Change was a hard thing.

Nai sat over a small hole, her face tight in concentration.

Change was the thing that drove life and forced it to grow. Age was the medicine to ignorance and the flowerpot of wisdom.

Yes, Nai thought. This was true.

Her face scrunched a bit more.

Only those who clung tightly to this stallion called time could expect themselves to grow. To live was to stay. To stay with life, to stay with soul, and to stay your very being.

But to live was also to change. The tree would stay, but it would grow, it would shed its leaves and grow stronger through the winds of time. Its roots would dig deep and force the ground apart, and in doing so, it would change.

Nai’s face grew red.

To live, to stay, to change, thus was the dichotomy of life.

Truly, to live was to die in some ways and to grow in others. Bits of your past shedding away and falling to the ground to nurture your future.

She pushed again, plop.

“There you go, easy as could be right?” Medin asked.

Nai nodded, her mission was complete.

“Though I don’t know if a child this young should even be potty trained. You're barely a few months old. You’ve got years before you need to do such a thing.”

“Aye!” Nai protested.

“Well alright,” Medin said with a smile. “If you say so. Now come here, let’s clean you up now.”

Nai nodded and let the woman pick her up. Unfortunately, cleanliness was not something she had mastered yet. But it was only a matter of time, Nai could feel it.

“Aye!” Nai yipped as cold water touched her back.

“Hold still now,” Medin replied. “It’s a little muddy back there.”

Nai froze and let the woman help her. She had to be careful now. The headband on her head kept her relatively weak, but she was still capable of hurting the old woman even with its restrictions.

A minute later she was clean, though her dignity was stained.

Nai crawled.

The floor was a very interesting place. The bugs, the dirt, the bark, and the rocks, were all very interesting.

She wasn’t supposed to eat them, that’s what Medin said.

She tried to tell the woman that she would be fine if she ate them. Nai could eat a sword and not feel a thing, but Medin wouldn’t have it.

Anytime she ate anything strange, Medin would scold her and take her inside for the rest of the day.

Nai could have opposed it. She could have easily freed herself or even run away, but she didn’t.

She liked the old woman, loved even though Nai couldn’t say she knew the difference between the two. She cared and she didn’t want to see the old woman sad.

Most days she played with Tob. He was an old herding dog belonging to one of Chin’s children. He lived here because he was too old to run in the fields and he was allowed inside because he was well trained.

Medin didn’t want Nai sleeping with the old hound, but Nai rebelled. She liked Tob, and Tob liked her.

The old dog talked a lot about all the things it had seen.

That was to be understood, Nai was the first person who was willing to listen so of course it wouldn’t stop talking to her.

He talked about sheep and herding, occasionally he’d talk about smells and mangy mutts who refused to groom themselves, but mostly he just talked.

Today was one of those days.

Tob lay down and Nai worked herself to get on top of the old hound. Medin was inside busy with something, probably cooking and Nai was allowed to play by herself unsupervised.

Even if Medin didn’t like it.

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Nai gripped the back of the old hound as he stood up. Her head rested on his shoulder and her feet and toes intertwined with his long hair. She was confident, even a whirlwind wouldn’t knock her off him now.

Tob started forward, slowly at first but faster with each step. The dog was old and slow and shouldn’t have been as fast as it was, but Nai was helping with that.

She didn’t quite understand how. It was instinct to her, like breathing. But she helped the dog and as her qi mixed with the old mutt’s it seemed to heal.

The dog galloped, parading throughout the outskirts of town and running for a few good miles until it stopped next to a tree on a hilltop.

She hopped off of the dog and crawled beneath the shade of an old tree. From here, Nai could make out an outline of the village along with the merchant’s outpost.

They were like ants, Nai thought. Insects.

And from here, she must have been the same to them, a dot beneath a tree.

Tob scratched behind his ears, brushing off some hair and an old scab.

He looked better too. His old fur seemed to shine and his joints stood straighter than before.

He started barking, another ramble about acorns and squirrels. Tob did that, talking.

He had gotten smarter since Nai had first met him, and now, though he couldn’t quite speak, his woofs and barks sounded like speech.

Nai didn’t like that idea. How could a dog learn to speak before she did?

She understood language in a way. Well, she understood auras and those were so much easier to understand. Why would she pay attention to weird sounds when she could just stare at the shadow of a person’s soul and know what they were thinking?

That was how the powerful spoke, she was sure of it.

They spoke with projections of will rather than projections of sound.

But… she didn’t want to speak to the powerful. She wanted to talk to Medin and Chin, and maybe that big fella who always lugged around poop with Xi Lu.

It wasn’t that the mortals were more entertaining, but that they were always there.

Nai had seen her older brother. The monkey king had visited her once when Bill was away, and Nai had seen ants, mindless insects beneath the earth. Nai had seen the weak deer that seemed to tower over her at once and the small insect-sized beasts that could devour her whole.

All of these beings had done something to her, or rather seeing them had. She understood something, innately. She knew.

But She didn't know what she knew. She didn't have a name for it yet.

Nai looked back against the tree and eyes against the sky. It was a small thing to Nai.

Her eyes could pierce through the daylight and see the galaxies beyond. She couldn’t make out the details of the moons and such, but the light couldn’t hide the stars from her.

But that wasn’t what the mortals saw. The mortals just saw a big blue thing with clouds and specks floating above them. Nai could see that too, if she wanted.

And sometimes she did, now was one of those times.

Clouds, Nai found, were also interesting things. There were a lot of them lately, but the sky was clearer today, a brief reprieve from the rainy season.

There will be more clouds tomorrow. Nai could sense that.

But those would be boring ones, giant uniform masses of vapor. Scattered clouds were the way to go.

Tob barked something about small rats in the meadows.

Nai frowned, a habit she had picked up from a very particular farmer.

Tob was saying the rats and wildlife were growing more disturbed over the days. He said that a rat had tried to fight him the other day and that they had even started using tactics of sorts.

Tactics? Nai thought. What did the dog know of tactics?

She listened to the dog bark, grabbing meaning from both his aura and body language. She listened to him speak more and more and realized Tob was speaking.

Not just talking or barking or expressing emotion, but communicating with intent and reason. He wasn’t using language or anything but he was talking.

Her little brown eyes grew wide in realization. She had been playing with him for a couple of weeks now, riding him and aiding him every time he helped her.

It was instinct to her, her mother was Beast and her father was The Tamer, how could it have been anything but?

She was raising the animal and caring for it. Controlling him and nurturing him, and now the dog had gained a spark of sentience.

No, it was already sentient.

Nai’s fingers stroked her chubby little chin.

A conundrum, a great debacle.

She had in her foolish ignorance started raising a spirit beast.

She looked at the talkative dog up and down in assessment.

And not a very good one either. She had taken an old herding dog at the door of death and extended its life by what? At least a decade. His mind grew larger and that in turn churned his soul.

What would Bill say about this? Probably nothing. He was a lazy old man after all.

Beasts, she thought. And once again she let her instincts answer her.

Beasts were inherently different from humans, as all the primordial archetypes were. While humans developed into intelligence and understanding, beasts grew into it. In fact, intelligence itself was a secondary trait, something they gained to aid them, not define them.

All there was when they were created was their nature and that was all that grew. Intellect, wisdom, comprehension, all those things were aids, pathways to power for most beings, not an intrinsically defining thing.

Now each beast’s nature was different of course. Dragons, for example, had a drive to be superior. They strived to know all things and horde because that was their nature, and at high enough ranks, any creature could free themselves of their archetypical limits.

And there were many mixtures of beasts, varying from simple animals to God-Imperium creatures who created their own archetype that other creatures could be modeled after.

But a dog was no such being. Nai didn’t know if her father was responsible for taming the first wolf or not.

Probably not. There were definitely others before him but none got as powerful or spread their powers as wide, so their influence was limited.

Regardless, a dog was a dog, not a dragon. And the nature of dogs was simple, companionship.

Dogs worked with humans, aiding, helping, and protecting.

If Tob had been a wolf she would have set him free. After all, what was one intelligent wolf? But Tob was a dog, and dogs wanted nothing more than to serve.

Tob kept barking about annoying rodents as Nai sank back into the moment.

Well, then. That was it.

Nai nodded firmly to no one in particular.

She has a dog now. A dog she would feed and raise because she had made him hers. Her responsibility, her eternal burden.

He would not die. He would follow her, from mortal beast to immortal hound. She would make sure of it.

But she really had to be careful now. She couldn’t allow this to happen again. One animal companion was enough of a burden for a child like her.

Nai turned, nodded to her subordinate, and listened.