Chapter Thirty-Three: Bound (Patreon)

The porcupig – Grenslar, whatever – follows me into my alcove, though the darkness inside combined with its murky colouring makes it almost impossible to see. In fact, it’s only by the odd shine of its quills in the shaft of moonlight entering my cave through the hole in the wall that I can see the creature at all.

I imagine rolling over in the night and smacking into those quills point first with either my hand or my face and shudder a bit. No. But equally, I don’t want to send it out into the night and risk it being eaten by a nocturnal predator without me even knowing anything about it. Not to mention it would be a bit of a waste of a jacket.

“Stay just inside the entrance to the cave. Sleep if you can.” The porcupig looks at me for a moment and then trots off. I peek out of my alcove to see it silhouetted against the sky, lying down at the entrance to the cave. Looking in the other direction, I see Kalanthia watching me, her golden eyes catching the light. “Say, Kalanthia...you seem to know a bit more about this whole...binding thing than I do. Do you know how my new...Bound...understands me? Enough to follow orders, at least.”

It’s something I’ve been wondering ever since the thought occurred to me on the way back from the clay pit. It’s not like animals on Earth are born with some innate understanding of language – heck, not even humans are born able to speak the language of their parents. Everyone has to learn, one way or another, and even the smartest animals aren’t able to use language in the same way as humans. Yet the porcupig has followed every single command, even ones like ‘stay just inside the entrance to the cave’ which would require understanding of both the entrance and cave I’m talking about, as well as what ‘stay’ means. Not to mention the distance of ‘just inside’. But the creature managed to do it perfectly.

Not to mention Kalanthia, of course, and her ability to communicate telepathically with words. That just seems too crazy to be real – except it undoubtedly is.

Why should your Bound not understand you? That is the purpose of the Bond – to communicate your desires and ensure compliance.

“OK, one, I don’t understand how you understand me because I’m speaking a language, words, which probably doesn’t exist in this world, and two, what do you mean by ‘to communicate your desires and ensure compliance’?”

Your two questions have the same answer. You may be using a language which I have never encountered, but it matters not: we are communicating mind-to-mind, so your human ‘words’ are no obstacle. The same is true with your Bound.

“A what now?” I ask slightly rhetorically. Shaking my head, not in rejection, but to try and clear it a bit, I try to form a question which might help me to understand more. “We’re communicating mind-to-mind? I thought that’s what you were doing, and I was speaking out loud…”

No, she replies, sounding a little as if she thinks I’m just a bit slow or stupid. Your ‘words’ mean nothing to me. I receive the meaning of your speech by catching the thoughts that you project and then you receive my meaning because I place it in your outer mind, which transforms it into ‘words’ for your own benefit. For creatures unused to mental communication, I believe speaking out loud enables the thoughts to travel far enough for a telepath to catch them. Those more competent with it have no need to make sounds aloud, and communicate all they wish by thoughts alone.

“OK,” I say slowly, my thoughts awhirl. While it kind of makes a bit more sense than a giant leopard in a world far different from my own understanding English, it’s still hard for me to grasp. “Could I learn to do that?” Kalanthia tosses her head.

Perhaps. You would need significantly more understanding of the world around you, and the ability to reach out with your mind beyond yourself to touch the aura of your co-interlocutor.

Something to aim for, perhaps. Still, it hasn’t quite answered my other question. “So how does all this link to the porcupig – sorry, Grenslar – being able to understand me? You can’t tell me that it’s a telepath, surely.” The nunda whuffs out an amused breath.

No. We could hardly say that. As I said before, your ‘words’ are irrelevant as you are in fact communicating your command mentally.

“But how?” It’s dark, but even so I can see/feel Kalanthia looking at me disapprovingly.

Come now, you forged a link with your Bound and do not even know what you have done?

“The...the Battle of wills?” I guess, that whole experience coming back to the fore of my memory.

Indeed. You engaged a free creature in a Battle of wills and overcame it. The will of the Grenslar has bowed to yours and accepted the chain of your dominance. The chain works to communicate your desires to your Bound. Once more, the sounds you make aloud are irrelevant except in that they help youto focus on what you wish your Bound to do.

The chain of my dominance...it sounds rather terrible, I think, as the unease rises once more.

“What did you mean by ‘ensure compliance’ earlier,” I ask, my mouth feeling rather dry. “Is it...is it linked to the ‘chain of my dominance’?”

Indeed. You have proven your will to be greater than that of your Bound, and as long as this is the case, the chain shall hold tightly to your Bound’s will. Should your will weaken, or should your Bound’s will grow faster than yours, you may find the chain loosens and weakens. Too much of a difference and it may break entirely. I...don’t know how to think about that. Though, while I’ve got Kalanthia here...

“Is this ‘will’ the same as Willpower?”

Not exactly, she replies before pausing. Will is based on Willpower to a large extent, but can be impacted by outside factors in a way Willpower cannot be. For example, if you are cold and someone offers you heat, your Will will be weakened in a Battle of Wills, but your Willpower remains the same. OK, that kind of makes sense. In fact, that explains why trapping a creature before starting the Battle of Wills makes a difference in outcome. Is your curiosity satisfied?

“Oh,” I say, realising I’ve stood there in thought for a longer pause than normal in a conversation. “Yes, thank you Kalanthia.” She doesn’t speak again, and all I hear is a slight sound of her readjusting her position.

I step into my cave, mostly feeling my way by now. Pulling out my canteen and a handful of meat, I eat quickly, the food almost tasteless in my mouth as I consider the new information I’ve received.

Clearly Kalanthia knows a fair bit about my Class, and I don’t think I’m imagining the slight colouration of distaste underlying her mental ‘voice’. Or should that be ‘thoughts’? That just by itself is something difficult to grasp – it’s hard enough to accept that a giant leopard can speak into my mind; it’s even harder to conceptualise that it’s not even words that either of us are apparently communicating with. But it does make sense of the fact that a dumb woodland animal can understand even simple commands with no training.

That brings my thoughts onto the thorny subject of what exactly I’ve done to the creature. I’m not sure what I’d expected of Dominate, but I can’t help but think it’s not this. I feel...I feel like the bad guy.

Realising that makes a weight lift from my chest, the act of putting a name to the uneasiness curling within me actually alleviating it to a certain degree. I took an animal from the wild and have forced it to follow me, to obey me. I’ve...well, if it were a human, the only term that would be appropriate would be ‘enslave’. Since it’s not a human, the term doesn’t quite fit, but the feeling does, to an extent.

The porcupig had a life in the forest. It may not have been a long one: for all I know, it would have been eaten this very night had I left it. It may also have been destined to live to a ripe old age having sired (or borne – I can’t say I’ve actually checked if it’s male or female) dozens of little piglets. Or whatever they’re called. We’ll never know now.

But then...wasn’t that what humans did with all the animals we domesticated? The original wolves that eventually became dogs, the original beasts that became domesticated cows and goats and sheep. How did that domestication happen? Over time, for sure, but isn’t that just an elongated process of changing the animals’ destinies? The animals gave up agency in return for security, freedom in exchange for food. It may not have been a conscious decision, but it was an exchange nonetheless.

This...this isn’t quite the same, I admit to myself quietly. I haven’t offered anything to the porcupig: I pinned it down and forced a Battle upon it that it didn’t ask for, and that I positioned myself to win from the start. And even if I could release it, though Kalanthia didn’t say anything about that, I wouldn’t because of how useful it could be.

That thought makes me shiver a little, feeling like my foundations have been rocked a bit. I’d always liked to think I was a nice guy, a good guy, really. Someone who would stand up for the innocent if it was demanded, someone in whom the hero was just sleeping, ready to awake in the right circumstances. I’ve suddenly realised that’s not true. Because a hero would immediately swear off using this tool of animal-enslavement. A hero would willingly take the hard road, spending time to win an animal’s loyalty and then use Tame, if indeed that were even necessary by that point.

That’s not what I’m going to do. The last few days have taught me that I’m a survivor. I’ve learned that I have so much more capacity to keep going, to withstand pain and keep fighting than I would have ever imagined in my cushy life as a corporate drone. And when the chips are down, a survivor uses any tools at his disposal. He doesn’t care about fair fights, about even odds. He places traps and ambushes, and aims to disable if he can’t kill immediately. He survives.

A hero doesn’t, not necessarily. But then he doesn’t really need to as there’s always some deus ex machina which guarantees his ultimate survival, even if not his happiness. There’s none of that for me – I learnt that in my one and only act of heroism against the wolvezard. Yes, I did actually survive, but it was through the luckiest of circumstances. The chances of a similar set of circumstances coming into effect the next time I decide to be a hero are vanishingly small.

No, much as I would like to think of myself as a hero, I’d like to be alive significantly more. Maybe when I grow in power and survivability, I’ll be able to be more heroic, but for now, I’m a survivor. And when a tool is unsavoury, but offers better odds of survival, a survivor uses it.

So, I’m not going to swear I will never use Dominate again. I’m not going to even try to release my current follower – Bound, was the term Kalanthia used. What I am going to do, for my own peace of mind if nothing else, is swear to treat my Bound well. It may not have been a voluntary choice on my Bound’s front, but while it serves me obediently, I will make sure that it has everything it needs, that it comes out of the experience better than when it went in.

I make a promise to myself that I will never use Dominate without a good reason, nor will I use my Bound as cannon fodder, assuming that they wouldn’t balk at a suicide mission anyway.

The vows I make to myself relax the sense of uneasiness inside me enough for me to start feeling sleepy. I lie down on my ‘bed’ and pull my jacket/blanket over me. After the long day I’ve had, sleep creeps up on me quickly.