This Beast Tamer Has So Many Questions

Three months passed, and the world rearranged itself again around a single quiet man who never saw it happen.

In the realm, Elias finished what he had promised Iris.

It took the better part of those three months, but at the end of it he had her Blood Crystal Butterfly—and a fine one. It was not the prodigy Valentine had been; few things ever would be. But it had endured the full sixty-four cloning divisions, the same as Valentine, and that alone had carried its potential to Monarch rank. Paired with Iris’s Elemental Resonance, with its three attributes feeding one another and her talent magnifying all three, Elias had little doubt it would climb to heights few butterflies ever saw. Iris had wept a little when she contracted it, and pretended she hadn’t, and no one in the realm was unkind enough to mention it.

And while that work wound on, the sheep went out into the world.

Elias submitted both evolutions—Dream and Nightmare—and chose, as he always did, to make them fully public. Whatever they were worth, he wanted them in everyone’s hands.

Oliver braced for another avalanche—and this time he was right to.

It was not the help with sleeping that set the world alight, though that mattered to the restless and the insomniac well enough. It was the other thing. The Dream sheep cultivated for you while you slept. A night of pleasant dreams that also advanced your spiritual strength, meditation’s grind done in your sleep at no cost of waking hours—and to a world of cultivators who loathed the daily tedium of meditation, that was nothing short of a revolution. Everyone cultivated. Everyone, therefore, wanted a sheep.

The scramble was immediate and enormous. Cultivators of every rank, families and guilds and lone practitioners, all of them suddenly desperate for a soft creature that could turn sleep itself into progress. It was, in its way, as fierce as the rush for the ravens had been—and once again it was Oliver who stood in the middle of the storm and bent it to order.

He pulled the strings from behind, the way he always did. He capped the prices before they could spiral past reach. He managed the politics—the great families angling for first access, the guilds demanding allotments, the officials wanting to be seen securing sheep for their districts—soothing each in turn and steering the whole roiling mess toward something orderly and fair. The commotion was vast. Under Oliver’s quiet hand, it never became chaos.

What Oliver had not anticipated, in the middle of all that, was the other kind of letter.

All across the federation, people had kept Sleep Sheep for years—ordinary ones, common pets, soft companions who had warmed a thousand beds and were now growing old. And the evolution did not only make new spirit beasts. It gave those aging sheep a future. Owners who had been quietly dreading the loss of a beloved companion suddenly learned that the creature could evolve, could grow stronger, could live years longer than its small life had promised.

The letters poured in. Thank you, they said, over and over, in a hundred different hands. Thank you for the years you gave back to my sheep. Thank you for the nights I sleep again. And not only for the sheep—there were older letters too, ones Oliver had been quietly collecting all along: gratitude for the Lifebloom honey that had saved a life, for the Butler Pigs that had given a family’s old companion a second youth, for every quiet miracle that had ended up in an ordinary home.

Oliver gathered them all, checked each one carefully—for he trusted no envelope that reached Elias unexamined—and sent the safe ones on.

And Elias read every single one, slowly, with great relish, and was happier over that stack of letters than over anything else the three months brought him.

The trouble, when it came, came from the Nightmare sheep.

What Elias had reasoned out in a flower field, the military worked out within days of the public release: a creature that could build a perfect battle inside a sleeping mind—any enemy, any terrain, real as death and costing nothing—was the single most valuable training tool anyone had ever conceived of. No casualties. No lost veterans. Endless repetition against the exact horrors a soldier would one day face.

The military did not merely want them. It clamored for them, every branch and every frontier at once, in a frenzy that made the raven scramble look orderly.

Oliver waded into the chaos and did what he did best. He could not stop the demand, nor did he try. But he bent it—pulled strings, called in favors, traded access for guarantees—until he had secured the one outcome that mattered: at least half of every Nightmare sheep produced went, first and foremost, to the Sagittarius frontier. To the place, and the soldiers, the whole project had been meant for.

And on that frontier, Cassian Sagittarius watched a war change shape.

He and Seraphina had returned to it months earlier, sheep in tow, and found the line much as he had left it—which was its own small mercy. Nothing catastrophic had happened in his absence. His parents had held the Frontier as they always did, and the worst of it had waited, almost politely, for his return.

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He set about the distribution exactly as Elias had advised.

The Dream sheep went to the retired and the recovering—veterans pulled back from the line who could not sleep, who woke screaming, who had carried the frontier home in their heads and never set it down. To them Cassian gave good dreams, real rest, and watched men he had thought permanently broken begin, slowly, to mend.

The Nightmare sheep went forward, to the soldiers still fighting.

At first the men were wary—understandably so; one did not eagerly invite a creature of nightmares into one’s sleep. But the results converted them fast. A Nightmare sheep would settle against a sleeping soldier and simply devour the horrors waiting there, eating the gruesome, blood-soaked nightmares of the frontier with the same placid contentment its gentler kin showed for dreams of love—and the soldier would wake, for the first time in months, having slept the whole night through untroubled.

And then came the part that proved Cassian right.

Some of those nightmares were not merely memories.

On a frontier soaked in Illusion and Mental energy, demonic beasts had a way of burrowing into a soldier’s mind and lurking there, manifesting as recurring nightmares no waking weapon could touch. The Nightmare sheep found them. Drew them out, cornered them in dreamscapes the sheep alone controlled, and devoured them whole—clearing from men’s minds the very things that had been driving them mad. It was exactly what Cassian had imagined in a flower field three months before, and seeing it work, he allowed himself a rare, private satisfaction.

The sheep did more still. For soldiers too frayed to face the dark all at once, they built gentler nightmares—weaker versions, scaled down—and walked the men through their fears in pieces small enough to master, the sheep always holding control, always ready to end it before it became too much. Slowly, surely, soldiers who had been unmanned by terror learned to stand in it again.

And then there was Seraphina.

She had finished her sheep’s evolution on the journey, and under the watchful protection of a handful of powerful veterans, she tested what it could do—and what it could do was staggering.

Her talent saw to that. Mystic Body magnified a Mystic beast beyond all ordinary measure, and her Nightmare sheep had become something far past its rank. A single Nightmare’s Shout swept out and dragged every demonic beast of Lord rank and below into forced sleep at once—and then into a nightmare the sheep sealed shut around them, where it ate away at their minds until nothing remained but husks. The intangible ones, the mind-invaders that no blade could find, were easier still: in the dreaming dark the sheep was sovereign, and it grew stronger with every nightmare it devoured. It punched far above its own rank, turning back demonic night-beasts that should by every measure have overmatched it—and did not so much as strain.

Some of that was the sheep’s nature, the natural dominion it held over its own nightmares. But most of it was Seraphina. A talent that had spent years unable to find a beast worthy of it had, at last, found its moment—and the quiet woman who had never quite known where she belonged stood on her parents’ frontier and turned out to be a weapon the frontier had been waiting a generation for.

The change, once it began, did not slow.

Elias sent another thousand sheep, and then more, and still the military bought every one it could lay hands on. On the Sagittarius frontier the casualties began to fall—and then to fall sharply—as the most feared enemies of all, the nightmare-dwelling demonic beasts that had tormented the legion for generations, became suddenly among the easiest to put down. A Nightmare sheep made short, contemptuous work of the very things that had once driven veterans to madness.

Within those months the Nightmare sheep became what the Protector Turtle had become before it: not a luxury, not an advantage, but a necessity—a contract every soldier on the frontier was expected to have, as fundamental to survival as a blade.

Cassian felt the difference in himself, too.

He had seen it in their faces the day he rode back in. An old veteran—a man who had served under Cassian’s father before him, who had buried more comrades than he could name—had straightened from his post at the gate, taken one look at the commander and the strange flock behind him, and snapped a salute so sharp it might have been his first. “The commander’s back,” someone had said down the line, low, and then it had moved through the camp like a current—the commander’s back, he’s come back—soldiers leaving their posts just to see it was true. They had not merely missed him. They had been waiting.

And when they learned what he had brought—that the man who had once ended the slow bleed of madness on the frontier had returned bearing salvation a second time—the respect and admiration they gave him ran deeper than any he had known. Through his talent, that devotion became strength. His rank, already towering, climbed higher still, all the way to the peak of King, a height almost no one of his years had ever touched.

Seraphina rose with him in her own way. Her sheep, carried by her talent, advanced by leaps and bounds until it reached Monarch rank—and she with it, no longer a guardian uncertain of her place, but a soldier who had found one.

And when at last the work was done—the sheep settled, the soldiers seen to, the frontier remade—the two of them did exactly what they had promised. They left it in his parents’ steady hands, and they returned to the realm. Back to the flowers, and the table, and the gentle man who had set all of it in motion without ever raising his voice.

They found him, of course, already buried in something new.

Elias barely looked up when they arrived, so absorbed was he in a fresh stack of notes—though the smile he gave them when he did was warm enough to make up for it. He had, he explained, found his next project. A small, overlooked creature, common and unremarkable, that almost no one ever looked at twice.

A miniature horse. A gentle little thing called a Glimmering Horse.

Cassian looked at the breeder bent eagerly over his notes, at the realm full of impossible creatures he had raised from nothing, at the frontier-changing miracle that had already passed quietly into history behind them—and only shook his head, and smiled, and went to find Sebastian about a cup of tea.

Whatever the Glimmering Horse was, he had long since stopped doubting it would change something.