Legendary Beast Tamer: Every Beast I Raise Makes Me Stronger

Chapter 129: THE COUNT THE FEN ATE

Aiden woke up before the others and looked at the fog.

Still two days away. It’s been two days away for three days. Either everyone on this road can’t count, or the road can’t.

He decided to find out which.

There was a big grey rock at the edge of the camp. He walked to it, counting his steps.

Forty.

He walked back to the fire. Thirty-six.

He stood there for a moment. Then he retraced his exact steps.

Forty-one.

Cinder raised her head and watched him as he walked to the rock for the fourth time. She tilted her head, then growled as if to ask him if he was alright.

Miasma covered her forehead with a foot and shook her head.

"No, Miasma. I’m not crazy yet. And yes, I’m fine, Cinder."

He counted thirty-eight.

Alright. Neither the rock nor the fire has moved. I walked in my footsteps to be sure I took the same path.

This time, three footprints were missing.

Last time, there was one extra.

The ground changes every time.

He sat on the wet grass with his hands on his knees.

The widow had warned him, her hands on her apron. He’d nodded and thought it was folk nonsense.

Don’t rely on your map. A man who counts how far he is from the stones never reaches them.

She hadn’t been warning him about paper. She’d been warning him about counting itself.

I’ve counted every day of my life. Lamps, coins, years, steps. And out here it’s the exact thing keeping me out.

He tried to stop.

He lasted about eight seconds before he caught himself counting his own breathing.

Wonderful.

He turned to Nyx.

It had slept there and woken up with him. It was still facing the fog.

You’ve never measured in your life. You’ve just known you wanted something in that direction since before we left the city.

That direction is the fen. You read the map in the office too. You weren’t curious.

"Nyx," he said. "You lead us."

Nyx looked at him, its head slightly leaned back. Its eyes curved. The corner of its mouth too.

It jumped down from his arm and moved ahead of him. Not fast. Sure.

A little too sure. Sure enough that it paused half a breath in front of Cinder and let out an amused sound.

Stop it. Seriously, do you want to sleep beside her when she breathes like a furnace?

With a sigh, Aiden patted Cinder’s head and followed Nyx.

Cinder didn’t even growl back. Apparently, she had decided to ignore whatever Nyx meant.

Miasma simply moved to Aiden’s shoulder. No drama. No noise. Just there. Patient and silent.

They crossed the first mile, then the second. His jaw ached by the third.

Every time he started counting to calm down, he forced his eyes on Nyx’s small body and watched its darkness instead of the ground.

Somehow he thought he was doing a really good job because the fog seemed closer.

Or maybe he just wanted to believe that because he’d forbidden himself from counting.

But as he followed Nyx, he asked himself a real question.

The man who kept counting everything because he had nothing was the old me.

Now, I’m healthy. I’m a tamer. I have a pack I can trust when Cinder’s not trying to burn the camp.

He let go of his old habit. He didn’t even track the wall of fog anymore. He focused on Nyx’s back. He trusted it.

And an hour later, Nyx stopped leading them.

Stones in front of him. Two of them, grey and shoulder-high, leaning together over a gap wide enough for a cart.

The grass stopped in a clean line between them. Past that line the ground turned soft and silver. The mist moved over it like something breathing.

Shepherds let their sheep guide them. I had the answer the whole time.

"Alright. Let’s get in, whatever it does to us."

Cinder didn’t follow him.

She stopped six feet short of the gap, her fire pulled tight against her body until she seemed smaller than she had been on the road.

"You didn’t even flinch when a dragon sized you up on the Ember Peaks. Why are you scared of that line?"

She shook her head and looked around.

Aiden understood. He checked the country behind them. Empty grass all the way out. No roofs, no riders.

"Clear," he said.

The fire opened and Cinder stepped out of it in her human shape. She looked at the gap. Then she looked at Aiden like he’d suggested a swim.

"This water is wrong," she said. "I hate it."

"I know."

"Then why?"

"Because between the Sunken Quarry and the Vane trap, you picked this one too." He looked at the gap, where Nyx was already waiting with no patience left to spare them. "And because Nyx is going anyway."

Cinder looked at Nyx for a long moment. The embers under her collarbones went a shade darker.

Then she looked back at Aiden. At the white in his hair. She put her hand on his chest, over the token.

"You go in," she said. "I go in."

She exhaled and became Solari Blaze Dancer again. She walked through the line. Slow, close to his leg, hating every inch of it.

Miasma left his collar before the gap. She didn’t ask, and he didn’t tell her to wait. She climbed onto one of the stones, crossed the gap above it, then dropped to the other side with her spines flat. She picked her own way in.

The cat rode on Cinder’s back. It kept its head turned to watch one of the stones until they were past it.

Then they were through, and Aiden’s system opened.

[ PROVISIONAL SEAT — REGISTERED ]

Territory: Foggy Marshland

Holder: Aiden Vell

Bounds: confirmed

Assessment: pending

Area:

The last line stayed empty.

Then a number appeared. He read half of it before it vanished and a bigger one took its place. That one vanished too, replaced by a smaller one.

My own system can’t measure it either. That’s a first.

He noticed his hand had gone to the token on his chest. He took his hand away.

The map was wrong. The surveyors were wrong. Now the system is wrong.

I preferred it when the array was wrong about me never becoming a Tamer.

Inside, the fog thinned in front of him and closed behind him, so the way back sealed as fast as the way forward opened.

And the way forward only opened as far as Nyx walked it.

As Nyx moved, pieces of the fen appeared and vanished on either side of them. Narrow black-water channels cut between beds of reeds and low grassy rises, with crooked trees wherever the ground stayed firm enough to hold them.

Some were alive, others stood dead and grey in the mist. Frogs called somewhere beyond the water, and the air smelled of wet reeds and peat.

The light came from everywhere and nowhere, and after a while Aiden stopped trying to find where it came from.

Night was heavier inside the fen, closer to true darkness, with not a speck of light to shine on a stone.

Miasma pulsed green at his shoulder, lighting the ground for him.

Nyx kept leading, stopping every few steps to make sure the pack was still behind it.

Cinder stayed close to Aiden’s side since they had entered. She released more heat than usual to fight back the fog’s wetness, which she had already called wrong.

The cat stood up between Cinder’s shoulders and stared into the fog. Its ears flattened.

Aiden looked where the cat was looking.

A sheep was standing in the mist.

It stood to one side of the way, knee-deep in the silver ground, facing nothing at all.

It didn’t eat. It didn’t startle. It didn’t turn its head when Cinder passed close enough to bite half its body off and cook the rest for the pack.

Instead, it watched a patch of empty air in front of it with enormous patience.

Its sides moved. It was breathing almost right for a sheep. Its wool was right.

A sheep wanders past those stones and it comes back out on its own. Looks fine. Eats, walks, everything. But no shepherd will put that sheep back with his flock.

He understood the rule now.

The sheep never comes back. That’s not a sheep. This place will make me believe in ghosts.

Behind him, Cinder made a low sound and her heat climbed. She wanted to burn it. She was waiting for the word.

"No."

She glared at him.

"We just arrived. I own the fen on paper, but try to show papers to whatever that fog is. We wait until we understand it more."

He picked up his pace because the way only stayed open while Nyx walked it, and he wouldn’t let a sheep that made his gut cold leave him stranded in the middle of nowhere.

The ground rose. The mist pulled thin over a low hill that two of the three surveys swore didn’t exist.

At the top, the silver ground opened into a hollow.

And inside: a fire that made Aiden’s pack stop cold in their tracks.

Someone had built it, banked it, and tended it, with a pot hanging over it. Something was cooking in the pot, in a place nobody had claimed in sixty years.

Two bowls were warming by the coals. One had been used. The other hadn’t.

The unused bowl was set on the other side of the fire, where a second person would sit.

A figure sat with its back to him. It didn’t turn around. It didn’t hurry.

That’s not normal. Nothing has been normal around here. They’re letting me see them. Letting me know that they knew I was coming.

Why? Who are they?

"You counted longer than most," the figure said, without turning around. "They usually break at the fence."