This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

With the concoction finally ready, Elias gave it to the sheep.

All thousand of them took the draught—a careful measure each, steeped in hard-won Mental-attribute energy—and one by one, across the meadow, they lay down in the flowers and fell asleep. Not an ordinary sleep, either; this was the deep, total stillness of evolution at work, and Elias spent the whole first day wandering anxiously among the slumbering flock, checking that each soft chest still rose and fell.

They slept for a week.

Then, slowly, in twos and threes and then in earnest, they began to wake—blinking, yawning, entirely unbothered, as though they had merely taken a particularly good nap. Elias caught up to the nearest one and brought up her status.

She had a new skill. Every one of them did. A single line that had not been there before: Dream Visitor.

It should have been a triumph. It very nearly wasn’t.

Because when Elias examined the new skill closely, he found it did—strangely—nothing at all. Dream Visitor allowed a sheep to enter dreams, yes. But only dreams the sheep itself produced. And at this stage, the sheep produced no dreams whatsoever. The skill was a door that opened onto an empty room; a key to a house not yet built.

It was, he realized, exactly the sort of half-finished step the evolution intended. The ability existed. It simply had nothing to act upon yet. That would be the work of the next step—to give the sheep something on the other side of that door.

Which left him at step three. And step three, it turned out, was where the trouble began.

Through patient questioning, Elias pieced together the shape of the third step.

The sheep needed to consume a particular material—to eat something—and from it, they would awaken a new skill. Simple enough, in principle. He had done versions of it a dozen times before. The catch was the material itself.

It was rankless.

That single word undid him. A rankless material was not some rare spiritual treasure with a telltale aura he could hunt down. It was ordinary. Common. Mundane stuff, the kind of thing that carried no spiritual rank at all because it was simply… a thing, an everyday object of the sort that lay around the world in endless variety. The evolution needed the sheep to eat something perfectly ordinary—and gave him no clue at all which ordinary thing it was.

So Elias did the only thing he could. He guessed.

Dreams, he reasoned. The skill concerned dreams; surely the material would relate to them somehow. He gathered every food he could think of with the faintest association to sleep and dreaming and fed them to the sheep, then asked the talent whether each was the answer.

Warm milk. No.

Chamomile and a dozen other soothing herbs. No.

Honey from his own hives. Lavender. Valerian. Every drowsy, dreamful thing he could name. No, no, and no.

A month went by like that. Sixty questions spent—sixty precious, irreplaceable questions—and sixty times the answer came back the same. No. No. No. Elias, who prided himself on his patience, once again felt the familiar helplessness coming with every evolution research.

He did not suffer through it alone, at least.

Iris threw herself into the puzzle with him, delighted to help, peppering him with suggestions and asking questions of her own. Hope—the dreamer of the three queens, fittingly—hovered at her side, contributing food combinations of escalating absurdity. Crushed flowers steeped in moonlight. Fruit that had been sung to. Bread baked at midnight, on the theory that midnight was when dreams happened. Elias dutifully tested the reasonable ones and laughed at the rest, and none of them, reasonable or absurd, were right.

The realm, meanwhile, carried on around his frustration—and not all its news was bad.

Taka, for one, had finished.

Rowan’s two-headed Carrier Raven had hatched at last from his golden egg, and the result left the entire realm staring. Where the flock’s Lucky Ravens had emerged at Lord Rank Ten potential, Taka had come out higher—Monarch Rank Ten, a full realm beyond, the mutation and Rowan’s relentless fortune compounding into something no one had anticipated.

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And he was stranger than the rest, too. His attribute read Wind, Mystic (Fortune, Misfortune)—both at once. The two heads had split the inheritance between them: Ta carried the same skills as any Lucky Raven, fortune and blessing and lucky finds, while Ka had taken the mirror of them, bringing and sensing misfortune instead. One head to bless, one to curse. Rowan was, predictably, over the moon about both of them, and had already started a running argument with himself about which head was the favorite.

His family visited through all of this, as they always did.

Selena, Damian, and Kyle came and went as the weeks passed, and each time they did, Elias watched the guardians and his family fit together a little more easily—arguments shared, meals lingered over, the slow alchemy by which strangers quietly become something more. They were becoming a family. It was happening so gradually that he suspected no one had noticed but him.

And the thing he was most grateful for, in the end, was the smallest. From everything his family told him, their lives had scarcely changed since his name went public. No siege of reporters. No grasping strangers at the door. The storm he had braced them for had simply… passed them by.

He knew exactly who to thank for that.

“I mean it,” he told Oliver and Cassian, more than once. “My family hasn’t had so much as a knock on the door. I know that isn’t luck.” For Oliver and the vast invisible labor of politics and persuasion that kept the world at bay; for Cassian and the unseen guards he knew were posted somewhere beyond the realm, watching over the people Elias loved. Oliver waved it off with a smile. Cassian only nodded, as though shielding a family was the most natural thing in the world.

They saw him sulk, too. That part, he was less proud of.

By the end of the fruitless month, Elias had sunk into a genuine slump, and his family—being his family—refused to let him stew in it. Kyle simply showed up, dropped onto the couch beside him, and pushed a game controller into his hands, and the two of them spent a whole afternoon playing the way they had as boys, Elias losing badly and cheering about Kyle’s win and feeling, slowly, a little better. His mother and father took the gentler route, sitting with him in the evenings and letting him talk out his frustration, offering no solutions, only the steady comfort of being heard.

It worked, mostly. It usually did.

The guardians watched all of this with reactions Elias only half noticed at the time.

Rowan thought nothing of it; he simply joined whatever was happening, cheerful as ever. An orphan he might have been, but Rowan had never pined for a family of his own—he was, genuinely, happy as he was, and folded himself into the warmth of the Arkwrights without any ache beneath it.

Cassian and Oliver, by contrast, were quietly dumbfounded—though for a reason Elias would have found funny if he’d known. The two of them understood, better than anyone, that discovering an evolutiona path took years. Decades, sometimes. Whole careers ended without a single breakthrough. And here was Elias, sunk in genuine despair, because a discovery had taken him one month longer than he’d hoped. They did not quite know what to make of a person to whom that counted as a hardship.

Iris watched the family fuss over him and went quiet, a small, sad smile on her face, thinking—though she said nothing—of a family that had never fussed over her like that. And Seraphina watched too, and smiled as well, but hers was a softer, nostalgic thing, remembering an old warmth of her own, from before the frontier took it.

Another two weeks passed, and the guardians settled deeper into the rhythm of the place.

Living under the same sky, sleeping under nearby roofs, gathering each morning at the same long table—it had worn the last of the strangeness off them. They teased one another now. They had inside jokes. The careful distance of those first days had melted into something easy and lived-in, and breakfast in the flowers had become the warm, noisy heart of every day.

It was at one such breakfast that Iris noticed something.

Seraphina was quieter than usual—quieter even than her considerable baseline—and Iris, who noticed such things, leaned over and gently asked what was wrong.

“It’s nothing,” Seraphina said, which fooled no one.

Iris simply waited, in that patient way of hers, until Seraphina sighed and gave in.

“One of the sheep got into my house,” she admitted. “Last night. It ate part of one of my books. A good portion of it, actually.” She looked genuinely mournful about it, the way only a true reader can mourn a book. “I’m not angry. It’s only—it was a favorite.”

“Oh—I’m so sorry,” Elias said at once, mortified. “That’s my fault; they’re my research. I’ll replace it, I promise, I’ll track down another copy today—”

And then he stopped.

Because something had gone very still and very bright at the back of his mind.

A sheep had eaten a book.

A sheep had eaten paper.

Paper, that ordinary, rankless, utterly mundane thing—paper, on which were printed words, and stories, and—

And dreams.

Elias set down his cup very carefully, the way a man sets something down when his hands have begun to shake, and asked Omniscient Questions one more question.

Was the material paper?

Yes.

He was up and out of his chair before the answer had finished settling.

“It’s paper,” he said, to no one and everyone, already moving. “It’s paper—of course it’s paper, the dreams are in the stories, it was never about sleep at all—” And he was off, half-running for the laboratory, a month and a half of frustration burning off him like morning fog, leaving behind only the pure delight of a question finally answered.

Behind him, the table watched him go.

And Sebastian, with the long-suffering grace of a butler who had seen this exact thing many times before, rose, bowed crisply to the bewildered guardians, and murmured, “My apologies for the Young Master. He becomes… single-minded.” Then he set off after Elias at a dignified trot—to help him, and rather more importantly, to manage the magnificent mess that was about to follow.

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