This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

For a while after Kyle finished, no one at the table said much of anything.

The tea had gone lukewarm in its cups. Selena, with her arms closed, rough and unmoving. Damian was looking at the raven with the soft, bright expression he usually saved for moments he didn't trust himself to speak through. And Kyle sat in the middle of it all with the bird tucked against his chest, a little hoarse, a little embarrassed, holding onto Hero as though someone in the room might try to take him.

Elias didn't say anything either. He wasn't sure he could have said anything useful even if he'd tried. He just looked at the raven across the table—at the burn scars that climbed up one side of him and folded the feathers wrong, at the clouded eye that no longer caught any light—and let the story sit where it had landed, somewhere low in his chest.

It was a good story. The kind that made a person's throat tighten before they understood why.

And a part of him—a quiet, practical part he didn't always like—thought his brother had been reckless.

Elias knew he was kind. People told him so often enough that he'd stopped arguing about it somewhere around the third anonymous discovery. He loved spirit beasts—all of them, the ugly ones and the slow ones and the ones nobody else would look at twice—with a sincerity that sometimes embarrassed him. But loving them didn't make him a saint, and he'd never pretended otherwise.

He didn't lie awake aching over every creature he couldn't save. He couldn't. There were too many of them, and he was one person with one life, sitting at a table beside a brother he loved more than any rescued bird in any shelter in the world.

Because that was the truth underneath the warm feeling Hero's story had given him. As much as it moved him—and it did—Kyle mattered more. Kyle's future mattered more. And his brother had just spent a contract slot on a Carrier Raven that had flown into a fire and come out half a bird.

Elias loved that about him. He also, very quietly, wanted to put his face in his hands.

Kyle had reached Elite Rank Ten long ago, which was exactly why his Beast Space could hold a second contract at all. That part wasn't the problem. The problem was that Kyle, free to choose any beast in the world, had once again chosen the one nobody else would.

It would be easy to look at his brother's rank and think him slow. Elias was now Commander Rank Five, several steps ahead, and Kyle was the elder by years. But Elias knew that he was the strange one, not Kyle.

His talent had helped, of course. Omniscient Questions came with rewards for the knowledge it uncovered, and more than once, those rewards had arrived as deep, effortless meditation.

But the meditation rewards were the smaller part. The greater part of his speed had come from Briar and Valentine.

It was easy to forget, watching them now. Briar spent his days wrapped affectionately around Elias's arm, blooming whenever he was praised, hiding behind him whenever a stranger came too close. Valentine dozed against the side of Elias's neck like a piece of living jewelry, vain and possessive and prone to sulking. Neither of them looked like the reason a researcher had outpaced people who'd been cultivating since before he was reborn.

But Briar carried Lord-rank potential, and Valentine carried Monarch-rank potential, and those were not numbers that came cheaply.

Lord-potential beasts were famously particular about who they let contract them. Monarch-potential beasts rarely bound themselves to anyone whose rank sat below their own—and the higher a beast's potential climbed, the higher its intelligence and its pride climbed right alongside it. By every reasonable measure, a creature like Valentine should have glanced at someone of Elias's rank and felt nothing but indifference, if not open disdain.

Instead, Valentine got jealous when Briar held Elias's wrist too long. He performed little aerial dances for compliments. He returned to the same spot on Elias's neck every single night.

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Elias was self-aware enough to know how rare that was. Not rare like a lucky draw. Rare like a thing that should not have happened and had anyway, because a half-starved vine and a blood-mad larva had decided a quiet boy who fed them and asked for nothing in return was worth more than rank.

He hadn't earned his speed by training harder than everyone else. He'd been given a generous talent and, more than that, he'd been chosen. There was a difference between those things and the effort everyone imagined, and he never let himself forget it.

Kyle was simply stubborn in his own way. It wasn't new. His first contracted beast, Koda, had come from a shelter too—a battered young Boxing Monkey, bruised half to ruin in a cage. A Commander-potential beast was perfectly respectable; no one would argue that. But back then, even before Elias' success, the family's fortunes would have allowed far better, yet Kyle had taken him anyway. He always took the bruised one. The forgotten one. The one with a story.

Elias didn't want to sound cynical, even inside his own head. He loved spirit beasts with his whole heart, and he meant it. But he'd read enough history to know the world wasn't built out of fairy tales, and he refused to pretend otherwise just because pretending felt kinder.

Spirit beasts had been created, in the beginning, as weapons. That was the plain origin of the entire profession—humanity standing at the edge of extinction, learning to contract the very creatures that had nearly finished them off. Everything since, all the breeding and the bonding and the gentle research Elias loved so much, had grown out of that one desperate need. And no one, not a single honest person alive, would deny that a stronger weapon raised your odds of seeing the next sunrise.

A shelter raven with one good eye was not, by that measure, a strong weapon.

And yet.

Elias glanced down the table at his brother, who was scratching Hero very carefully along the unburned edge of his neck, murmuring something too low to hear, wearing the face of a man who'd won a prize instead of adopted a problem.

Kyle's talent made him an exceptional fighter. Friendship Power—the bond that scaled with trust and grew without any ceiling at all—turned ordinary contracts into something far greater than their numbers suggested. Even now, Elias couldn't honestly say he'd win against his brother. Not even with Valentine. The butterfly was deadly, the most ruthless thing he had, the moment Elias was threatened, and it still might not be enough, because the bond between Kyle and Koda had been forged over years of two fools keeping each other alive.

That bond was the weapon. Not the monkey's rank. The years.

And watching the raven lean into Kyle's hand—eye half-closed, trusting a human again after a year of refusing to—Elias understood, with certainty, that it would be the same with Hero. Give it time. Give it, Kyle. And the forgotten delivery bird would become something no rank table could measure.

His brother hadn't been reckless after all. Or he had, completely, and it didn't matter, because reckless was simply the shape Kyle's loyalty took when it walked into a room.

Elias decided he could live with that.

Still, he found himself studying the raven longer than he meant to.

Half the body was wrapped in burn scars. One eye blind and clouded over. Feathers that would never sit flat again. A Carrier Raven—common, useful, the sort of beast a city employed by the thousand and discarded just as easily. The sort no breeder would ever bother to research, because what was there to find in a bird whose whole worth had been measured in parcels delivered per day?

Which was, of course, exactly the sort of question Elias had never in his life been able to leave alone.

Across the table, Kyle was still murmuring to the bird. Selena had started threatening to feed Hero properly. Damian was asking something gentle about the burns. The meeting had already begun loosening back into a family, the way it always did.

Elias barely heard any of it. He had fully stored questions, and he spent one.

Does this race have an evolution path capable of reaching at least King rank, and is its first evolution affordable to me now?

The answer arrived the way every answer always did—not as words, not as a voice, but as a quiet, absolute certainty settling into the back of his mind, true beyond any possibility of doubt.

Yes.

Elias let out a slow breath and felt the familiar warmth begin to spread through his chest—the one that had nothing to do with sentiment and everything to do with a door he hadn't known was there, swinging quietly open.

Hidden inside a delivery bird the world had thrown away the moment it stopped being convenient was a path that reached the sky.

He looked across the table at Hero—at the scarred, half-blind, gloriously unremarkable raven dozing against his brother's hand—and felt his mouth curve.

Well. It seemed his next research project had just decided itself.

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