Who Is the Beast King?
Season 1 — The Dragoness of Nature
Chapter 10 — Flowers, Scars, and Silent Hopes
1) The Scarred Outcast
The Bear Tribe clung to the mountain like roots to stone. Timbered galleries bridged cliff to cliff; smoke poked neat holes in the evening sky; den-doors yawned black along the rock face like patient mouths. The air was pine and ash and the copper breath of fresh blood.
He came up the switchback path with a yearling elk across his shoulders as if it were a shawl, not a burden. Taller than any man on the ledges, broader by half, he moved without noise despite the size. A pale scar slashed from his left brow to the edge of his jaw—an old wound, ugly in a way that made strangers look twice and children stare outright.
Eyes followed him now. Some with relief (meat was meat). Some with that familiar twist of lips he had learned to endure.
By the main fire, three women lounged on cured furs. Their cloaks were the best the tribe could spare—glossy pelts soft as rain—and bright beads clicked at their throats when they laughed. Stocky bodies, strong hands, faces plain and a little hard with comfort. They watched him approach and began, as they always did, to play with knives made of words.
"There goes the ugly bear," one said, voice pitched for him to hear. "Doesn't the scar look deeper today?"
"It looks like it's eating his face," another snorted, flicking ash from her cloak. "Imagine waking to that."
The third tilted her chin, mouth curving. "No female will ever want a beast like that over her. Useful back, ugly front. He should keep to himself."
The elk slid from his shoulder to the prey-stone with a dull, clean thud. He didn't look at them. He didn't answer. He stepped back so the butchers could work.
Ugly. Scarred. Useful. He set the words down as if they were rocks he refused to carry any farther. Not the nights I bled. Not the claws I broke saving theirs. Only this mark.
He moved past grinders and scrapers, past boys practicing with short clubs, to the edge of the ledge where the mountain fell away into a black-green ocean of trees. Wind lifted the hair at his nape. He breathed.
His name was Rurik. Few said it kindly. Fewer said it at all.
A finger of memory pressed the scar and he let the old night come, quick and hard the way it always did.
—Keep up, big oaf! Laughter banged off trunks. He turned—and the trail was empty. No breath. No scent. They had slipped away because leaving the largest behind was funny.
The forest's silence lifted its lip. The crystal beast came out of shadow—a boar with a dark-pink stone pulsing inside its chest like a second heart. It charged, tusk up. The world shattered along the path of its horn: brow, cheek, jaw. Fire ran down his face.
He stayed. He planted his feet and braced his shoulders and stayed. When it came again he broke its neck with his arms around its throat and lay in the leaves while the world steadied, blood ticking onto moss.
He brought the stone back in a fist full of red and thought, foolishly, they will see me.
They had seen. And laughed.
Now—as then—he sat on the ledge's lip and watched dusk comb the forest below. A hawk spun in place over the pines. The river wrote a silver line through the dark.
I should be grateful, he told himself. My strength feeds them. I still have a place. His hand closed and opened once. But is it so much to wish for kindness? Only once. Once would be enough.
He rose when the butchers called to weigh his kill. He lifted, noted the number, nodded, said nothing. A life's practice. He had learned to keep words for his chest, not his mouth.
Behind him, the women's laughter thinned like smoke in wind.
---
2) The Fading Tide
Moonlight bent like a blade on the lake and slid down into the halls below.
The water people had built beauty in the quiet places: spiraled coral pillars soft as bone, arched windows cut from nacre, gardens of waving kelp threaded with glass-colored fish. Light swam in schools along the vaults, cold and clean. Music was current and pulse and the soft clack of shell.
Nerion moved through it like a line drawn with a single, steady hand. His hair unspooled behind him in silver-blue ribbons. Scales lay along his hips and tail in small, perfect mosaics—the color of pale aquamarine deepening to seafloor green near the fin. He was beautiful in a way that made people turn and then turn again, and it cost him more often than it helped.
His sister lay in a shell bed open like a cupped palm, eyes half-shut, breath a little too slow. Pearl—named for the soft glow that lived in her face when she laughed—looked dim tonight. The scalloped edges of her gills fluttered once, twice.
"Brother," she breathed, and bubbles rose to the ceiling.
"I'm here." Nerion smoothed her hair back, fingers careful. "Sleep. I'll bring you the sweet fruit from the east garden tomorrow."
Her mouth made the memory of a smile. "You always do."
Because it is the only thing I can fix, he did not say. Because the rest—the thinning schools, the dying eelgrass, the faint taste of iron in the current—was larger than a brother's hands.
When Pearl slept, Nerion pushed from the chamber and sank down the long hall to the council shell. Elders gathered in a ring, faces pale, eyes shadowed. Water moved slow here. The kelp ropes along the walls hung limp.
"Our hunters returned with nets half-empty," one said, voice heavy as silt. "Again."
"The river mouth tastes wrong," another whispered. "Like rock and sickness."
A third rubbed his brow. "We can cull our own numbers or we can starve. Those are the choices if this continues."
Soft, frightened murmurs, the sound of a tribe at a loss.
Nerion did not speak. He watched. He listened. He counted breaths so his face would stay smooth. The waters are failing. Pearl is failing. If the elders cannot move, I must. But not yet. Not while the dark is still thin and hope has a thread to pull.
"Some say the Beast God turns his face," an old woman murmured, hands folded. "Some say a blessing has come to land instead of sea."
Nerion's head lifted at that, just a fraction. A blessing on land? He filed it beside all the other impossible things, because he could not afford to forget any tool. Then he rose when the council broke, went back to Pearl's bedside, and let his forehead rest a moment against hers.
Hold on, he thought. Please, little one. Hold on.
He pressed his mouth into a line. If the sea forces me, I will climb into air. For you.
---
3) The Flower's Secret
Near the Wolf Tribe, the earth softened into a small meadow where late-summer flowers made their last brave color. The wolves had cut paths in clean lines like stitches through cloth; beyond them, wildness lay down and offered its neck.
Areum sat with her back to a warm stone and the sun in her hair. The breeze smelled like clover and something sharp and green. Her hands were empty and then not—she tucked her knees beneath her chin and folded her fingers and listened to the new quiet inside her body.
It had started the night she looked into Raion's eyes and said yes without saying the word. A slow heat, a sense that something vast was turning toward her attention. She had thought it was only love—or something that could become it. Now she wasn't sure.
She looked at a daisy whose head had folded itself in fatigue.
"Try," she whispered.
She closed her eyes and reached—not with hands, not with thought exactly, but with that warm thread inside. It unspooled. It touched.
The stem straightened. Petals spread, white again instead of gray. The tiny sun at the center brightened a tone. A bee noticed, altered course, landed.
Areum laughed, a quick, surprised sound, and clapped a palm over her mouth. Then she reached again, careful this time, and watched a slick curl of vine scoot one handspan toward the sun.
It's me, she thought, pulse quick and light. It answers me.
Not all at once; not miracles on command. But where her attention fell, life leaned. Leaves perked. Flowers breathed deeper. The meadow felt—suddenly—as if someone had opened a window in a stale room.
If I can do this, she thought, breath fogging the air, maybe I can do more. Food. Medicine. A garden behind the cave. A—
She stopped before the word home and felt shy at herself. Slowly, she told her chest. One small thing at a time, Areum. Don't spook it.
The light moved across the stone and she followed it, touching leaf, stem, dirt with the part of her that could finally touch back.
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4) Panther's Dream
Raion hunted the way rain falls—without ceremony, perfectly.
The boar had not known he was there until the last breath. The hit was clean. Blood steamed in a thin line along the leaves. He lifted, set, lifted, set, the motion folding into his spine until it felt like part of walking.
He did not think much when he hunted. That was safe, for him and for anything that stood too close to his teeth. Today, though, thinking came without teeth. It came like a hand over a fire, warming, cautious.
Hides for her shoulders. A thicker roof; the last storm talked through the seams. A better ledge for drying meat. A shelf for the little things she keeps picking up. A place to set the bowl she made—she will make; I can feel it—and laugh at its lopsided mouth.
He let a smile go where no one could see it.
He saw, in a picture as solid as a stone in his palm, Areum sitting with her feet tucked beneath her on a fur, a small dark head butting her knee, then another, then another. Green eyes in tiny faces. Little paws batting his tail, so bold he would not know whether to scold or preen.
My family, he thought, and the words were a weight he wanted. My mate. My cubs. Mine to guard, mine to warm, mine to wake to for the rest of my breaths.
The lightning tattoo under his collarbone pulsed once, faint red in the trees' dark. He set his jaw and shifted the boar higher on his shoulder and went where the idea of home was.
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5) Hands of Change
By the time the sun's edge touched the trees, Areum had a small chaos spread neatly over a flat rock: lengths of vine, two gourds with their insides scraped into a neat pile, a shallow stone she had been patient with until it surrendered a spoon shape, and a fist-sized lump of damp earth.
She held the spoon up to her face and squinted. "You are an adorable disaster."
But mine, she added inside, and smiled.
She looped a vine and tested it for strength, tugging. Good enough for a tie. She pared the gourd's mouth wider, working slowly with a flake of sharp stone. "If I can boil water, I can make soup," she murmured. "If I can make soup, I can make broth. If I can make broth, I can make everything taste less like 'animal.'"
Her mind ran ahead of her hands and she let it, this once. Clay, it trilled. There's riverbank clay below the wolf paths. If I shape bowls and let them dry, then bake them near—not in—the fire, maybe they harden enough to hold water.
She turned the damp earth in her palm and felt the way it wanted to be smooth. The way it wanted to remember hands.
"I can't keep waiting for Raion to do everything," she told the air, not scolding him, just setting a line she could see. "I'll make our life better. I'll learn. One bowl at a time."
The meadow seemed to nod. A little wind moved through the flowers. She glanced up at that and flushed, as if the world had seen her proud.
A shape stepped out of the trees.
"Raion?" she called, half rising, and then laughed when the panther's rumble answered. "You're early."
He padded close, set the boar down, and bumped her shoulder with his head, heavy as a blessing.
"You smell like sunshine and dirt," he said when he was man again, voice warm with something new.
"You smell like… dinner," she said, wrinkling her nose at the boar and then smiling despite herself.
His eyes slipped to the rock and the mess and went soft in a way she hadn't seen from warriors in any world. "You made…" His hand hovered, careful not to touch until she nodded. Then he picked up the lopsided spoon as if it were gold. "You made these for us."
"For us," she echoed, throat strange.
He looked like a promise.
---
6) Wolves in Council
Night slid cleanly over Shadowfang. The plaza kept breathing—quiet now, measured for rest. Spears leaned against the central post. A pot muttered to itself on a low fire.
In the council hut, Chief Harun stood with his palms flat on the table and his face in a shape that meant he had measured the tribe's weight and found it just shy of comfortable. Beside him, the Witch Doctor watched the smoke curl from a dish of crushed herbs, eyes cold with thought.
"The female stays or goes within days," Harun said. "If she stays, we weave her into us. If she goes, we lose what she might bring."
"The dream," the witch doctor murmured, not for the first time, not for the last. "Green light. A woman. Beasts bending. Famine in far places. She is a knot in the rope. We must keep a hand on it."
Harun lifted his head. "We pressure too hard, she will bolt. We offer too little, she will wander."
The witch doctor's mouth bent. "There is a third path. We bind her to us by mate-bond. Then the rope runs through our hand no matter where she walks."
Silence after that—thick, knowing.
Harun gestured. "Bring him."
Kane came in without ceremony. He filled the doorway in that way only wolves did, posture clean as a blade stood upright. The pale mark of his spirit curled over his ribs like frost lines on a window. His hair fell straight and white to his shoulders; his eyes were a winter sky a moment before snow.
Harun didn't bother with speeches. "Females are rare. This one is rarer. The tribe needs you mated. Take her."
Kane's face did not move. He watched his chief as if reading hunt signs in muddy ground.
The witch doctor added, voice mild and razor-fine, "Your hesitation has lasted seasons. End it. Bind the tribe's future. Bind yours."
Kane's jaw flexed once. A memory put a blade under his ribs—dark eyes glinting through a hut-slit, panther and girl knotted together in warmth that made his hands twitch with a want he despised.
Why does she not leave my skull? Why is last night still in my blood? He framed the answer and did not examine it too closely.
"All right," he said.
Harun blinked, just once. The witch doctor's head tilted a scrap.
"All right?" the chief repeated, as if testing a new word with his tongue.
"I'll ask her," Kane said. "Properly. In daylight. With the tribe to witness." He set the spear-butt down with a quiet tok. "If she refuses, you will not push her. If she accepts… the tribe will have what it wants."
And I will have my answer, he added inside, the thought sour and hot. Whatever it is. Whatever it makes of me.
"Good," Harun said, mask sliding back into place. Relief took a single breath and hid again. "Dawn, then."
When Kane stepped into the cold, he did not go to his bed. He took the long path along the palisade and let the wind bite his face until his eyes watered and the taste of decision felt less like iron in his mouth.
What are you doing? a familiar voice inside asked, the one that had kept him clean of entanglements all these years.
I'm ending a question, he told it. If she is nothing, I'll be free of thinking about her. If she is…
He didn't finish it. The wind finished it for him.
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7) Lattice of Quiet Hopes
Far on the mountain, Rurik shouldered the next day's meat and did not look at the women. He felt, instead, the small pulse of hope he had hidden from himself: someone, somewhere, might touch my face without flinching.
Under the lake, Nerion tucked a strand of Pearl's hair behind her ear and watched the thin ribbon of her breath in the water. Hold. I will find a way.
In the meadow, flowers turned their heads wherever Areum walked, as if a sun had shifted shape. Her palm fit inside Raion's and they traced the path back to the cave, lopsided spoon riding proudly in her belt.
And in the wolf camp, a chief and a witch doctor sketched a future with lines that did not yet include consent, while a man who did not trust women decided to ask for a bond he did not understand.
The night breathed. The Beast God listened without saying what He heard.
And the world—quietly, stubbornly—began to grow.