Control Comes from Within

“Would it kill you to give a little warning next time?” I shouted out while facing the waves, the dragonkin responsible for the spatial displacement somewhere behind me. Once again, the teleportation was immaculate, and though there was no accompanying nausea, headaches or disorientation that were typically associated with spatial magic, there was also no visual indication that space had been manipulated besides the obvious change of the surroundings. I was jealous of that kind of power, as it could truly be a life-saver one day, but there was a zero percent chance that…she…would teach me.

I presumed that it was a she, as there was a lack of musculature that one would expect from a male of the species, though that didn’t make me feel any safer. After all, in most species, the females were more aggressive and dangerous than the males.

The dragonkin narrowed her eyes at me, yellow-amber pupils glinting in the evening light, as her hands crossed in front of her chest. She stood nearly half a foot taller than me and looked down on me in every way possible, as her words would soon indicate.

“I owe you nothing, man-child,” she spat out, her words almost literally dripping with venom. “You will accept what happens, or I will rend the flesh from your bones and eat it while you watch. I understand you have some experience in healing? That is good news for me. It means I can push you into the endless cycle of pain, torment, begging for death, and healing. And when your mind breaks, and the agony overwhelms you….then I will give you a…warning.”

I cannot emphasize enough how much stress that last word held. Just barely thinking about it, I was more afraid of pain than death. At least with death, you were one and done, but pain….if someone had enough resources, time, and imagination, they could make pain last a long time. And this dragonkin…did not seem to be lacking in any of those.

I faced her while doing my best to conceal the utter terror I felt from her words. She had made one thing abundantly clear: she didn’t care about me. That meant…something. But I wasn’t exactly inclined to question her on why she was here. Even if she wanted something of me, she would eventually ask regardless of whether or not I prompted her.

She simply took in the view of the sea and sky, ignoring me as completely as I was attempting to ignore her. We stood like that for so long that the sun had risen and set multiple times, and, in the absence of any movement or instructions from the dragonkin, I returned to my regular routine of meditating, performing my breathing technique, and working on my magic. I couldn’t work on the combat forms I knew as that would require a weapon, which would require me to enter my beast space, and I was certain that divulging its existence would not be beneficial for me.

I caught fish whenever I ate, as circumstances demanded, skewering and roasting them over a small fire, but the dragonkin never so much as looked in their direction, the appetizing smell of freshly cooked food a non-factor to her.

Finally, after three days of awkwardness, with her standing as still as a statue and only occasionally blinking while I did what I would have normally done, she turned to me at last, taking a deep breath before staring at me pointedly. I was currently doing my best to dry out seaweed and reshape it into the more modernized and papery version I was familiar with, but I was having limited success…to put it mildly.

The fact that I had basically given up and taken to wrapping dehydrated seaweed around fish, making a kind of proto-sushi roll, and stuffing my face with it when she turned to look at me, did not give off a great impression.

“Are you finished?” she asked rhetorically. I paused to finish off the last piece in my mouth and swallowed the salty snack before saying, “Yes.”

“Wonderful. Then bring me into your inner world.”

“...What?” I asked her, hoping against hope that she wasn’t referring to what I thought she was.

She approached me with her eyes narrowed, like I was prey and she was a predator. She may have had her arms behind her back, but I could feel the proverbial claws slipping around me, ready to bleed me out if I didn’t acquiesce to her demands.

“Do not think me a fool. You know of what I speak. I can see it in your eyes. Bring us there now. Do not make me ask again.”

She knew about my space. Who else knew?

“I will, it’s just that, the last time I brought…someone….inside, they became…nearly brain-dead,” I said. I could have risked not telling her anything, and seeing if the space’s subjugation effect would work on her, but there were just too many ways that could go wrong.

What if it didn’t work, and I hadn’t told her? She’d be much more pissed off than she currently was, and I didn’t want to see what an angry, well, angrier, dragonkin looked like. And then if it did work on her, I highly doubted the other dragons would be too pleased that I had enslaved one of them, and that was a one-way ticket to eternal torture.

“You’re referring to that sea beast?” she asked, once again rhetorically, though the fact that she knew about it….

“How long have I been watched?” I whispered, more to myself than her.

“Too long, manling,” she snarled. “I think you will find I am much more resilient than a mere beast, or do you believe otherwise?” she challenged me.

“No, no, of course not,” I rushed to say, immediately capitulating before her implied threat of force. “Um, then, I need to be touching you for it to work,” I said.

She narrowed her eyes even further at me, before finally laying a single claw on my neck, poised to cut my carotid artery perfectly. I would have commented on it or at the very least, made some kind of grimace if I didn’t think she wouldn’t act on her threat.

So, with no small amount of trepidation, I took a deep breath in a futile attempt to calm down, and moved us both into my beast space.

In the blink of an eye, the surroundings had changed once more, the quiet sandy beach replaced by an almost equally silent 90’s-era basement, save for the sounds of snores and quiet breathing from hundreds of tamed beings. My supplies were in a corner, as neat as I could make them, with my sleeping place not too far away. A typical beastfolk tent with a bedroll atop sheets laid out on the floor stood near where we appeared, as I preferred to just drop into bed as soon as possible.

The dragonkin simply took it all in as she had at the beach, though she was far more alert, her muscles tensed for any signs of duplicity. She only gave a cursory look at the tent and my supplies, but I could actually hear her breathing stop once she took in the sight of all those I had tamed. Animals, creatures, beasts, voranders.

“By the Elders,” she whispered, as she looked at one of the reanimated voranders, flying over to it and examining it up close, though she never laid a hand on it. Her eyes went over its entire form as though she could determine its secrets. Once she had finished her inspection, she moved on to the undead voranders, then the ones that were still alive, before proceeding to the rest of the beasts.

Most of them were asleep, as I had ordered them to be, though a certain emerald-colored deer was snoring loudly, and providing some lightheartedness that broke the initial tension of the situation.

The dragonkin maintained a mostly neutral expression the entire time she was exploring my beast space, and if she ever felt a compulsion or any similar effect, she never showed any sign of it. That, at least, answered the question of whether I could ‘tame’ people by just grabbing onto them and bringing them into my space.

As always, it was hard to judge how much time had passed, but eventually, she stood apart from anything else and took deep breaths, before she suddenly stopped and placed her clawed hand on my shoulder once more. “Take me to the outside,” she ordered, and I willingly did as she asked.

The sun’s position indicated that we had been in my beast space for a little over an hour, though it felt longer to me, with the dragonkin’s implicit threat hanging over my head the entire time. Now that we were outside once more, she resumed taking deep breaths with her eyes closed, though her wings extended and contracted in time with her exhalations.

Now that the cat was out of the bag, I simply retrieved a book from my beast space and began reading while I waited for her to finish. If she were to kill me for enslaving innocent beasts…well, at least I wouldn’t die wondering what happened to the Beastly Baron and his mischievous maid.

Barely five minutes had passed when she spoke, and although her voice was quiet, I could hear every word. “Do you know why you still walk this world, man-child? Because one of the most powerful beings alive did not want you dead. And when he was asked to provide a reason….he did not give one, at least, not a proper one. ‘It will do you no good to know,’ he said.”

She turned to face me, though I was pointedly looking at the waves crashing upon the shore instead of at her face, as she continued speaking. I sincerely hoped she wouldn’t question me about why I thought the dragons had intervened in saving my life. I wanted to know just as much as her, if not even more.

“And then there is you. A human, though unlike most humans I have seen and spoken to, your presence is enough to rouse a Progenitor from their slumber, which is no small feat. Although there is something…different…about you, it is not my place to judge you for your actions, despite every part of myself screaming at me to put an end to your life right here and now.” I swallowed in discomfort as I processed that statement internally, glad that she wouldn’t just kill me out of hand.

“So, you will tell me everything about yourself,” she said, causing me to whip my head around to look at her in astonishment, “-- and once I have heard enough to determine your character, we will…proceed accordingly.”

No, no, no. No, no, nonono. This can’t be happening.

“To clarify, honored dragonkin –” I began to say.

“Reela,” the dragonkin said, presumably telling me her name without giving any indication of gender, a minefield I was only too familiar with.

“Honored Reela, you want me to tell you everything about myself, from the day I was born, until today…without leaving anything out?” I asked her, to confirm what she wanted.

She made a dismissive gesture with her hand-claw. “You can leave out the minutiae. I don’t particularly desire to hear what you ate or expelled every day, nor who you mated with or any other triviality. But,” she fixed me with a gaze that had steel and fire in it, “do not leave anything out. Do not attempt to lie, or obscure the truth from me. I will know if you do, and you do not want to test me. My patience is already thin from merely interacting with you. So do us both a favor and tell your tale without any falsehoods.”

Was I really about to tell my life story to some random stranger, simply because she threatened me?

…Without a shadow of a doubt. If I were going to unload my entire biography onto someone, I would have preferred a therapist or at the very least, someone who would show some hesitation at the thought of killing me, but we don’t always get what we want in life.

Going through with this would mean she, and almost certainly the other dragons, would know everything about me. My otherworldly origins, the existence of Khime, the enigma that was my beast space, thought that secret was pretty much toast. A brief moment of madness overtook me, where I considered retreating into my beast space and just hiding out there forever. I had books, and food and water. I could hide out for a time.

But I had a suspicion that the dragons were far more patient than I was, and that the moment I stepped out of my beast space, I would be whisked away somewhere, where the questioning would not be nearly as polite as this one was. That wasn’t even considering the possibility that Reela would be able to enter the beast space herself with her spatial magic. I would be well and truly fucked over if that scenario played out like I thought it would.

So I breathed in deep, the essence filling me without conscious thought, as the act was so ingrained into me by this point, and began speaking.

I told the scarlet-colored dragonkin my life story, though I had forgotten some parts in the middle, and she made no reactions to any of it. My childhood was nothing remarkable, and the same held true for my adolescence. After high school and college, I recounted the early days of lazing about in my parents’ basement for months while waiting for someone to call back and tell me I had gotten the job. Eventually, I transitioned to my own place, barely squeaking by on rent, and that continued until my eventual…destruction.

I still didn’t know if I died or not, and the uncertainty bothered me more than it should have. In the end, it didn’t really matter, but the question still remained. The events surrounding my death and awakening were told far more in detail than those that preceded it, and she showed no reaction or hint of recognition when I brought up Khime or the fact that I had been transported across worlds. I told her about my early struggles with getting enough money for the academy, and my time studying there, as well as all the ways that my beast space had ‘evolved’, for lack of a better word. Through it all, she showed no reaction, simply listening as I spoke about my life.

I did appreciate that she hadn’t interrupted, as I somewhat sped through the parts that were embarrassing, or that I didn’t look on fondly. Having to walk down memory lane wasn’t the greatest of experiences for me, and I was somewhat grateful that I wasn’t being forced to scour through details for any questions she might have had. I never added in any of my opinions or inner thoughts unless they were relevant to how events transpired, simply narrating the sequence of events as they occurred. If she was displeased with my style of storytelling, she made no sign of it.

Finally, I had caught up to the present, my time in the beast continent being largely summarized as ‘travelling’, and finished speaking, as I waited for my audience of one to decide my fate.