[Beastborne: Voracious] (Book 5) Chapter 35

Chapter 42

Hal looked around, realizing that while he had let his feet do the walking, his mind hadn’t paid the least bit of attention. They had walked out of the gates and away from Brightsong. Far enough that they were almost at the exact spot where Hal and fought the dragons.

The chewed-up earth of the clearing was just ahead through the trees.

“Do you want me to?” Hal asked her.

She drummed her fingers against the outside of her thigh. “I might have said ‘yes’ to anybody else.” It was eerie looking into a face that was so alike to his own, but clearly feminine. “No, I don’t think I do. Not when there is clearly so much to learn from you.”

With that, she turned and began to walk into the clearing, which was hardly an easy or simple stroll. They clambered over blasted clods of earth, shattered rocks the size of small huts, and massive furrows in the ground that could swallow a man whole.

“We fought here, you and I,” she said, turning on the spot. “I had heard about you. We all had. You are something of a legend, perhaps a myth. When Thirty-six went after you, we thought that would be end of it. And when he was… released, we all felt it. The last moments of his life.”

Hal winced and forced the memory away. He had tried to help him, but in the end, there was no escape. Not from the Shadesblight and not from the madness that had taken hold of Thirty-six.

“Is it true, that when you kill one of us, a portion of our power gets absorbed into you?” She tilted her head to the side. “Like essences?”

“Something like that,” Hal said. He had no reason to lie.

“That is why we cannot harm one another,” she told him. “It’s in there, too deep to dig out. The Founder… Rinbast, he probably wanted to make sure we would not kill one another to gain more strength than him.”

Hal wanted to tell her that he could release her from it. With Dominate, he had done something similar to Ashera. Helped her in a way that no medicine could.

The Kinslayer shook her head. “No. This is a small burden, but one in which I am happy to carry. Contrary to what you may believe, the Founder was not overly cruel to us. We were used as weapons, yes, but it gave us purpose. It helped us. And as we grew in power, we came to understand the meaning of this world.”

“Which is?” Hal asked as the woman stood in silent reverie for some time.

“That the powerful make the choices, and that there are many types of power. Some are simple. Levels, Skills, that sort of thing. Those are easy to judge, easy to compare against. But you have something else.”

Hal stepped up onto a cracked boulder the size of a truck and sat down on it, his legs dangling as he looked down at the Kinslayer. “Do tell.”

“People do what you want, even though there are those within your own group who are stronger or more capable. We had heard of your followers. If they banded together, they could do whatever they wanted to you.”

Hal wasn’t so sure about that, not since he had full control of Dominate once more, but he didn’t correct her. If it came to that, he wouldn’t raise a hand against his own people. That was crossing a line he would never be able to come back from.

“Rinbast knows how precarious his position is,” she continued, looking up at him with a curious expression on her pretty face. “There are countless people under his control. It is why he fears an uprising. He, unlike you, will gladly put his people to the sword if it means he retains control. He likes it. You… merely tolerate it.”

“Interesting take,” Hal admitted. And uncomfortably true. “So you want to learn how to lead? To get people to do what you want and have them think it’s their idea?”

“That is rank manipulation, and furthermore, not what you do. At least, not that I have seen thus far.”

“You haven’t seen much,” Hal pointed out. “You’ve been here less than a day. What could you have learned?”

“A great deal.” She shook her head. “It is most disturbing wanting to help you. Not because of my desire to get stronger, but because I want to. It is… unsettling. But I can detect no magic you have placed upon me beyond the Sigil, which I often forget is there. It feels like a leash of spider silk. All I need to do is desire it gone and it will be… but I do not wish it gone.”

“That’s how Dominateworks, at least passively,” Hal explained. He saw no harm in it. “You could push me out if you wanted to. I could try to force it on you, but then I would have to control you the entire time. This is more like I’m riding shotgun in your mind.”

She smirked. “I have not heard that analogy in a while.”

“They don’t have cars here,” Hal said with a shake of his head. He looked up at the smallest moon trailing after its larger brothers. “I haven’t even seen many carriages, being that the only city I’ve seen is Murkmire.”

“Sanctum,” the Kinslayer corrected. “Do you mind if I sit with you?”

Hal’s answer came in the form of patting the stone beside him.

In a flash, she leaped up, twisted like a gymnast, and landed seat-first on the stone with hardly a bounce.

He snorted. “Show off.”

“There are benefits to having high Agility and Dexterity,” she told him. “I would not dull myself merely for the sake of your ego.”

“That is not what I meant.”

There was that piercing purple-fire gaze again. “No… perhaps not. But this is a world where we have attributes, yes? Why not use them to the fullness of their ability? Why walk when you can run? Why use stairs when you can simply leap to the second story in an eyeblink?”

“Because sometimes it’s good to do things the slow way,” Hal told her. “Always going full out can be nice, but there’s a time and place for that.”

“Like the battlefield.”

“Like the battlefield,” Hal agreed. “But even there, restraint can be useful. I get the impression you don’t get out much, so battling is probably your own release. You don’t have to fight here, not if you don’t want to.”

“You will turn my sword into a plowshare?” she said with a wry twist of her lips.

“If you like,” Hal said. “It would be a waste of your Class. Beastborne is rare, I take it. Even among the… your kind.”

“Kinslayers,” she said. “You do not need to shy away from it. I know you think of me as one. The connection between us, it goes both ways at times. Oh, don’t look so startled. I am hardly able to rummage in your mind, and I’m certain you would feel it besides. But sometimes I can pick up your feelings.”

“It could be because we’re—”

“—the same person?” she finished for him. “Yes, that is likely as well.”

“You are a Kinslayer,” Hal agreed. “But that’s just a title or occupation like soldier, baker, bricklayer, and what not. But who are you? What is your name? What do you dream of doing?”

For a long while, the Kinslayer looked up at the stars. “I must confess, I’m a little surprised you don’t call me Femhal.”

“I did love the Mass Effect series.”

“We all did. Those of us who had access to it in any case. Sometimes it was called something else.” She glanced at him. “Different Earths, different things. Sometimes we make names for ourselves, just between us, based on those differences.”

Hal lowered his gaze from the heavens. A cold wind blew through the trees, but with his dragonfire swirling around his Monster Core, he was more than warm enough. He wondered if he’d ever be cold again.

“You can call me Val. There aren’t many of us who are female, so as one of the first I kept my name from Earth.”

“Our parents named you Val?”

“Valerie, but I never liked the full name. So it is just Val.”

There were so many things he wanted to ask her. Things he had already asked Thirty-seven, but the differences between them were so interesting. What was her Earth like? Who won the super bowl, which presidents had won what election, on and on the questions went.

But ultimately, they didn’t matter, Hal reminded himself.

Whatever Val’s life was on Earth, it might have shaped her into the woman she was now, but they didn’t define her. Just as Hal’s experiences on Earth didn’t define him. They were useful, perhaps integral to the person he was now, but knowing that Sprite was changed to Sprunk or something stupid like that was irrelevant.

“I would like to learn from you,” Val said. “And I would like to teach you all that I know myself. In return, I would like to ask something of you.”

Hal raised an eyebrow at that. “That sounds like an equal exchange already. Asking for something more feels a little greedy, doesn’t it?”

“Nonsense,” she said, waving a hand at him. “You take what you can take and if that isn’t okay, then the answer should be ‘no’, don’t you think? Unless you feel, because I’m a woman, that I’m somehow harder to say no to? That I’m somewhat frailer and therefore need to be coddled?”

“I beat you, didn’t I?” Hal said with a smirk. “Frail? Not on your life. And certainly not because you’re a woman. There is no end to the powerful women in my life now. What’s one more? If you’re expecting some sort of special treatment, you might as well forget about it.”

Val nodded sharply. “Good. But I would still ask a boon of you.”

“Then ask, the night is getting long.”

“Kinslayers are… unable to harm one another directly or purposefully, as I’ve told you.”

“So I recall.”

“If… the corruption goes too far, if I stop being me, I want you to kill me.” She laughed at his expression. “Don’t look at me like that. You know as well as I do what happens to a Beastborne with too much Strain. Without a Beast… I do not know what will happen to me. I have been careful thus far, and only lost control of my Beast once or twice, but that was a dangerous situation for all.”

“Tell me about it,” Hal said. “But you don’t have a Beast now.”

“Yes, and that’s rather the point, don’t you think? There is nothing to go mad with Strain if I let it get too high. Just me. And I know I am not strong enough to weather the full-scale corruption of Strain. I could barely tame my Beast when I was only at the First Stage. Other Kinslayers could go higher, but that was my limit. My weakness.”

“You mean levels?” Hal asked.

“We call them Stages,” she told him. “The First Stage is ‘Taxed’ and that was as far as I could go. A few Kinslayers who are higher Level than me were able to retain complete control in Stage Two, but even for those over Level 30 Beastborne, it was something they could only keep up for so long. And then there were a few who could retain enough control to follow simple orders at Stage Three.”

“Feral,” Hal said, remembering. “There’s two more Stages after. Primal, and then another Stage which I couldn’t control at all, but Besal could. The Fifth Stage was called Antecedent. A kind of reversed affliction.”

Now it was Hal’s turn to laugh, because the look Val aimed his way was one of pure disbelief and a touch of fear.