This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

Just when Elias had let himself believe the rest of the evolution would be a breeze, a month slipped by and left him thoroughly stumped once again.

The next step had its hooks in him, and it would not let go. Question after question, theory after theory, and the answer simply refused to come together into anything he could act on. It was, he reflected ruefully, becoming a familiar rhythm—a stretch of smooth progress, and then one stubborn wall that made him pay for all of it at once. He’d learned, by now, not to fight it head-on past a certain point. When the wall went up, the wiser course was to step back, live a little, and let the answer come to him sideways while he wasn’t looking.

And as it happened, he had a whole world to live in while he waited.

The ten new Lifebloom Queens had hatched and settled in by now, folded seamlessly into the existing court.

They’d fallen in behind Holly, Honey, and Hope almost at once, the way all the queens did—the three ministers’ authority was simply a fact of life in the realm, as natural and unquestioned as the artificial sun overhead. The newcomers learned the rhythms of the place, took up their roles, and joined the great humming machine of the colony with hardly a ripple. Fifty queens now, where once there had been one. A whole flourishing dynasty, and at the head of it three familiar faces keeping the entire glorious mess in order.

Mostly in order. There was always a healthy margin of chaos. That, Elias had come to understand, was simply how a realm full of proud queens and ten thousand bees and a world’s worth of sentient vines worked. The trick wasn’t to eliminate the chaos. It was to enjoy it.

And there was a great deal to enjoy.

The days in the realm had settled into a warm, ridiculous rhythm. Mornings began, without fail, with Holly. She had appointed herself Elias’s personal supervisor and timekeeper, and she took the duty with deadly seriousness—arriving at his side the moment the artificial sun brightened, buzzing pointed reminders that he had slept too long, eaten too little, and was almost certainly about to forget something important. More than once he woke to find her hovering directly over his face, vibrating with the particular impatience of a queen whose schedule was being disrespected.

“I’m up, I’m up,” he would groan, and Holly would settle onto his shoulder with the smug air of a job well done, riding along to oversee his breakfast and judge his choices throughout.

Honey kept the peace, as ever. With fifty queens sharing one world, small disputes were inevitable—a contested flowerbed here, a matter of wounded pride there—and Honey drifted through it all like a tireless diplomat, smoothing each ruffled feather before it could become a feud. The colony ran as smoothly as it did in no small part because one gentle, sweet-natured queen simply refused to let anyone stay angry for long.

And then there was Hope, who was a category of weather all her own.

Hope did not supervise, or mediate, or keep to any schedule. Hope had ideas—a relentless, inexhaustible torrent of them, each more ambitious than the last. Over the course of the month she attempted, among other things: to teach a squadron of worker bees synchronized formation flying (a partial success, until two of them collided spectacularly); to convince Briar’s clones to grow a flower bridge clear across the encircling river (an immediate and lasting success, much to Holly’s exasperation); and to organize the entire colony into a single, coordinated wave of flight across the whole realm at sunset (a glorious, doomed failure that nonetheless produced one genuinely breathtaking minute before it all fell apart).

Elias adored her for it. Most of her schemes failed. A surprising number didn’t. And the realm was, without question, a more wonderful place for her relentless, optimistic refusal to leave well enough alone.

“One of these days,” he told her, watching her chivvy a reluctant Briar-clone into growing a slide, “one of your ridiculous ideas is going to change the world, and the rest of us are going to have to pretend we always believed in you.”

Hope, who understood none of the words and all of the affection, did a delighted loop and went back to her slide.

Briar, for its part, had grown more comfortable and more itself with every passing week.

The main body stayed near Elias almost always—coiled about his shoulders, trailing at his heels, draped across his lap when he sat to work—radiating its simple, bottomless contentment down the bond. But the clones had become a presence all their own across the realm, and they’d developed a personality to match their main body: gentle, affectionate, and quietly mischievous.

They took to playing little tricks. A clone would grow a particularly enticing flower just out of a bee’s reach and then ease it away, inch by inch, whenever the bee got close—a slow, patient game of keep-away that the bees fell for every single time and never seemed to mind. Another learned that Elias was ticklish and developed a habit of brushing a vine tip against the back of his neck while he was concentrating, just to feel his startled laugh through the bond. The whole sprawling network of them seemed to delight in small, gentle joys, an entire world’s worth of one being’s quiet, fragrant happiness.

“You’re getting cheeky,” Elias accused the vine around his neck one afternoon, after a clone three fields away had very deliberately dropped a petal on his open notebook. Briar pulsed with warm, unrepentant amusement. It had learned, somewhere along the way, that it was loved—and a creature that knew itself loved had room to be playful.

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And then there was the matter of the special larva.

The little glutton had only grown more devoted—and more ravenous—as the weeks passed. Its love for Elias’s blood had crossed the line from healthy appetite into open obsession. The moment it caught his scent, it would go wild, wriggling and lunging in its enclosure with single-minded determination, utterly convinced that its favorite person was also its favorite snack.

Feeding time was a production. While its nine thousand-odd siblings ate placidly from their bowls, the special one would ignore its meal entirely in favor of trying to climb Elias’s hand and gnaw directly on his finger, chasing the source of the blood it had been raised on. He’d taken to wearing a thick glove on that hand, which the larva regarded as a personal insult and attempted, daily, to defeat.

“You have a whole bowl,” Elias informed it, peeling the determined little creature off his gloved thumb for the third time in as many minutes. “A whole bowl, made specially for you, with extra of the good stuff. And you want the finger. Every time, the finger.”

The larva, undeterred, lunged for the finger.

He couldn’t even be annoyed. There was something genuinely endearing about being adored so single-mindedly, even if the adoration came with teeth. And he knew, better than anyone, what that voracious, abnormal hunger likely meant. He’d seen a creature hunger past all reason before, and it had become Briar. He didn’t know yet what this one would become. But he had a strong suspicion it would be something special—and in the meantime, it could keep trying to eat his fingers, and he would keep loving it anyway.

It was somewhere in the middle of that warm, stuck, contented month that Elias decided to do something he’d been meaning to for a while. He invited his whole family to the secret realm for a picnic.

It took some doing—marking each of them so they could enter, ferrying them through the platform one at a time—but soon enough the whole Arkwright clan stood blinking in the open fields of his private world, and their reactions were everything he could have hoped for.

Selena let out a low whistle, taking in the endless flowers and the impossible fixed sun. Kyle simply gaped, turning a slow circle, muttering that this was the coolest thing he’d ever seen and demanding to know if he could move in. And Damien—Damien stood very still, breathing in the mingled fragrance of a hundred blooms, his healer’s senses clearly overwhelmed by the sheer density of life and balanced spiritual energy saturating the air. “Elias,” he said quietly, “this is… do you have any idea what you’ve built here?”

“A nice spot for a picnic?” Elias offered, grinning.

His father laughed, helpless and delighted, and let it go.

They picnicked in a clearing among the flowers, beneath the warm artificial sun, and it was perfect.

Damien had, of course, brought enough food to feed a legion, and the family fell to it with their usual enthusiasm—Kyle eating roughly his own body weight, Selena recounting frontier misadventures between bites, the easy bickering affection of the Arkwrights filling the quiet world with warmth and noise. The family’s own beasts came too, and the realm welcomed them all: Amia drifted through the air in a shimmer of jade; Koda found a sunny patch and settled in with the contentment of a creature who had found paradise; Eiren surveyed the endless fields from a high perch with ancient, approving calm; and Rime drifted among the flowers scattering delighted snowflakes that melted before they touched the warm ground.

And Floria came with Damien, as she always did—the proud, regal matriarch of the whole Lifebloom line. The fifty queens treated her arrival with something close to meeting at a royal ball, and even Holly, Honey, and Hope—sovereigns in their own right- paid respects. Floria accepted it all as her due, settling regally at Damien’s side.

And Briar, shy no longer, came out to meet the family it had only briefly known. It wound happily among them, accepting Kyle’s teasing and Selena’s admiring inspection and Damien’s genuine, tender appreciation of its hundred fragrances. By the end of the afternoon it had clearly decided, all over again, that these loud warm creatures were good, and that the days they visited were the best days of all.

The bees joined too, naturally—fifty queens and their countless workers drawn to the gathering, drifting curiously around the family, and there was a long and delightful stretch where Holly attempted to organize the picnic, Honey made diplomatic overtures to Koda, and Hope tried very hard to abscond with one of Kyle’s snacks. Kyle, to his eternal credit, let her have it, and the two of them formed an immediate and chaotic alliance that Elias suspected he would regret enabling.

Elias sat in the middle of all of it—his family sprawled and laughing in the grass, his bees and his vine and his family’s beasts all mingling under his own private sky, the whole impossible warmth of it surrounding him—and felt his chest go full to aching.

He still hadn’t solved the wretched step. The evolution still waited, stubborn and unfinished, and he had no doubt it would keep him up plenty of nights yet before it finally yielded. But sitting there, with everyone he loved gathered in the world he’d built with his own two hands and a great deal of help from the creatures around him, he found he couldn’t bring himself to care about that just now.

The step would wait. It always did. And it always, eventually, gave in.

Evening came, and the family went home—ferried back through the platform one by one, full of food and warmth and promises to visit again soon, Kyle already lobbying to make it a weekly tradition.

And then it was quiet.

Elias lay down in the field of flowers beneath the dimming artificial sun, the day’s warmth still in the air, the world settling into its gentle false dusk around him. Briar’s main body uncoiled from his shoulder and wound instead around his neck, soft and affectionate, nestling close in the way it did when it simply wanted to be near him. All around, as far as he could see, the clones swayed in the still air—not from any wind, for there was none, but from sheer, simple joy, a whole world’s worth of one being gently dancing for the contentment of it.

Elias watched them sway, his strange beloved vine warm against his throat, and let his thoughts drift idle and unhurried.

And somewhere in that drifting, an absurd thought crossed his mind.

It was a ridiculous thought. A foolish one, born of too pleasant an afternoon and too relaxed a mind, the kind of half-formed notion he’d normally have dismissed without a second glance. But his talent was right there, and the day had made him bold, and so—mostly as a joke, mostly certain the answer would be a flat, sensible no—he spent his question on it.

The answer came back: yes.

Elias lay very still in the flowers for a long moment, staring up at his own private sky, while Briar nuzzled obliviously at his jaw and ten thousand vines swayed with joy all around him.

“You have got to be kidding me,” he said, to no one in particular.