This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

Next came the laborious part: grafting all the flowers onto the vines.

It was painstaking, repetitive work—exactly the sort that would have taken a lone breeder weeks of aching hands and bent backs. But Elias, as ever, was not alone. He had his three trusted confidants, Holly, Honey, and Hope, and behind them the thousands of bees of the hive—expert gardeners every one, their small, deft work tending plants with a precision no human fingers could match. He laid out the plan, matched each vine to the flowers its mood had favored, and set the colony loose upon the task.

The meadow filled with the industrious hum of thousands of bees grafting flowers to vines, swift and tireless and perfectly coordinated under the queens’ direction.

But for one vine, Elias kept the work for himself.

Briar.

Before he began, he stood a while and simply looked at the vine—the frail little runt he’d nursed back from the brink, now thick and green and thriving, the strangest and most special plant in all his meadow. And somewhere in that quiet looking, a decision he’d been circling for some time finally settled into certainty.

A tendril of spiritual energy rose from him and reached out to Briar.

The contract formed smoothly, without resistance, as though both of them had only been waiting for it. And for the first time in either of his lives, Elias felt what it was to be contracted—to be connected to another living thing so completely that the line between them blurred. Whole, yet two. Two, yet whole. It was a sensation he had no words for, and one he’d wondered about for years without ever truly grasping until now.

For the first time, too, he felt his own Beast Taming Space stir with a presence—that long-empty white void no longer quite so empty, a small green life now rooted somewhere in his soul. After all this time, his Space held its first beast.

He turned his attention to Briar, and found he could feel the vine’s emotions clearly now—vividly, immediately, even without reaching for his Insight talent. The contract carried them straight to him. And in return he could press his own thoughts gently down the bond toward Briar, though true conversation was beyond them yet; the vine, for all its rare gifts, simply hadn’t the intelligence for words. Feelings, though—feelings passed between them freely, warm and wordless.

From the side, three queens watched.

Holly, Honey, and Hope buzzed their congratulations—and beneath the well-wishes ran an unmistakable thread of jealousy, three regal sulks barely held in check. They had earned the right to be his closest, after all, had won it through a contest of their own. And now another had been bound to him before any of them.

Elias caught it at once, and set down his tools to reassure them.

“Hey,” he said gently, gathering the three of them close. “This isn’t about any of you not being enough. You’re more than enough—you know that. It’s not that you’re not worthy of a contract. It’s simply that Briar was the right choice for this, and for what I’m trying to build.” He stroked Holly’s shimmering wing with a fingertip. “A single spirit beast with compatibility for this many attributes at once is rare. Vanishingly rare. I can’t let a chance like that go—you understand?”

The three queens grumbled, mollified but not entirely, in the way of those who understood the logic and resented it anyway. Honey was the first to come around, then Hope, and finally even Holly gave a grudging, dignified buzz of acceptance. Whatever sulking remained, they kept it to a sulk.

Then Elias turned to the work he’d saved for his own hands.

He grafted Briar’s flowers himself, slowly and with the greatest care, and the contract made it a far more intimate task than it could ever have been otherwise. He didn’t have to guess at which blooms Briar favored—he could feel it, the vine’s pleasure and contentment flowing back to him with each flower he chose well, a quiet warmth of approval that guided his hands. He worked as much by feeling as by reasoning, reading Briar’s emotions to find each favorite in turn.

It took three days of meticulous, patient labor.

By the end of it, he had grafted a hundred flowers onto Briar—seventeen each of the water, earth, wind, and fire attributes, and sixteen each of light and dark. Six attributes, balanced as evenly as a hundred would allow, one for every element the special vine had embraced. A crown of mingled elements, grafted onto a single stubborn little vine.

The bees, for their part, had long since finished.

If you encounter this tale on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

In the same three days it took Elias to tend Briar alone, the tireless colony had grafted the flowers onto every other vine in the meadow, swift and flawless. And they didn’t stop there. With the grafting done, the bees turned to help the mending—the queens directing their workers to share life energy with the freshly grafted vines, accelerating the slow process of healing and binding, coaxing flower and vine to knit together far faster than they would have alone. What might have been weeks of delicate recovery was hastened along by a thousand devoted gardeners pouring vitality into the work.

Briar received the same care, and more—Elias saw to that personally.

During those three days, Elias hadn’t set his questions aside, and they’d brought him the shape of the second step.

It required an environmental condition—and something else besides.

He stared at that answer for a long moment, and felt a familiar dread begin to gather behind his eyes. Environment he could manage; his laboratory could conjure climates and terrains to order. But that “something else,” that nameless second requirement lurking beside it—he knew that pattern by now. He knew exactly the kind of maddening, weeks-long puzzle it tended to be.

And even before he’d asked a single question toward unraveling it, Elias felt a headache coming on.

“Why,” he muttered to Briar, who radiated cheerful, oblivious contentment back at him, “can you never just be simple?”

Briar, naturally, had no idea what he meant, and was perfectly happy about it.

And just as he’d predicted, three weeks passed.

By the end of them, the grafting had fully taken. Every vine in the meadow had assimilated its flowers completely, bloom and vine grown into a single seamless whole, the hundred grafts on each settling in as though they’d always belonged. It was a quietly marvelous sight—a thousand vines crowned in mingled blossoms, and Briar at the heart of them, wearing his six-attribute crown like the strange little king he was.

But assimilation came at a cost. The merged vines hungered for far more energy than before, the grafted flowers demanding their share, and left to themselves they’d have wilted under the strain. So the bees stepped in. The colony spread their Lifebloom honey across the rows, feeding the vines the rich, life-laden nourishment they needed—and the vines, sustained, repaid the kindness in turn, their grafted flowers producing far more nectar than before for the bees to gather. A quiet little cycle had formed, bee feeding flower and flower feeding bee, each making the other richer.

Those three weeks were not without their entertainments.

The bees, as ever, were a circus unto themselves. A cluster of workers discovered that a particularly large grafted blossom made an excellent trampoline and spent the better part of an afternoon flinging themselves into it for no discernible reason. Two queens got into a silent, dignified standoff over which of them had the right to inspect a newly nectar-rich vine first, hovering nose to nose until Honey drifted over and gently defused the whole affair. A single overworked worker fell asleep mid-task in the cup of a flower and had to be ferried back to the hive by its sisters, still fast asleep, like a tiny dethroned royal carried on a litter.

Elias was no better. He’d taken to narrating his work aloud to the bees as he went, and they’d taken to treating him as a kind of mobile garden feature—settling on his head, his shoulders, the bridge of his nose, riding along wherever he wandered. At one point he stood up and forgot that Hope had fallen asleep in his hair, and walked half the meadow with a slumbering queen perched atop his head before Holly buzzed sharply enough to alert him. He learned to check for passengers before standing. He did not always remember.

“You’re supposed to be helping me think,” he informed a worker that had planted itself squarely on his notebook, directly over the line he was trying to read. The worker did not move. “Right. Of course. Silly me.”

But beneath the antics, the second step refused to yield.

Three weeks of questions, three weeks of theories, and Elias was no closer to its nameless requirement than the day he’d started. He worked at it from every angle he could think of and a few he couldn’t, and the wall held firm. The environmental condition he’d sorted out easily enough—but that stubborn “something else” sat just out of reach, mocking him.

It wore on him. By the end of three fruitless weeks, he’d taken to wandering the rows in the evenings, talking at the vines as though they might answer.

“What do you want?” he asked Briar one night, more loudly than he meant to, throwing his hands up at the cheerfully oblivious vine. “You’re so close. You’re right there. Just—what is it? What do you need? Tell me, please, because I am running out of ideas!”

Briar, of course, only radiated warm, untroubled contentment, utterly unbothered by his keeper’s distress. The thousand other vines were no more help. Elias let his arms fall and slumped, disheartened, the frustration of weeks settling heavy on his shoulders.

And then, softly, three small presences came to his side.

Holly, Honey, and Hope drifted down out of the evening air to settle close around him—Holly on his shoulder, Honey near his cheek, Hope alighting gently atop his head. They didn’t need words. Through the warmth of them and the faint, comforting hum of their wings, the meaning came through plainly enough. They’d seen their keeper sink low like this before, over the bees, and they’d learned what he needed when he did.

Honey nuzzled softly against his cheek. Hope settled in his hair, a small reassuring weight. Holly, ever practical, simply pressed close to his neck, steady and certain, as if to remind him he wasn’t carrying any of this alone.

Elias let out a long breath, and some of the weight eased.

“Thanks,” he murmured, reaching up to brush a careful fingertip along Holly’s wing. “I know. I know. I’ll figure it out. I always do.” He managed a tired, crooked smile. “It just likes to make me suffer first.”

The three queens hummed and stayed with him there in the gathering dark, three small lights keeping their disheartened keeper company until the worst of the discouragement had passed.

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!