This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

The family answered the SOS the way the family answered everything—quickly, loudly, and in greater numbers than strictly necessary.

Within a day they had descended on the realm to help Elias invent treasure hunts, and the results were immediate, chaotic, and far more effective than anything he had managed alone. Selena suggested games with a competitive cruelty the ravens adored. Damian thought up gentler ones. Rime wanted everything to involve ice, naturally, and was only partly talked out of it. But the surprise of the whole effort—surprising, perhaps, only to people who didn't know him—was Kyle.

Kyle was the most enthusiastic person in the realm, and somehow also the most genuinely useful.

It made a certain sense, once Elias stopped being startled by it.

Kyle had spent his entire life turning ordinary afternoons into adventures. He understood fun the way Elias understood evolution paths—instinctively, completely, from the inside. And where Elias designed his games like a researcher, carefully and a little stiffly, with the joyless precision of a man satisfying a requirement, Kyle designed them like someone who simply wanted everyone to have the best possible time.

His games had more winners. More chances, more rounds, more ways to come out ahead, so that no raven ever flew home empty and discouraged. And they were more fun, full of the kind of ridiculous, escalating stakes that kept three hundred clever birds shrieking with delight rather than sulking in Briar's branches. Where Elias's careful clay-ball hunt had gone stale in three days, Kyle's games left the ravens clamoring for more.

Best of all, his designs were built so that every single bird could reach the hundred-win mark—all three hundred and one of them, Hero proudly included, the scarred raven throwing himself into the games with a one-eyed determination that won him an embarrassing number of rounds. Kyle had simply refused to design anything that left a bird behind. It was, Elias thought, the most Kyle thing imaginable.

He and Hope became an immediate menace together. The dreamer queen who saw possibility in everything and the brother who feared no idea, no matter how absurd, fed off one another shamelessly, and the games they cooked up between them grew steadily grander, sillier, and—infuriatingly—better. Elias gave up competing somewhere around their fourth collaboration and simply started writing down what they invented.

And where Kyle was chaos, Koda was the steadying hand that kept the chaos from collapsing under its own weight.

The Boxing Monkey had thrown himself into the project with the same quiet competence he brought to everything. While Kyle dreamed up the games, Koda was the one who actually built them—hammering together maze walls, setting up the fields of decoy dummies, carrying crates of clay balls and shiny prizes without ever being asked. He was strong enough to assemble in an afternoon what would have taken Elias a week, and patient enough to do it twice when Kyle inevitably changed the rules halfway through. More than once Elias watched the monkey hold up an entire half-finished game structure with one arm while gesturing with the other for a raven to hurry up and fetch the piece it had stolen. The ravens, for their part, had decided Koda was the single best perch in the realm, and a game could rarely begin until three or four of them had been gently shaken off his broad shoulders. He never seemed to mind.

So Elias made it official.

With as much ceremony as he could muster, he declared Kyle the project's Fun Gamemaster—a title his brother accepted with the delighted gravity of a man being knighted. From that point on, the games were Kyle's domain, and Elias was free to focus on the research itself.

There was only one logistical wrinkle. If Kyle was going to be the realm's gamemaster, he needed to actually be in the realm, which meant no more vanishing into the outskirts to train and hunt for weeks at a stretch.

Elias raised it with their mother, half-expecting resistance. “I'd like to borrow Kyle,” he said. “For as long as possible. It means no more training trips for a while—no hunting in the outskirts.”

Selena agreed before he'd finished the sentence.

She had been making these trips to the outskirts with Kyle for years now—a long stretch of them—and there was nothing wrong with letting the boy stay home and run wild in a different way for a season. Kyle worked best when he was let loose at something, and a realm full of games and rescued birds was as good a thing to be let loose at as any beast in the wild. Better, maybe. He'd come back from it happier than he came back from a hunt.

And—though she'd have rolled her eyes before admitting it out loud—there was a small, selfish part of her that didn't mind at all. With Kyle occupied here, it would be just her and Damian for a while. After years, the thought of a few quiet weeks alone with her husband was, Selena decided, a rather lovely one, though she would never admit it out loud. She'd earned it. They both had.

Stolen story; please report.

With Kyle handling the fun, Elias's own work moved faster than it had in months.

Cracking the first step had done more than unlock it—it had taught him the theme of the whole evolution. This was a path about luck, about fortune earned through play, and once he understood that, the rest of the requirements began to make a strange, delightful kind of sense. He stopped fighting the evolution and started listening to it. Within a month, he had deduced all five steps.

And to his enormous relief, he discovered the steps did not have to be completed in order. A raven could work on any of them at any time, in any combination. That single fact changed everything because it meant he could keep the flock entertained by switching freely between games rather than grinding the same requirement until the birds revolted. Variety wasn't just nice anymore. It was the whole strategy.

Step two was a maze.

The requirement asked a raven to choose the right path again and again—to reach the treasure at the heart of a labyrinth a hundred times over, each correct turn a small wager on fortune. Now that Elias understood the theme, the game designed itself: a shifting maze through the realm's gardens, branching and rebranching, with a prize at the center and luck rewarding the birds who guessed their way through. Kyle, predictably, made it a race, added shortcuts that sometimes helped and sometimes doomed you, and turned the whole thing into the ravens' favorite event within an afternoon.

Step three was about the wind.

A raven had to release its wind blades and, by chance more than aim, strike a true target one hundred times. So Elias built a game of decoys: a field of dummies, all identical save for one real mark hidden among them, and a flock of ravens firing their wind cuts wildly into the crowd. Hitting the genuine target was mostly fortune—you couldn't tell it from the fakes—and the ravens treated the whole thing as glorious target practice, shrieking with delight whenever someone's lucky blade found the real one.

Step four needed closeness.

A raven had to be near someone—all but touching them—while letting that person win, a hundred times over. For this Elias called in everyone gentle enough for the task: all the Butler Pigs, and Holly, Honey, and Hope. They sat down to board games, the simple luck-driven kind where dice and chance decided everything, each playing alongside a raven held close. The pigs cradled their birds with grave dignity. The three queens were a different matter entirely—being only the size of a human head, far smaller than the eagle-sized ravens, they didn't hold their birds at all. They perched atop them, settling regally between a raven's wings and letting the great bird serve as both seat and teammate. The ravens adored the arrangement; the queens pretended to tolerate it merely. A raven close against its player while that player won on a lucky roll—that was all it took, and it was, Elias thought, one of the warmest sights the realm had yet produced.

And step five was the simplest of all.

A raven had to caw at someone, and that someone had to win ten times in a row. Pure, unbroken luck—a streak that owed nothing to skill. So Elias reached for the simplest games of chance he knew: coin tosses, rounds of rock-paper-scissors, anything that came down to a clean fifty-fifty and a run of good fortune. A raven would croak its encouragement at a player, and if the lucky streak held all the way to ten, the step was satisfied, and the bird was rewarded with the shiniest prize on offer.

And so the realm became, for a season, the strangest and happiest casino in the world.

Elias watched it all take shape with a quiet, growing wonder. Everywhere he looked, something was being won. Ravens streaked through the shifting maze in the gardens. Wind blades whistled into fields of decoys. Butler Pigs hunched gravely over board games with birds tucked beside them, while Holly perched between the wings of a long-suffering raven like a tiny disgruntled empress on a feathered throne and Hope rode hers in delighted loops above the players, refusing to sit still. Coins flashed in the air. The realm rang from dawn to dusk with the croaks and shrieks of three hundred and one ravens discovering, perhaps for the first time in their hard-worked lives, that being alive could be fun.

And at the heart of it all stood Kyle, with Koda never far behind—the gamemaster and his right hand. Wherever Kyle's wild ideas threatened to outrun reality, Koda was already there, rebuilding the maze wall a raven had knocked loose, steadying a toppling tower of prizes, lifting a stuck bird down from a perch too high for its tired wings. The two of them ran the whole glorious circus together the way they did everything: one charging ahead, the other making sure the ground stayed under his feet.

The gamemaster had truly come into his own. He moved through the chaos like he was born for it—settling disputes between sore-loser ravens, inventing a new rule on the spot whenever a game grew stale, cheering the winners and consoling the losers with equal enormous sincerity. He had a raven on each shoulder more often than not, and Hero rarely left his side, the scarred bird presiding over the games beside him like a one-eyed lieutenant. Kyle remembered which birds were shy and which were bold, which needed an easier round to keep their spirits up and which wanted a real challenge. He knew them. In the space of a few weeks he had learned three hundred ravens the way he'd once learned a single battered monkey in a shelter, and he loved every one of them.

Elias stood in the flower fields—the vine immediately curling a contented tendril around his wrist—and watched his reckless older brother orchestrate joy for a flock of forgotten birds, and thought that he had perhaps never made a better decision in his life than asking Kyle for help.

The evolution would take time yet. A hundred wins each across five steps —three hundred and one birds—it was a mountain of small fortunes still to be earned.

But for the first time since the ravens had arrived, Elias wasn't worried about the climb at all.

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