Control Comes from Within

The venom from the snake that ambushed me was potent, and it took a long time for me to be confident that I had expelled any traces of it in my system, even after spending hours scouring my internal organs for any particulates that looked suspicious. Unfortunately, the venom’s effects, combined with the initial bite, caused considerable nerve and muscle damage in my torso. I had heard firsthand from doctors on Earth that damaged nerves took a long time to heal, and whether they could heal was always in question.

It took two months for me to recover to my previous physical condition, and the last two weeks of that were just me being cautious. I only had to actively cast a few healing spells the first few days, and those did the majority of the work, while I just had to lie down and let them do their magic, no pun intended.

The entirety of my recuperation was spent reading novels, trying not to die of boredom, and meditating, trying to gain some sense of inner peace that had, thus far, eluded me for my entire life.

I definitely saw some improvements to my breathing technique, as I could more acutely sense the ethereal energy entering my body before it went dormant, merging with the rest of my personal reserves. The fact that essence was accessible or present in my beast space was puzzling, but I just accepted it as a part of the space. Treating it as another mystery to solve would drive me crazy, and I spoke from experience on that matter.

It was a bit nostalgic, doing nothing but lazing around for months while I recovered, and I largely ignored my ‘roommates’, as they didn’t really bother me too much. I had been moving at a fast pace recently, both literally and figuratively, and taking the time to slow down, even if it was involuntary, helped me to decompress. This downtime helped me recognize that a bit of a break every now and then was a good thing overall. Completely devoting your focus to one thing would eventually lead to burnout if you couldn’t meet the unrealistic expectations of an overworked mind.

I made sure that everything affected by the venom was functioning properly before exiting the beast space. I swung my limbs in every direction, stretching every muscle I could think of, and sensed my body’s internal workings. My physical capabilities were restored to their prior state, and I was in control of my body once more.

I took a deep breath before leaving. This place, for all its mystery and limited square footage, was something of a mobile base now, practically a second home. The temptation of just…staying there, it called to me. That old demon known as sloth had reared its fat head, enticing me with promises of relaxation, and nesting in a comfortable spot without having to interact with anyone. It was practically an introvert’s paradise, just without the internet and food on demand.

I resisted the temptation, my desire to explore winning out over the siren call of the comfort zone. Maybe that would be a better name for it than the beast space. I strapped a carved tooth knife onto my belt, just in case. My boots were tight, my clothes were breathable, and I was as healthy as I could be. It was pointless to procrastinate any more.

I stepped out of the beast space cautiously, with a ring of blood needles at the ready, and gazed upon an idyllic, picturesque view of an untouched beach. There were no clouds in the sky, nor were there bodies anywhere in sight. I felt trace amounts of blood in the sand, but the tides had washed most of it away, returning the area to how it looked before my arrival.

I did feel a tremor jolting through the ground, though it was far less jarring than it had been months ago. If those two titans were still battling each other somewhere farther away, it implied one of them ran away. After all, did the terrain really matter when your body was hundreds of feet tall? That they were still fighting was bad, in the general sense that the voranders needed to be eliminated and all that, but I didn’t know if I wanted the enormous sea serpent to emerge the victor. If it sensed my entering or exiting the beast space, it was possible that it would grow…curious.

And I didn’t want to find out what an age-old beast looked like when faced with someone who wouldn’t reveal their secrets.

Spring was in its final days, as the temperature was considerably warmer than it had been earlier. As such, my plan to visit the desert would have to wait, probably until winter, when the hot weather would be marginally more tolerable. I could still wander the coast, looking for marine animals to tame, though that idea was much less appealing now. Maybe it would be better if I just went to the capital directly? If I rode fast enough, I could reach it in time to see the Thundering tournament, and that was something I had been looking forward to during my recuperation.

In the end, I had to prioritize secrecy over desire, as moving fast enough to reach the tournament would require me to constantly switch out fresh mounts from my beast space, something that would not go unnoticed, as there were no roads on this continent to help explain why someone could travel that fast.

So, with a tentative plan to follow the coast until something more interesting drew my attention, I began walking south, heading in the general direction of the continent’s only desert. It only took me two days before I came across something that caught my eye, and while some may have called it interesting, in an academic sense….I was not one of those people.

Walking on the shore with the seas to my right and the mainland on my left, I entered the outer reaches of a lagoon, large coral reefs in the ocean visible from where I stood on the sand, the perfectly crescent moon-shaped body of water sublime in its appearance.

What was less sublime was what I noticed happening on one of the small landforms near the coral reefs on the seabed: a vorander, having taken on the appearance of a scaled leopard, was stabbing its fangs into the neck of a struggling…Loch Ness monster? The creature beneath it was making futile attempts to flee, but the monster’s weight effectively pinned it down. The creature’s broad and flat body, four webbed limbs, and long neck would normally make it seem graceful, but at that moment, the creature was just…desperate, and it was obvious why. It was dying slowly, or maybe it was already dead and just hadn’t accepted the fact yet.

Whatever the case, I couldn’t just move on and ignore it when I heard an unexpected female voice sound in my head.

“You, human, I beg you, kill me now! I beg you!”

There was no time to think. I was already somewhat inclined to kill the monster, but the beast’s pleas for death touched me in a way I had never felt before, and I couldn’t wait any longer if I wanted to end its suffering.

I didn’t know how to respond verbally, so instead I used my actions to convey my intent. With a flick of the wrist, a thin tendril of seawater rose from the ocean like a transparent tentacle. It wound around the monster’s head, choking it and attempting to crush its neck all at once, before it slumped to the ground, brain matter and blood leaking out of its orifices. It kept twitching even after its death, so I made a novel magic construct to end it: a water blade. The blade kept stabbing and slashing, my nature spell allowing me to manipulate it freely, until the monster was cut to ribbons, black viscous blood leaking from its body.

I turned to the beast who had been forced to experience being eaten alive, and met its eyes. It was still injured, and…I noted the desperation hadn’t left its eyes. It didn’t look at me, but I heard a voice once more, much weaker than it had been merely minutes before.

“Please…kill me…quickly…I beg you…human…”

Wheezing gasps of air followed that dire request, and I felt obligated to try and heal it, even if it wanted to die. I had even spoken aloud in the hopes that it could understand me, “I can heal your body, you don’t have to die.”

But….

“No…..I need…to die…please…shame…guilt…beg you…kill…plea –”

There was no point in listening any further. It – she – was set on dying, but I could make sure it was painless. Even her words seemed like they required herculean amounts of effort for her to get out, and if I didn’t ‘help’, it would grate on my conscience. Teacher Passen, my elven healing professor at the academy, had predicted that if one became a healer, they would eventually be confronted with the situation I was in now, and so I did what he said was the best thing for everyone.

I killed someone who could have lived, but was determined to die, leaving me with a burden that would only grow heavier the more I thought about it. I did it as painlessly as possible, casting spells for a pain-killer, a mood relaxer, and a sleep inducement. She closed her eyes before dying, but I thought I saw the desperation shift into something more…peaceful.

I ignored the part of me that said I could have saved her by using my taming spell, as I felt that would be almost worse than death. She said she felt guilt, and shame, and it was to such a degree that she would rather die than attempt atonement. That she was capable of such emotions also spoke to her age, and experience, which meant she had, at the very least, lived a long life. Taming her would mean she had to live with those memories for a long time; it would be cruel and unnecessary.

I had to burn the bodies, though each one for a different reason, but my blood sense alerted me to something approaching from beyond the lagoon, and in the ocean proper. It was small, and felt…abnormal, somehow. There was something off about its blood, but I couldn’t get a proper sense of what was wrong with it.

It swam close enough to the little island that it soon launched itself out of the water, torpedoing through the air, and crashing onto the small piece of land headfirst, its tiny head stuck in a small indent in the ground. It wriggled its tiny body, attempting to wrench free of the sandy prison. It would have been cute….if I hadn’t seen its face once it surfaced.

Because it was a nauseatingly similar face to one I had killed. Its body was equally familiar, and I felt the urge to throw up bubbling unpleasantly in my gut.

A broad and flat body, with a tiny spiked shell on its back, and four webbed limbs that resembled paddles….not to mention, the long and narrow neck that some would call graceful. And its head….a black leopard’s face, with black scales covering its blue fleshy body. It licked the body of the dead female that resembled it, nudging it with its head when that failed, and finally, biting into it, too weak to break the skin.

My stomach churned, and I vomited into the sea, unable to hold back any longer. The separate pieces of information that seemed unrelated all clicked together once the little….thing came into view.

The female beast begging for death, muttering about shame and guilt. The vorander lying almost completely atop her, preventing her from escaping. The features of the baby sea creature.

It was a hybrid…a hybrid of a beast, and that goddamned vorander.

I had felt rage before, but never like this.

Neither one of the two beings I had killed deserved death. One should have lived a longer life of peace and happiness, and the other deserved to be tortured and castrated and healed in an endless cycle until it begged for death.

I had to calm down, but it was so hard with the fire burning within me. I knew that I didn’t have all the facts at hand to judge the beast. Maybe she was a mass murderer, maybe she was a cannibal or a vicious prankster that enjoyed biting off limbs of unsuspecting humanoids. The point was, I had no idea what kind of life she lived….but I know she didn’t deserve the end that came for her.

I looked at the little hybrid – chimera. The chimera was still attempting to bite into its mother’s flesh, and growing increasingly angry at every failed attempt. I was tempted to just kill it….and every debate about abortion I had heard came flooding through my mind.

The child is innocent, one side of me said.

It’s a goddamn monster trying to eat its mother, the other part of me retorted.

It didn’t choose to be born, the first side replied.

Really? So it gets to wreak havoc like all the rest of its kind?! The second part cried out.

I don’t have the right to kill it.

And what about all those beasts you killed a couple months ago? They were just trying to live, but oh no, you couldn’t have that. The ‘great hero’ had to be all responsible. Did you have the right to kill those beasts? Didn’t you kill them regardless?

They would have attacked innocents.

And so will this one, if you give it the chance.

I don’t want more blood on my hands.

You’ve only killed beasts so far, self-righteous dipshit. Say that again after you become an assassin or a soldier.

I couldn’t make the decision, so I settled for the middle ground.

I tamed the baby chimera, sending it straight into my beast space…..though it retained its personality, as it began tapping the ground with its feet, yipping at the other voranders and beasts it spotted, walking up to each of them and giving them a sniff or lick before moving on.

Well, it was a chimera, maybe the first one to ever exist. It made sense that it was different from all those that came before it.

I burned the bodies of the hybrid’s…parents, using some of my older clothes as fuel to get the fire going. For all that the torch spell had its uses, there were times I wished I didn’t know it. The sun had set by the time the bodies turned to ashes, and I felt far worse than I had when I thought a crocodile beast would kill me.

I kept moving along the coast, eager to get as much distance as I could from that place before sleeping. No, I would forgo sleep for at least a day. I needed something that would distract my brain from dwelling on that nightmare fuel in my dreams. Maybe I would come across a tribe of exotic beastkin that resembled turtles, or crabs, or sharks, or eels?

I did see beastfolk that resembled axolotls in the far distance, and forced myself to take shelter with them for the night. They were friendly as soon as they saw me, even bringing up my bracelet that I had completely forgotten about, the one that declared me a true friend to the beastkin. I would have been shocked that they recognized it, if my emotions allowed me to feel anything but guilt and disgust.

So I did what I always did: pushed down my feelings and assumed a mask of neutrality. The axolotl beastkin weren’t mounted, and for good reason. Their mounts were aquatic. The tribesmen looked so similar to the mounts they bred that I had trouble differentiating the two, though I soon noticed that the mounts all had four limbs while the sapients stood erect on only two.

I was escorted to the tribe’s chief, who held a feast in my honor to welcome me, a selection of seafood dishes laid out in front of me. The feast was a large affair, held for the whole tribe, as they brought out wine from somewhere, as well as some type of maracas and drums, dancing along to the thumping beat that accompanied the food.

The seaweed was saltier and slimier than I was used to, but it fulfilled one of my cravings nevertheless. The wine was disgusting, but I soldiered through it and put away a full jug, belching and laughing uproariously.

I even partook in the celebrations myself, hoping to drive away the bad memories with some fake good ones. I didn’t know any of the steps to the dance, but nobody pointed it out. I even busted out the worm, a move I hadn’t done in years, which showed how desperate I was.

I slowed my heart rate down before I got too worked up, the mere mention of the word sending me back to that lagoon.

I asked to be excused from the festivities, as they clearly hadn’t worked to uplift my mood, and the chief’s wife agreed, ushering me along into an empty tent that belonged to one of their guards who had the night shift. I caught the chief kissing another axolotl while his wife watched, and I decided to meditate, with an additional horrifying image burning its way into my mind.

I took deep breaths and did different poses, hoping some combination would work to calm me down, but all my efforts were in vain. It seemed like I would be having a sleepless night full of experimenting with magic.

That might distract me from thinking about the rape victim who had begged me to kill her, and my lack of hesitation at doing it.