going to let him forget the shouting even if he pretended not to have heard it.

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It was only then, in the settling quiet, that Elias remembered the other thing. He turned, and there was Cassian in the doorway—had been there since the shout, come at a dead run, still poised and scanning the room for whatever had made Elias cry out.

Elias flushed to the ears.

“It’s—ah. False alarm,” he managed. “Sorry. Sorry, everything’s fine. Valentine just—he was actually helping, it turns out. With the last step. I didn’t know that when I yelled.” He rubbed the back of his neck, thoroughly embarrassed. “Thank you for coming, though. Really.”

Cassian took in the room—the scattered jade, the unbothered butterfly, the pink-faced breeder—and let the tension go out of his shoulders. He did not comment on any of it. He did not tease. He simply said, quietly, “As long as you’re alright,” and meant it, and that was all.

For some reason that made Elias flush a little harder.

Then there was work to do—and this time, gladly.

He began breaking the jade guppies. It felt monstrous the first few times, taking a small, gleaming thing and deliberately cracking it apart, until the warmth and the heartbeat beneath his fingers reminded him each time that this was a hatching, not a killing. He learned to read them as he went. Most, when he studied them, had two pieces that held warmth and a heartbeat; some had three; a few had only one. Whatever the number, once he broke the shell along the living lines, the pieces came free clean.

He returned every warm fragment to the lake, to the glowing life-attribute water, and let it do the rest.

For a month, the pieces sat in the water and drank the light.

And then they hatched. The shells softened, and split, and out of each one swam a tiny, perfect, newborn Sparkling Jade Guppy—pure shimmering white, or jade green, or blue, or lavender, or yellow, or any color of jade, trailing motes of green light, no bigger than a fingernail. Where the lake had held ten thousand hardening jade fish, it now held a slow-blooming cloud of living jewels, thousands upon thousands of them, darting and alive.

Elias stood at the water’s edge and watched them come, one hatching and then a dozen and then too many to count, the whole lake waking into shimmering motion. After all the worry and the mess and the days of getting nowhere, it was almost unbearably lovely. Even Valentine, from his perch at his neck, deigned to watch.

He had done it.

And with success, as it so often did, came the wheel.

The familiar spin of fortune turned in his mind, the reward for a path newly opened—and as his luck would have it, it slowed, and wavered, and landed on purple. A permanent boost to his memory, threaded quietly into him. He would forget a little less now, hold a little more. A small, useful gift, and he was grateful for it.

Then he looked at the status of what he’d made, and got a second surprise.

Their potential was higher than Silverstream’s.

The guppies produced by the cruel old method topped out where Amia had—Commander Rank 10. His did not. His new Sparkling Jade Guppies reached Lord Rank 1, a full realm beyond, born stronger for having been made kindly. It should not have surprised him by now, and somehow it always did: that the gentler road so often turned out to be the better one in every way that mattered.

Still—looking out over the lake, now home to roughly twenty-four thousand guppies where ten thousand jade fish had been—he found he wasn’t entirely sure how to think about it.

Had the original ten thousand survived? Or had they given rise to these, passed themselves on and gone? Each old jade fish had broken into two or three new lives; the numbers had more than doubled. Was that duplication, or was it offspring? Was it the same creature continuing, or a parent making children and ending?

He turned it over and, in the end, made his peace with it. Nature was often exactly like this. There were creatures in the wild that lived their whole lives for a single act of leaving young behind, and died in the giving, and no one called that a tragedy—it was simply the shape of that life. He had not invented the pattern. He had only found a version of it that did not hurt.

Because that was the thing he could be sure of, whatever else was true. However one counted them, whatever had ended and whatever had begun—none of them had suffered. Not one small fish had been forced screaming through agony to make the beauty in that lake. They had eaten, and lived, and changed, and broken gently open into something new.

And for Elias, that was enough.

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