Legendary Beast Tamer: Every Beast I Raise Makes Me Stronger

Chapter 130: NOBODY CLAIMS IT

Aiden stopped at the edge of the firelight, his eyes darting to his beasts.

Cinder stopped behind him. Her mane burned at full height and she kept herself low, ready to strike.

Miasma climbed a rock above the hollow. From up there she could watch the woman’s back and the way they’d come in.

Nyx stayed behind Aiden’s boots, in his shadow, dark enough to swallow the firelight.

The figure stirred her pot.

"Sit or don’t," she said. An old voice, dry as a stick. "The barley doesn’t mind."

"Who are you?"

"The one who lives here." She tasted the spoon. "Shorter answer than you’d like. Only true one I’ve got."

"Nobody lives here. No one has for the last sixty years."

"Nobody claims it." She set the spoon down. "That’s a different thing. Claiming is your word. You walked in with it stamped on a piece of brass."

She still hadn’t turned around.

"I walked in without one. The fen knows the difference."

"You know a lot about what happens outside for someone who lives here."

Aiden circled the fire, his hand on his knife, his eyes narrowed. He wasn’t going to talk to the back of a head.

She didn’t try to stop him.

She had grey hair, weathered skin, and fingers crooked from over sixty winters of work. Her eyes had the same pale color as the mist outside.

She looked him over. At the white in his hair. At his full cheeks. At the fading remnants of a body that had once been thin and sick, now filling out with muscle.

Then she returned to her barley as if he were rain she’d already seen coming.

Behind him, Cinder’s heat climbed. She had walked into this hollow burning, and the old woman hadn’t so much as glanced at her. She didn’t like it.

Aiden put a hand back on Cinder’s shoulder, in the middle of the fire, and left it there. Her flames did nothing to his skin.

The heat dropped. Not much.

She’s more impressed by her soup than a Tier Three glaring at her... I’m the most impressed here.

"You set two bowls," he said.

"The fen said someone who counts was coming." She filled one and held it out over the flames. "It didn’t say which of you it’d be. Counters give up at the fence, mostly. You got further in than any counter I’ve seen in years. So I filled the second bowl. Don’t waste it."

Aiden didn’t take the bowl.

"How does the fen tell you anything?"

"Same way your shadow tells you there’s someone behind you before you turn around." She set the bowl at the empty place. "You don’t ask your shadow how it knew. You just learn to trust it."

That’s Nyx’s trick. The blank part of the map. The empty corner. She’s been doing it alone out here for sixty years.

"The road lied to me for three days," Aiden said.

"The road tells everyone the truth. The truth is two days." She almost smiled. "It just keeps being two days for as long as you keep counting them."

She stirred the pot.

"The fen gives a different answer to every person who asks. To a man with numbers in his head, it’s always two days more. To a sheep with nothing in its head, there’s no distance at all. It walks straight to the middle. And then it’s a problem."

"The sheep in the mist."

"Mm." She kept stirring. "Here’s what happens. An animal walks past the stones with nothing much going on in its head. A sheep. A dog. Something empty like that. The fen gets inside it and fills it up with itself."

"Then it walks the animal back out to the fence and stands it there. Same wool. Same legs. Same face. Whatever’s driving it now has never breathed before, so it breathes wrong. That’s the only part it can’t copy.

"You saw that. That’s why you kept walking."

She looked into the pot.

"Don’t take one back to a flock. You did right to keep walking."

Aiden stood there, his chest cold, and not because the token was against it.

So I was joking about ghosts, and the fog wears sheep and dogs. Wonderful. I’ve never hated my jokes more.

I’m not staying here. We finish the task fast and go straight back to the city.

"The assessment—"

"There it is." She looked up. Her pale eyes stayed on him this time. "You’re waiting for someone to tell you what to clear. What to kill. What to tick off a list, so someone with a book can walk out here and write down that you held the ground."

She shook her head, slowly.

"There’s no list. There’s nothing to finish." She went back to her barley. "Out here the fen decides on its own whether it’ll have you. Nobody’s watching. Nobody’s marking anything down. And you can’t hurry it."

Cinder’s fire pulsed behind him. Aiden reached back again and Cinder’s fire sank beneath his palm.

His plan to rush the task crumbled right there.

I can’t fail the task either.

"Then how do I pass?"

"Now that," the woman said, "is the first useful thing you’ve said."

He waited for the answer.

It didn’t come. She ate instead.

Aiden let her. She could be a ghost of the fen for all he knew. He wouldn’t show interest anyway.

He opened his Perception for half a breath.

Silver motes filled the hollow. They filled the ground, the mist, the rocks, everything. They filled the old woman too. There was nothing in her that wasn’t already the fen.

... Miasma!

Above him, Miasma hadn’t moved since they had arrived. Her spines were neither up nor down.

Is she possessed or not?

He knew that stillness. She’d looked at every stall-keeper, every proctor, every enforcer he’d walked past since the gutter. She made up her mind about each of them after one glance.

She had been looking at this woman for an hour and she still hadn’t decided.

Then she caught him watching and gave him the flick of the tail she always gave him for no. Once. Then nothing.

She’s not possessed, but you can’t tell the rest?

Letting out a long, weary sigh, he studied the rest of the hollow while he waited for the woman’s answer.

The ground fell away past the hollow. The mist grew thick down there, swallowing what little light reached it.

What sat at the bottom was black. It had nothing to do with shadows. There was no light down there to make one.

Nyx had slipped from his shadow to face it.

Not the fire. Not the woman.

That.

It had faced the wall of his room and other patches of darkness like that. It had faced the fog for three nights the same way. It always found the darkest thing in reach and pointed itself at it.

Nyx had never wanted much. It stole food he would have given it anyway. It clung close to him most of the time.

And now it wanted what was down there. More than anything it had ever wanted.

Is that what you felt from the city? You want to go down?

Behind him, the cat sat on Cinder’s back and began a staring contest with the old woman. Ears forward. Calm.

"You’ll want to keep that little one close," the woman said without looking at the cat. "Where the rest of this is going."

"Why?"

"Nobody says." This time she smiled, an old dry smile with nothing cruel in it. "I’ve been waiting all evening for you city people to ask me something I can actually answer."

Of course. Nobody says anything in this annoying fen. Are you all having fun talking in circles?

"What do you want?"

The woman put her bowl down in the dirt. She wiped her mouth on the back of one hand.

Then she looked past him. Down. At Nyx.

She’d stirred her barley while a Tier Three Solari Blaze Dancer glared at her, mane burning. But when she looked at the Shadow Pup, her hands stopped.

"You didn’t get in here because of your token," she said quietly. "You got in because of that little shadow at your feet. The fen was shut. It opened the moment that one put a paw on the stones."

She kept her eyes on Nyx, and her voice dropped.

"I’ve lived here for sixty years. The fen has only ever gone quiet for one thing in all that time. It isn’t you. And it isn’t your fire beast."

Aiden looked down at Nyx.

He understood Miasma and Cinder. Tier, lineage, affinity, appetite. He had traveled with them and did everything he could to help them evolve.

He’d carried Nyx on his shoulder since it hatched, and he still didn’t fully understand what it was.

Shadow Pup. Lineage D. Void affinity. That’s everything the system ever gave me on you.

It never explained one thing you’ve done since you hatched.

"Son," the old woman said. "Do you know what you’ve got?"