ALL NOVEL Book One: Leap - Chapter Fifty-One: Acceptance
Focusing back on the raptorcat, my distraction having lessened the pressure I was applying, I take a different approach. Honestly, this isn’t all that different from all the other negotiation and mediation I’ve done – when one angle doesn’t work, try a different one.
Do you not wish to live to grow stronger? Death is the end of all growth. I feel the raptorcat pay reluctant attention to the wave of images and emotions I sent it.
Death is natural. Chains are not.
But it is life nonetheless, even if it means being bound to another. Is it not better than a noble, but futile death? I feel it wavering a little and the brief let-up of pressure lets me take a couple of small steps forward before it returns. Still, I notice that the strength is not quite as much as it was before. Give in to me and I will heal you and we will grow stronger together.
I am old, the raptorcat sends pictures of grey fur and the sensation of joints becoming painful with age along with a sense of almost-amusement. My time is near anyway.
It should be the end of the conversation – if the creature is already old, why would it choose to live a little longer as my Bound? But yet...I haven’t been cut out completely. In fact, it feels like the raptorcat’s Will is wavering, that the hosepipe of pressure she’s directing at me is starting to sputter. Why, becomes evident with her next transmission.
I am old...but they are not. I see a picture of a small group of cubs. Or kittens. Or puppies. Or chicks, or whatever to call these creatures which are such a strange amalgamation of so many Earth animals. I will bow to you, she continues, transmitting such a sense of finality that I know it is this or nothing, if you will care for these young ones. And if you promise never to force them to serve you.
That pours cold water on my sudden avaricious thoughts of having my own little pack of raptorcats, all bound to me through Dominate. Then again, she did say force…
And if they choose to bond with me of their own will? I ask. The raptorcat doesn’t respond immediately, and I sense that she’s filled with turmoil. In this strange world, our emotions and thoughts are as obvious as facial expressions would normally be between humans in a particularly expressive culture. She’s torn, knowing that the cubs will die without anyone to care, but thinking that it would be better if they died than be bound to an uncaring master.
If, by the point they are capable of being independent, they consider you pack and choose to stay with you, that is acceptable, she decides finally. I get the sense of a half-grown raptorcat, paws still too big for its body, some fluff still on its wings, but a boundless determination and the keen competence of a born-killer. An adolescent, I guess. By her definition, I’m pretty sure that Tame would work, even if Dominate is out of the realms of possibility.
Very well. I send a wave of acceptance of her terms and the resistance holding me back crumbles. In three quick steps, I’m standing in front of her and we’re staring at each other with mere inches between us. She breaks the eye-contact – and when did I realise she was female? - and bows her head.
Our surroundings bleed back into full colour, the sounds and smells of the forest returning with the breeze that caresses my skin. The raptorcat, my new Bound, is not doing well at all. Her breathing is significantly more laboured than it had been when I triggered Dominate, and it hadn’t been great then.
I quickly shift to lay my hand over the wound and cast my healing spell. I cast the channeled version, not giving much guidance to the magic apart from focusing it on the terrible injury in front of me. I pour most of my mana into the wound and see the effects. Flesh rebuilds itself before my eyes, the walls of torn organs stitching together, muscle reforming into a whole and skin growing to hide everything inside from view. The skin is furless, and may actually remain so from now on – it seems like my Lay-on-hands isn’t capable of restoring lost hair, or maybe that would just require more energy than I have to spend. Still, I’m very grateful that it works on her at all.
When my mana bar has reduced significantly, I stop pouring healing into the wound. I haven’t completely bottomed out my mana store, since if something suddenly attacked, I’d want to be able to cast at least one healing spell on myself. I think I’ve poured enough in to make a significant difference, though. I’ll need to continue later, since so much mana leaving me all in a few seconds is surprisingly exhausting.
Panting and giving my mana the chance to regen a bit, I pull out my sneleon shell and pour some water into the little soup that remains to cool it down. Fishing out the bits of pondweed, I dribble the liquid into the mouth of the raptorcat and encourage her to drink. I figure that if she does end up eating the bits of meat left in there, it’s not an issue – she’s a carnivore, after all. In fact, a bit of food might even do her some good.
I choke down the slimy bits of pondweed as she swallows the liquid. Angling the sneleon shell, I position it that she can lap weakly at the thin soup. When my mana has regenerated enough, I cast another Lay-on-hands, this one over her body generally. Her lapping strengthens a little, though I know she’ll be weak from blood-loss for quite a while: my spell doesn’t deal much with that.
We rest like that for a while, the raptorcat drinking the soup bit by bit and me recovering my mana and keeping watch. Every so often I cast another Lay-on-hands until I sense that there’s nothing more it can heal. It’s strange using the healing spell on a body other than my own. I realise now that casting it on myself is a bit like rubbing two of your fingers together instead of touching something with one finger – I get double feedback from the spell.
I’d always thought that the sense of healing I got was from the feeling in my body, but at least half of it is actually the spell itself as I still get most of the same sensations from healing the raptorcat. On the other hand, when I use it on myself, I can feel the injuries pulling themselves together or misaligned parts rearranging themselves, and I didn’t get that from the raptorcat, thankfully. Either way, I’m glad to know that my healing spell works just as well on others as it does for myself.
I also take the time to look properly at her. The first time I saw a raptorcat, I was far too concerned with survival to really get a good look at them. And then when I came across this one before Dominating her, I was more looking to see what had happened and thinking about what to do next.
She’s darkly coloured, shades of black with tints of green and brown covering her body. The patterning is almost like a camo outfit, but night version, or something like that. At least, it’s like that where it’s not stained with blood. I can understand why I didn’t see the trap when I walked into it before. Her fur isn’t really fur, I realise – it’s more like soft, flexible feathers with very short vanes. Perhaps an evolutionary prototype of fur…
The feathers on her wings are actual proper feathers, but I don’t see any long pinions, making it even more clear that these limbs aren’t meant for flying. Are they an extraneous feature which used to be helpful, but are useless now? Or do raptorcats use them for something other than flying?
Her eyes are the same ones that stuck in my memory after my last encounter – predatory golden orbs with slit pupils. Even now that we’ve come to an accord, I can see them warily watching me, violence only a hair’s breadth away. Fortunately, I have an instinctual confidence in the Bond and its ability to prevent at least direct harm from one of my Bonded. Otherwise I think I’d have already been too unnerved to sit here so close to the predator.
As for her feet, they’re clawed, scaled affairs with four toes facing forwards and one short toe facing backwards. The claws are quite sharp on her front feet, but far less so on her back. Now I realise the cause of a number of gashes I’ve seen in the trunks of trees while walking through the forest. A shiver goes down my spine as I realise that I’ve been exploring raptorcat territory at least half the time I’ve been staying with Kalanthia… Really, it’s only dumb luck which prevented me from re-encountering the pack.
Her sharp front claws are matched by a mouthful of sharp teeth, her muzzle length somewhere between a lion’s and a wolf’s. With two large canines on top and bottom, I can see that her specialty is grabbing and holding on. Frankly, I don’t understand how I managed to survive the first time I met the pack – by all rights they should have taken me down easily. Still, I did, and now I’ve got one of them as my Bound, it’s my enemies which will have to deal with her teeth and claws.
Checking on my Energy store, I realise that Dominating this raptorcat has actually been pretty lucrative. I’m already up thirty-six percent, having been in single digits when I checked last night. OK, some of that’s from my hourly absorption, but the majority is from this single action. Pretty awesome, right?
Eventually the raptorcat, who I’m thinking of naming Bastet after the Ancient Egyptian cat goddess, is ready to move. Incidentally, Sekhmet was another choice but I decided that naming an already dangerous creature after one whose mythology paints them as a serial killer is probably not the best idea. It’s been a while waiting for her to regain her strength, but with the help of my healing Skill it hasn’t taken anywhere near as long as it would take a cat or lion to recover from surgery on Earth. I’ve collected what firewood I could in the local area, but didn’t want to venture too far in case she got attacked while I wasn’t there.
“So, show me the cubs?” I suggest eagerly when she manages to struggle to her feet. She sends me a look that I have little trouble in interpreting as annoyance and admonishing me to be patient. It’s not been more than a few hours since she became one of my Bound and I can already tell she’s very different from Spike.
We set off moving after not that much time, but it feels like longer than it really is because of my desire to get moving. “How about Bastet as a name?” I ask as we start walking, still a bit slowly to account for the raptorcat’s recent physical trauma. She flashes me a glance which I think is questioning. I’m pretty sure that Animal Empathy is the only reason I come to that conclusion. “It’s the name of a goddess on my original world – a cat one. Not that you’d know what a cat is,” I realise belatedly.
Instead, giving up on words, I try to feed her the memories I have of learning about Bastet: visiting the British History Museum and seeing statues; learning about the beliefs of the Ancient Egyptians at school; reading mythology about the Egyptian gods and goddesses… The raptorcat takes a few minutes to mull it over and we walk in silence for that time. Then, when I’m starting to think that she doesn’t like the name but can’t or won’t communicate that to me, she sends a wave of approval through our bond.
“Bastet it is,” I conclude numbly, amazed that my newest Bound is capable of communicating in a way that Spike has never done; something which took me a while to understand how to do myself. Seems she’s a natural...