A tremor passed through the air... Or was it just him?
Grey felt something brush against his chest, like roots moving deep underground, and staggered.
Kaz caught him before he hit the ground, one hand gripping his shoulder with more steadiness than Grey expected from something that had just spent centuries in chains.
"Are you alright?" Kaz asked.
Grey opened his mouth to answer and felt power drain from him, not painfully, just inevitably, flowing outward the way water finds the lowest point without asking permission.
Kaz's human form flickered at the edges. Then it shrank. Folding inward again without ceremony, the tall elegant figure compressing itself smaller and smaller until a small dark bat perched on Grey's shoulder, barely bigger than his palm, its tiny claws gripping his collar with what could only be described as dignified precision.
Grey stared at it.
"Kaz? Kaz!"
The bat yawned, revealing miniature versions of the canines that had been considerably more alarming at two hundred metres. "I'm fine."
"You were huge! Now you're the size of my hand! What the hell happened?!"
Lin hid a smile behind her sleeve. "Your spirit can only hold so much. The Hive adjusts the beast to its contractor."
Grey blinked. "The Hive? What's that?"
They both looked at him. The specific look of two very old beings confronted with a gap in knowledge so fundamental they weren't quite sure where to begin addressing it.
Grey had seen that look before. Usually from teachers. Usually right before something embarrassing happened.
"You don't know about the Hive?" Lin asked.
Grey scratched his head. "I might have missed a few classes."
"A few," Kaz repeated not believing it.
"To go play with animals," Lin added, in the tone of someone who already knew this and had formed a comprehensive opinion about it.
'How does she know?!'
"They were interesting animals," Grey said defensively.
Kaz sighed with the weight of someone who had existed since before recorded history and was still somehow surprised by this conversation.
"The Hive is a sentient concept created to help humans progress alongside their bonded Eidos. It bridges the gap between contractor and beast when connection doesn't come naturally. You'll learn more about it when you return to the real world." The Bat explained.
Grey nodded slowly. Then something else occurred to him.
"How do you both know this?" he asked. "You've been imprisoned here for centuries. How do you know more about being a Beast Mage than I do?"
A short silence.
Kaz coughed politely. "We know a great many things."
"Everyone knows this," Lin added.
Grey pointed at himself. "Everyone except the boy who missed classes."
"Precisely," Kaz agreed, with great dignity, "Except the boy who missed classes."
Grey groaned and covered his face with both hands. Lin hid another smile behind her sleeve. He could tell she was hiding it and it somehow made it considerably worse.
The pressure deepened then, settling over everything like weather changing. It came from inside his chest rather than above him, a pulling sensation, gentle but insistent, the way a current feels when it has already decided where it is taking you and is simply giving you time to accept it.
Kaz's small form dissolved into light that sank into Grey's chest, settling into a warmth behind his ribs that felt immediately and completely right.
Not foreign, nor intrusive. Like something slotting into a place that had always been shaped for exactly that purpose and had simply been empty until now.
Grey pressed a hand flat against his chest.
"My spirit seed," he said softly. He knew about Spirit Seeds as the few Beast Mages in their village talked about it sometimes.
Kaz's voice echoed from within, warm and faintly distant, like a sound heard through walls. "I'll stay here until your spirit locus forms. Don't forget to feed me."
"I have to feed you?"
"Spirit energy. Not mangoes."
Grey paused. "You like mangoes though."
"That is completely irrelevant—"
"You like them," Grey said. "I can tell."
A sound from inside his chest that was unmistakably a laugh, short and reluctant and completely genuine.
Lin burst out laughing at the same moment, unguarded and bright, the image of a proud two-hundred-metre titan with strong personal feelings about mangoes apparently too much for her composure to contain.
It transformed her face entirely, made her look younger and less ancient, considerably less like something capable of levelling a city without raising her heart rate.
Grey grinned despite himself. Despite everything.
Slowly the world began to fade.
It started at the edges the way it always seemed to start, colours draining slowly from the plain and the sky above it.
The green of the eastern mountain grew pale and the grass underfoot turned translucent.
The mist that had always been present thickened and rose steadily until the land dissolved into pale outlines, suggestions of shapes rather than solid things, a world in the process of being packed away.
Lin's figure grew faint at the edges. She stood still in the dissolving landscape and bowed, small and graceful, her green hair lifting in a wind Grey couldn't feel.
"Grow strong, Grey," she said. "We will meet again."
He wanted to say more. There were things he hadn't asked yet, things about what she was and how long she had been here and what the divine actually meant in practical terms when it came looking for people who had broken covenants on its behalf.
There was a lot he didn't know and the time for knowing it was clearly not now.
"I promise," he said.
Then she was gone and the light swallowed everything and Grey felt himself falling through the familiar tunnel of colour, the kaleidoscope of it blazing across his vision, stunning and disorienting, before it gave way to nothing.
---
He woke on cold stone.
Incense smoke curled through the air in thin ribbons. Soft chanting echoed from somewhere far away, rolling through stone corridors in a rhythm that had probably been going since before he entered the root node.
Above him rose carved pillars shaped like twisting roots and branches, the flowers and vines he had noticed on the way in still blooming at the joins between them, vivid and unbothered.
The World Tree Temple.
He lay still for a moment and let the weight of his physical body settle back over him properly. It felt different after the spirit form, heavier and more real, the stone floor solid beneath him in a way that the ground of the Heartlands never quite had been.
He sat up slowly and pressed his hand to his chest. The warmth was there. Small and steady and completely real, the pulse of something ancient tucked inside him like a coal that had decided to stay.
He laughed softly to himself.
It was a strange sound in the empty hall. Not the nervous laugh he had produced several times in the Heartlands when things had gone wrong in new and creative ways. Something quieter than that, something that came from a different place.
He looked around the hall. The other children were gone, back to the village presumably. The altar at the far end stood bare and quiet, the glass bowl gone, the ceremonial objects cleared away.
The Druid Priestess and her Priests had obviously packed up their green cloaks and their professional calm and moved on to the next village on their route.
But there was still one person in the temple with him.
The Chief stood across the hall with his hands folded behind his back, watching Grey with the patient expression of someone who had been waiting for a while and had made peace with it some time ago.
The shells at his collarbone caught the candlelight of the temple. His blue eyes, warm and tired, tracked Grey from the floor to sitting to standing with the careful attention of someone checking for damage before they say anything out loud.
Grey stood and brushed the dust from his clothes.
The Chief said nothing for a long moment, just looked.
"You took the longest," he said at last.
Grey swallowed. "I had some unexpected delays."
The corner of the Chief's mouth moved. Not quite a smile but close enough that Grey could recognise it.
He studied Grey another moment with the thoroughness of someone who had known him since before he had words for things and could read the difference between fine and actually fine without needing to ask.
"Did you find your beast?" he asked.
Grey placed his hand over his chest. The warmth was steady beneath his palm, small and alive and completely real.
"Yes," he said. "I did."
The Chief held his gaze for a long moment.
He nodded once.
"Good," he said quietly.