This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

A few more weeks slipped by, quiet and ordinary, and in that time the realm grew used to its three hundred and one gleaming residents.

Elias spent most of those weeks writing. The Lucky Raven method was the largest he had ever documented—five evolution steps that could be completed in any order, a whole framework of luck-based games, the careful tracking of a hundred small fortunes per bird. He filled page after page, drew diagrams, crossed things out, started again. Holly kept the drafts in order. Hope kept suggesting additions. Honey kept reminding him to eat. And slowly, the method took shape into something another breeder could actually follow.

By the time the last section was finished and checked twice, he had something he was finally willing to send.

He was reaching for a clean sheet to write the cover note when the call came.

He answered out of habit, half his attention still on the paper in front of him.

“Hello, Miss Thornwell. I was just about to submit something, actually. A new one. I think you’ll like it.”

“I had a feeling,” Maeve said, and he could hear the small smile in her voice. “You always go quiet right before the big ones.”

They talked for a little while about the work. She had a question about grafting compatibility she’d been meaning to ask him, and a piece of advice in return—a slow correction to the way he was structuring his public methods, so that less-experienced breeders could follow them without ruining a generation of beasts in the process. Elias listened carefully and took notes, the way he always did when Maeve spoke about the craft. She had been doing this far longer than he had, and there was always something to learn from her. It was the easy, unhurried sort of conversation he had grown comfortable with over the years, the kind that no longer made him brace for a hidden cost.

Then her tone shifted, just slightly.

“There’s another reason I called,” she said. “Come by whenever you’re ready. Bring your family. I’ve found them—the guardians. The ones to keep you safe.”

Elias went still.

He remembered the conversation perfectly. Months ago, when he had been deep in the Protector Turtle research, he had said something to Maeve that had stayed with them both. He had built the turtles to guard a mind against attack—but a guarded mind did not stop a knife in the dark, and Elias had never been foolish enough to think his anonymity would last forever.

His discoveries were too large. The Lifebloom Bees. The Hundred Fragrance Vine. The Blood Crystal Butterfly. The Butler Pigs. Every one of them had reshaped some corner of the world, and every one of them traced back, however quietly, to a single source. Sooner or later someone would follow that thread to its end and find him sitting at the other side of it.

So he had asked her, plainly, to prepare for the day his name became public. Not for fame. For protection—for himself, and far more importantly, for his family.

He had spent the months since trying not to think about it too hard.

Now the day had a date.

Elias set down his pen and called Kyle over first. Then he called his parents. Within the hour the four of them had agreed on a time, and not long after that, Elias Arkwright walked into the Breeder Association to meet Maeve Thornwell with his whole family at his side.

Maeve was not alone.

She rose to greet them as always, composed and warm, but behind her stood five people Elias had never seen before—and the moment he looked at them, he understood that whatever he had imagined, this was something else entirely.

They did not look like hired muscle. They looked, if anything, like a family of their own, mismatched and easy with each other in a way that took years to build.

“Elias,” Maeve said. “I think it’s best if they introduce themselves.”

The first to step forward was the tallest of them, and the room seemed to arrange itself around him without his asking. He was broad-shouldered and striking, with vivid crimson hair and piercing golden eyes that held a quiet, unwavering steadiness. His posture was flawless, his expression calm to the point of stillness, and when he spoke, his voice carried the unmistakable weight of someone used to commanding.

“Cassian Sagittarius. My talent is Supreme Commander. It lets me draw strength from those who genuinely trust me—the deeper their faith, the stronger I become.”

He said it the way another man might state the weather, but Elias caught the faint shift in those golden eyes as they settled on him—something almost careful, as though the commander were not quite as composed as he appeared.

The second was lighter on his feet, golden-blond hair falling easily over warm amber eyes, an effortless smile already in place. Even here, indoors, he somehow looked as though he had just stepped out of a tailor’s rather than a journey.

“Oliver Locke,” he said, with the air of someone enjoying himself enormously. “Talent—Hypnotic Voice. It makes people a little more willing to open up, to trust, to listen. Though I promise not to use it on present company.”

The third practically bounced forward, messy brown hair refusing to stay in place, honey-colored eyes bright with an amusement that seemed to be the natural state of his face.

“Rowan Sterling!” he said cheerfully. “Talent’s Lucky Star—bends probability, more or less. Bad luck slides off, good luck turns up where it shouldn’t. Comes in handy more often than you’d think.”

Elias found himself warming to the easy brightness of him almost at once, and Rowan, sensing it, looked thoroughly delighted.

The fourth came forward more quietly. She was slender, with long silken white hair that fell to her waist and rainbow-colored eyes that shimmered softly when the light caught them. Her smile was gentle, almost healing, and there was a calm about her that made the room feel a little safer.

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“Iris Everlove,” she said softly. “My talent is Elemental Resonance—my beasts grow stronger together, the more elements they share between them.”

She trailed off there because her gaze had drifted from Elias’s face to the vine gently coiled around his arm. Briar, shy as ever among strangers, had tightened a little against him—but the flowers along his length were blooming all the same, a slow ripple of color, fire-bright and water-clear and a dozen shades besides. Iris’s rainbow eyes widened.

“He has so many,” she breathed, almost to herself. “So many attributes, all in one… I’ve never seen anything like it.” She caught herself, color rising faintly in her cheeks, but the wonder in her voice didn’t fade. “He’s beautiful.”

Briar, who adored nothing in the world more than being admired, unwound the smallest fraction and let a single new blossom open in answer—pale gold, just for her—before retreating bashfully back against Elias’s sleeve. Elias felt a warmth bloom in his own chest at that. She had looked at his shyest companion, the one who hid behind him from every stranger, and seen only something worth loving.

The last to speak was the quietest. She had long silver-lavender hair and pale violet eyes of an almost unsettling clarity, and she looked, for a moment, as though she might let the moment pass without speaking at all. Then she seemed to gather herself.

“Seraphina Vale.” Her voice was low and even. “Talent—Mystic Body. I can only contract Mystic-attribute beasts, but those I do become… quite strong.”

She didn’t say more than that. She didn’t need to. Elias found himself nodding, a quiet understanding passing between them—two people who had never been especially good at filling silences, and were both perfectly content not to.

For a moment Elias simply stood there, his family at his back, taking in the five of them. He had expected—well, he wasn’t entirely sure what. Guards, perhaps. People who would stand at a door and look intimidating. Not this. Not five gifted people with talents the federation would have killed to keep, each of them looking at him as though he mattered.

Then Cassian reached into his coat.

He drew out five stones and set them on the table, and the air around them seemed to ripple faintly, the way heat shimmers above stone in summer. They gave off a strange, pressing energy—something Elias felt at the edges of his mind rather than his skin —and Angel, dozing against his collarbone, stirred and pressed closer in a faint warning.

“Contract stones,” Cassian said. “Mental-attribute treasures. King rank.” He let the words land. “They can be used to form a binding contract between people, not beasts. Once sworn, the bond cannot be broken without consequence.” He met Elias’s eyes. “If any one of us were ever to betray it—to break our oath to you—the contract would destroy our minds. Utterly. There is no undoing it.”

Elias’s mouth went dry.

“That’s—” he started, and found he didn’t have the rest of the sentence.

But they were already moving.

One by one, the five of them placed a hand near the stones, and one by one they spoke. The words were simple, and somehow that made them worse—or better; Elias could not decide which. Each of them swore, in their own voice, that they would never betray Elias Arkwright and would protect him with everything they had, for as long as they drew breath.

Cassian’s voice was flat and certain, a soldier’s vow.

Oliver’s, for once, held no performance in it at all.

Rowan’s was bright and steady, the cheer underneath it suddenly very serious.

Iris spoke softly, the way a person makes a promise they have already decided to keep.

And Seraphina, quietest of all, said the words without hesitation, as though she had been waiting for somewhere they were worth saying.

The stones flared, gold-white and brief, and went dark.

Elias stared at them, his heart hammering.

“Wait—please.” He held up a hand. “I think there’s been a misunderstanding. When I asked for protection, I meant—bodyguards. People who could keep my family safe if things went wrong. Not… this. Not your whole lives. You’re binding yourselves to me forever. You don’t even know me.”

He looked at them, genuinely distressed. “You shouldn’t throw something like that away on a stranger.”

It was Cassian who answered, and he did it in the voice Elias would later learn he used on the battlefield—level, absolute, leaving no room for argument.

“We know exactly who you are,” the commander said.

“The Lifebloom Bees cut frontier casualties by one-fifth within a year. I have watched soldiers die away from wounds that could have been healed, but now because of lifebloom honey that did not exist before you made it possible.” His golden eyes did not waver. “The Butler Pigs gave a second life to creatures the world had thrown away. The Protector Turtles will shield minds that the frontier would otherwise have broken—minds I am responsible for. You did all of it without a name attached. Without asking for anything in return.”

He paused.

“You ask why we would swear our lives to a stranger. You have already saved more lives than most soldiers ever will. That is not a stranger to us, Mister Arkwright. That is someone worth protecting.”

Behind Elias, his mother made a small sound that might have been a laugh or something close to pride, and his father’s hand settled warm on his shoulder.

Elias was quiet for a long moment.

He thought about the years of working in the dark, sending his discoveries out into the world and watching them ripple outward, never quite letting himself believe the ripples mattered to anyone in particular. He thought about the people in this room who had read that work and decided, on its strength alone, that he was someone they would bleed for.

It was too much. It was more than he knew what to do with.

But refusing it now, he realized, would be its own kind of insult—to throw their conviction back in their faces as though it weren’t real.

So he took a breath, and steadied his voice, and said the only thing he could.

“Then—thank you. I accept.”

The contract formed.

Elias felt it settle into him, unlike anything he had felt before. The bonds with Briar and Valentine and Angel were warm, two-sided things, a current that ran in both directions; this was different. It ran one way. He could feel the five of them now—five distinct presences at the edge of his awareness, steady and quiet, like lamps lit in distant windows. He knew, without quite knowing how, that he would feel it the instant any of those lamps went out.

One-sided. Yet powerful all the same. They had given him something and asked for nothing back, and the strangeness of that—the sheer, unearned generosity of it—sat in his chest like a held breath.

He looked at the five of them, at the people who had just tied their futures to his, and found that the formal words had entirely gone out of his head.

So he simply smiled—a little shy, a little overwhelmed, entirely sincere—and introduced himself again, properly this time.

“I’m Elias,” he said. “It’s good to meet you all. I hope—” He faltered, then pressed on. “I hope you’ll take care of me.”

For a moment no one spoke.

Then Rowan laughed, bright and delighted, and the careful stillness in the room broke all at once into something warmer, and Elias understood that whatever came next, he would not be facing it alone.

Oliver Locke

Rowan Sterling

Iris Everlove

Seraphina Vale

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