This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

The changes came over the following weeks, one after another, until the realm Elias had grown so used to began to feel new again.

The first was the largest, in every sense.

With his contribution points—and there were a great many of them now, after years of discoveries—Elias purchased a set of Earth-attributed Secret Realm Cores, a wind-attributed one and a water-attributed one, dense little stones that hummed faintly with grounding energy. Cassian had been the one to handle the working itself, his King-rank strength threaded carefully into the cores, coaxing the boundaries of the realm outward without tearing the delicate balance of the world inside it.

When it was done, the realm had tripled.

Fifteen hundred hectares now, where there had once been five—fifteen square kilometers of meadow and river and sky, so much space that Elias spent an entire afternoon simply walking a straight line and failing to reach its end. Briar was delighted; the vine had already begun creeping joyfully into the new expanse, claiming fresh ground for flowers.

And with the expanded land, Elias decided to add more Lifebloom bee queens, precisely one queen bee per 10 hectares

It had cost far less than Elias expected, which surprised him until Cassian explained why.

“Making a realm is the expensive part,” the commander said. “The first time, everything must be built from nothing. Gravity. Air. The cycle of the artificial sun and moon. Weather. Rainfall. The thousand invisible things that let a world hold together at all—those are what cost a fortune. Once they exist, expanding the space they govern is comparatively cheap. You are only stretching a thing that already works, not building a new one.”

Cassian had paused then, and added, with the slight awkwardness of a man unused to offering, “I could cover the cores myself, if you like. My own points sit largely unused. It would be no trouble.”

“Thank you,” Elias said. “But no.”

He said it gently, but there was no give in it. “This place is mine because I earned it—every core, every hectare, paid for with work I did myself. I’d like to keep it that way. It matters to me that it’s mine.” He gave a small, rueful smile. “Besides, I don’t even know what I’ll do with all this room yet. There’s no sense having you pay for empty space I haven’t found a use for.”

Cassian inclined his head, and did not press. He seemed, if anything, to respect the refusal more than he would have accepted.

Oliver, meanwhile, was in his element, and insufferably happy about it.

He had thrown himself into the work of managing Elias’s affairs with the contentment of a man who had finally been handed a job worthy of him. The raven publication, the finances, the quiet groundwork for the day Elias’s name went public—he juggled all of it at once and seemed to grow only more cheerful under the load.

The houses came together under his hand as well.

Once each of the guardians had decided what they wanted, a construction crew arrived through the realm’s entrance—hand-picked, thoroughly vetted, and remarkably incurious. They did not speak. They did not question the impossible meadow, the head-sized bees, the bipedal pigs directing them to material stores, or the three hundred gold-veined ravens wheeling overhead. They simply worked. Oliver had promised they would never breathe a word of what they saw, and Elias chose to trust that the promise had teeth.

With the help of construction-attuned spirit beasts—earth-shapers and stone-setters that raised walls in hours rather than weeks—the work went astonishingly fast. In three weeks it was finished: five houses for the five guardians, and one great boarding house for the pigs.

Each house, Elias thought when he toured them, said something true about the person it was built for.

Cassian’s was the plainest—low and solid and unadorned, its lines clean and its rooms spare, with wide windows angled to watch every approach to the realm’s heart. There was a training yard behind it before there was a sitting room inside it. It looked less like a home than a quiet outpost, and Elias suspected that was exactly how its owner wanted it.

Oliver’s was its opposite: elegant, warm, and welcoming, full of comfortable chairs and good light, clearly designed with guests in mind. There was a room that could only be called a parlor, and a small, well-stocked study, and everywhere the easy luxury of a man who understood that comfort was a tool as much as a pleasure.

Rowan’s was cheerful chaos—a sprawling, slightly lopsided thing with too many windows and a flat roof he’d specifically requested for stargazing, surrounded by open ground for the ravens to mob him in. It looked, fittingly, like somewhere fun things happened.

Iris’s house all but disappeared into the meadow. She had asked for it to be built low and open, half-swallowed by flowers, with broad doors that stayed open to the garden and a greenhouse larger than her bedroom. Things grew on every windowsill already. It was less a house set in the realm than a house that had agreed to belong to it.

And Seraphina’s was small, quiet, and lined floor to ceiling with shelves. She had asked for almost nothing—except space for books, and a single deep window seat positioned to catch the afternoon light. It was, Elias thought, the most peaceful room in the realm, and the most unmistakably hers.

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The pigs’ boarding house dwarfed them all—a grand, many-roomed manor, immaculate before a single pig had moved in, with a kitchen built for an army and quarters enough for every member of the household. Sebastian had wept, very slightly, and denied it absolutely.

With the building done, the realm settled into something like a rhythm, and Elias found he liked watching his guardians become part of it.

Rowan spent most of his days with the ravens—though it would be more honest to say the ravens spent their days with Rowan. They followed him in a gleaming cloud wherever he went, dropping treasures at his feet, competing for his shoulders, turning every walk he took into a parade. His own two-headed Taka presided over the chaos with the smug authority of a creature who had been there first. Whether Rowan was playing with the ravens or the ravens were playing with Rowan was never entirely clear, and neither party seemed to care.

And somewhere in all that play, something purposeful was taking shape.

Rowan had asked Elias, early on, exactly how the Lucky Raven evolution worked—the five steps, the hundred small fortunes, the way every requirement could be met through games of luck. He had listened with rare seriousness, and then he had gone straight to Taka. The two-headed Carrier Raven had thrown himself into the treasure hunts ever since, not by chance but at his contractor’s asking, working through the same path the flock had already walked.

But Elias had wondered, at first, whether Taka could even keep pace. The games were built on luck, and the Lucky Ravens were luck itself; a plain Carrier Raven competing against three hundred Fortune-blessed birds should have come dead last in every round.

He had reckoned without Rowan.

With his contractor at his side, Taka was simply unstoppable. Coins came up his way. Hidden paths opened for him. Buried treasures all but leaped into his beaks. Rowan’s Lucky Star poured its quiet fortune over his oldest friend until the bird with no luck attribute at all was somehow out-finding birds who were made of the stuff, both heads crowing in delighted triumph at the end of every game. Going by the pace of it, Elias guessed it would take Taka perhaps a month to complete the evolution requirements—and could not help being charmed that the most fortunate bird in the realm was the one creature there with no fortune of its own, borrowing every scrap of it from the man who loved him.

Iris simply talked to everything.

She moved through the realm in a state of perpetual quiet wonder, asking questions of anyone who would answer—the bees, the butterflies, Holly and Honey and Hope, Briar, Sebastian, even Elias himself, even prickly Valentine, who tolerated her questions with the air of a noble suffering an interview. How did the queens divide their work? Did Briar feel each flower separately or all at once? What did the butterflies see when they looked at the realm? She gathered answers the way some people gather coins, delighted by each one, and the beasts—unused to being asked anything at all—adored her for it.

And Seraphina read.

She had claimed a favorite spot near the river almost at once, and could most often be found there with a book and a cup of tea that a Butler Pig kept gently, endlessly refilled. She said little. She did not need to. There was a settledness about her in those hours that Elias recognized from his own best afternoons.

It was Seraphina who quietly brought him her decision about the ravens on one of those afternoons.

“I thought about it,” she said, not looking up from her book at first. “The Lucky Raven. Properly, the way you said.” She set the book down in her lap. “And I’m going to say no. Thank you for the offer—truly. A Mystic beast at Lord Ten is more than I had any right to expect. But when I sit with the idea of it…” She searched for the words. “It doesn’t sing to me. I can’t explain it better than that. A contract should feel like recognition, and this one only feels like a good decision. That isn’t enough.”

“Then it isn’t enough,” Elias agreed easily. “You were right to wait, and right to say no. A contract you talk yourself into isn’t a partnership.” He smiled. “When the one that sings to you comes along, you’ll know. Until then, there’s no hurry at all.”

Seraphina looked at him for a moment, something easing in her careful expression, then nodded and picked her book back up. The Butler Pig refilled her tea.

But beneath all the settling and building, something had been turning over in Elias’s mind for weeks now—ever since the breakfast, ever since Cassian had bowed and Seraphina had spoken of parents who never came home.

The frontier.

He could not stop thinking about it. The endless tides of Illusion and Mental energy. The soldiers lost to madness before they were ever lost to wounds. Seraphina’s family, and the thousands of families like hers, and the quiet, bottomless weight Cassian carried for every name under his command.

And tangled up in all of it, if he was honest, was a thread of guilt.

Because Elias had, in a sense, taken from that frontier. He had drawn its finest commander—a King-rank heir, a man worth a legion on his own—into a flower field to guard a single breeder. He had taken Seraphina, with her rare and formidable talent, and given her a window seat and a cup of tea. They had come willingly; they called it duty, and meant it. But the frontier was lighter by two extraordinary people now, and those two people were here, looking after him.

It was favoritism, perhaps. He couldn’t help it. They were family now, and a person looked after family first.

He wanted to help the Sagittarius frontier. Partly to reassure the two of them that it was not forgotten. Partly to ease the guilt he knew was not entirely reasonable. And partly—mostly—because it was simply the right thing to do, and helping overlooked, suffering things was the only talent Elias had ever really trusted in himself.

So he began to research.

The frontier’s great enemy was not the demonic beasts themselves. It was what they did to the mind—the sleeplessness, the creeping madness, the way a soldier’s own thoughts turned against him under the endless psychic pressure. The Protector Turtles guarded against attack. But they did not give a worn, hollow-eyed soldier what he needed most after the line was held.

Rest. True rest. Sleep deep enough to mend a mind frayed to its last thread.

Elias turned the problem over and over, and then, late one night, he sat very still and asked Omniscient Questions a single careful question, and felt the familiar warm certainty of a yes settle into him.

There was a path. An overlooked, common little creature, gentle and unremarkable, that the world had never thought twice about—and a hidden evolution waiting inside it, exactly suited to a frontier that had forgotten how to sleep.

Elias smiled in the dark and wrote two words at the top of a fresh page.

Sleep Sheep.

The Secret Realm

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