Chapter Ninety: Silverstream
Elias was still blowing on his reddened hands when he remembered he had never actually explained where they were going.
"Oh—right. Sorry. The trip." He flexed his stinging fingers one more time, winced, and gave up on them. "I should tell you what all this is for before Sebastian loads you onto a transport without a word of warning."
Cassian, still slightly bent, straightened—his face, Elias noted with a flicker of relief, unmarked, not so much as a trace of where the slap had landed. "Where," he said.
"Silverstream District. We leave the day after tomorrow." Elias gestured vaguely at the storm of packing all around them. "I need to study one of their native spirit beasts—it's the whole reason for the trip. I'm sorry it's so sudden. I know you only just got back, and now we're hauling you off across half the continent."
"It's our duty to follow you," Cassian said, as if this settled the matter, which to him it plainly did. "Wherever you go."
It was, Elias reflected, a very Cassian way to put it—and not quite the whole truth of how it worked, though he let it stand.
Humanity, these days, lived crowded together on a single great continent. The middle of it was the gentlest place, where the spiritual energy ran calm and even—though never truly empty; demonic beasts surfaced everywhere on Blue Star, even in the gentlest districts, only far more rarely there, a stray danger rather than a daily one; and there, spread across that stable heartland, sat the districts—hundreds of them, each one as large as a nation of the old world. The farther one traveled from that center, the wilder the energy grew, until at the very outer edge it boiled over into the frontier, where the beast tides came, and men like Cassian held the line.
Each district, sheltered in the calm middle, had grown into its own thing over the long centuries. Each had a specialty—one famed for its plant beasts, another for mining, another for aquatic species, another for breeding, or research, or war machines. It was the natural shape of the world. And because Elias's work took him wherever a particular beast happened to live, it meant his guardians simply… went where he went. They had sworn to. A King-rank contract stone was not a thing one carried lightly. So when the breeder packed his bags, his guardians packed theirs, and no one thought it strange.
"Silverstream is where my parents are from," Elias said, the explaining settling him, his hands forgotten now. "Both of them. It's an aquatic district—rivers and lakes everywhere, the whole place built around water beasts."
He told it the short way, the way the family told it at the dinner table. His mother and father had met young and run off together against everyone's wishes, and spent their early years wandering—far and wide, district after district, two reckless people with nothing but their beasts and each other—before the running finally wore itself out and they settled down in Heartwood District, put down roots, and had a family. Kyle first. Then him.
"So I've never actually been there," Elias admitted. "Silverstream. Neither has Kyle. We grew up in Heartwood." A small, surprised smile crossed his face, as if he had only just noticed. "This'll be the first time either of us sees the place our parents came from."
"It's for my dad, really," he went on. "That's what started all this."
Damian, it turned out, had not been able to stop thinking about the Guiding Horses. He had walked among the little unevolved Glimmering Horses on every visit, in no hurry at all, until at last one of them had looked back at him the right way—and he had made up his mind. He wanted to raise that one himself, the long way, into a Guiding Horse of his own.
If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
There was only one problem. His father was Commander Rank 8, and so did not have an open contract slot to spare. He was full. Which left exactly two options: wait—possibly years—for his rank to climb high enough to open another slot, or evolve one of the beasts he already had; naturally Elias chose the former.
And that was where Amia came in.
Amia was Damian's first contracted beast—the oldest companion he had, from long before Elias was ever born. A Sparkling Jade Guppy: a small, elegant thing like a fish carved from living jade, her scales a pure, shimmering white that caught the light like a polished gemstone, her fins translucent and trailing, her eyes a clever, watchful emerald. Tiny motes of green light drifted through the water wherever she swam, so that she looked less like a fish than a living jewel gliding through liquid crystal. She was, fittingly, a specialty of Silverstream—and she was also, by long family agreement, the single most judgmental member of the household, given to blowing slow disapproving bubbles at anyone (Kyle, usually) doing something she considered beneath sense.
She had also, quietly, reached the end of her road. Elias had checked her status himself, with care.
Name: Amia
Race: Sparkling Jade Guppy
Type: Aquatic
Attributes: Water, Life
Rank: Commander Rank 10
Potential Rank: Commander Rank 10
Skills:
Jade Spring — Lv10
Water manipulation - Lv10
Healing Current — Lv10
Shimmering Waters — Lv10
Purifying Water — Lv10
There it was, in every line: a beast at the very ceiling of her kind. Full rank. Every skill at level ten. Amia had grown as far as a Sparkling Jade Guppy could possibly grow, and could not climb one step higher without becoming something else.
There was, of course, an evolution for her. There nearly always was, for anything precious.
But the known one was a closed, private method—owned and monopolized by a single house—and the price of using it was the sort of thing that made Elias's jaw tighten. Lifelong service. Binding terms. The kind of clause written by people who knew exactly how badly someone might want their old friend to keep growing, and meant to charge them their whole future for it. He had said no the very moment he understood what they were asking. Some prices were not prices at all. They were leashes.
So naturally, during the months Cassian and Oliver were away on the frontier, Elias had gone question diving and found it.
Two, actually. The thought of it still warmed him—the researcher waking up underneath the host. Two evolution paths for the Sparkling Jade Guppy, both of them affordable. Though questions were all he needed, specimens helped in research, and he needed a great many of them to study the thing properly—and the best place in all the world to find Sparkling Jade Guppies was the district they came from.
Which was how the entire household had come to be turned upside down.
This was not a quiet research trip. The Butler Pigs, under Sebastian's serene and absolute command, were preparing to move the whole family and every guardian —packing, provisioning, arranging transport, fussing over Elias's refusal to sit still. Damian and Selena were coming, of course; it was Damian's beast and Damian's home district, and Selena had grown up in those harsh streets and had her own reasons to see them again. Kyle was coming, loud about it. And the guardians went where Elias went.
It was a great deal of fuss for one small jade fish.
But it was also, Elias thought—watching the cheerful chaos, his stinging hands finally cooling—something more than research. He had never seen Silverstream. Neither had Kyle. For two boys raised entirely in Heartwood, this would be the first time they ever set foot in another district at all, the first real journey out into that wide patchwork world he had only ever read about. The thought of it sat warm in his chest, underneath the work.
It would be nice, he decided, to go traveling.