“Devon, can I talk to you?”

It was the tone of voice that captured my attention more than the words themselves.

“Yeah, of course,” I said. “What’s up?”

I diverted my footsteps from where I had been heading across the farmyard towards where Willa’s workshop was. Willa was standing in the doorway, where she had hailed me from, leaning against the jamb, waiting for me. There was an unaccustomedly serious look on her face. She looked thoughtful. There wasn’t any of the devil-may-care attitude about her.

“Is it serious?” I asked.

“I think it could be,” she said, standing aside and holding the door open for me.

I stepped into her workshop. Clearly, whatever it was that she wanted to talk to me about was better done out of earshot of anyone else, apparently.

The inside of Willa’s workshop was how I imagined the inside of Willa’s head probably looked. It was a mess, but an organized mess. It was the kind of havoc that only a very clever person could create and still find anything of use in. I knew from experience that if I even moved a single, seemingly random object, that she would blast me. So, once Willa had closed the door behind us, I sat down in a luckily and conveniently empty chair and waited for her to begin.

“Hey, don’t sit in that chair,” she said as she turned around.

“Typical,” I said and got up.

“I’m just messing with you, Dev,” she said, grinning. The grin was not long in staying on her face though. As I seated myself once more, rolling my eyes, she leaned against her workbench and started fiddling with her Artificer’s gem-binder bolo tie.

“You are agitated,” I said, nodding at her twiddling fingers.

She scowled at me, and her hand dropped. “Smart ass.”

I held up my hand in a placating gesture. “I can see that joking is out.”

Willa snorted and nodded. “And they say it doesn’t take a genius to spot a goat in a flock of sheep.”

“What’s up, Wil? You know you can come to me with anything. What’s on your mind?”

Willa looked at me from out of those big green eyes of hers. She tucked a flyaway strand of wispy pink hair behind her ear and bit her lip. “In all honesty, Dev, this is more of a heads up. I’m glad I caught you.”

“Heads up about what?”

“Well, I’ve been thinking.”

“Uh oh,” I said before I could stop myself.

Willa raised an eyebrow.

“Sorry, I forgot we weren’t joking,” I said, with a grin.

She grinned back. “That’s my gag anyway.”

“True. So, what were you thinking about?”

“I was thinking about how I might lend a hand in making Merlin’s ranch a little more productive.”

I scoffed at that. “Wil, you’re already making it productive with all your artificing. Only the other day, I heard Lucas telling Amber how you’d made an elevator up to one of the observation towers.”

Willa shrugged. “That as may be. I’m always looking for ways to enhance this place, you know?”

“And I appreciate it,” I said to her earnestly. “You don’t need to feel like you’re not doing your part.”

“It’s not that.” Absentmindedly, she reached out and spun a vial of some sort of milky purple potion around on the desktop.

“What is it then?”

“Well, there are a few guys coming over to see me in a bit. We’ve been discussing options.”

“What kind of options?” I asked. “Stop talking in riddles, will you?”

“I just want this place, this ranch, to be a success.”

“You know, my dad says that success is the size of the hole a man leaves when he dies.”

“Yeah, that sounds about the sort of cheery thing your dad would say,” Willa said with a grin. “Look, the thing is, and I don’t know how you’re going to take this…”

“Just tell me.”

“I’ve been pondering on why it is that we aren’t domesticating some monsters like we do other beasts.”

I blinked. “Because basically every monster we’ve ever come across has wanted to nothing more than to kill us and eat us. You want to make some monsters our pets?”

“Not pets. I just don’t get why we don’t try and use them to help us. They ain’t all bad. The glimmerhorns for instance…”

I considered that. “I suppose,” I said slowly, “that we didn’t have horses before we broke mustangs.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” Willa said, nodding.

I looked at her shrewdly. “You’ve already got something in mind, haven’t you?”

Willa nodded. “There are some things in motions,” she said evasively.

“Come on and spill those beans. You’re one of the brightest people I know, Willa. You’ve always been a lot smarter than me.”

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

“That ain’t hard.”

I laughed. “You’re probably right. And we’ve known each other for as long as, well, shit, for our whole lives. You can tell me anything, even if you think it’s a bad idea. Air it. Let me know what’s in your mind.”

Willa looked at me for a while. “It’s just… I know that this idea of mine is going to rub some of the other folk in the guild up the wrong way.”

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.”

“It’s hard to cross bridges you’ve burned,” Willa pointed out.

“Maybe, but just tell me what you’ve got in mind. Come on.”

“Well, me and some of the others—”

“Who are these others?”

“Well, there’s Dominic Cook and Andrew Peck.”

“The Occult Engineers,” I said. “They’re a pair of smart cookies.”

“And then there’s Amber Khan and Dayna Roberts.”

I nodded. Amber was a Necromancer, and Dayna was a Blood Mage. “I think, judging by the people you’ve brought into this, I can almost see where this is going.”

“Want to hazard a guess?”

“Hell no!” I laughed. “I’m a smart enough guy not to go doing anything so foolish as guessing what you’re thinking.”

Willa smiled. “True. The female mind is far more complex a thing than any male could possibly imagine.”

“I don’t doubt that.”

“Anyway,” Willa went on. “Me and Andrew and Dom and Amber and Dayna, we got to thinking, how could we domesticate monsters? We’re actually meeting in a little bit to discuss a few of the more promising options, so I won’t bore you with hypotheticals at the moment.”

“Much appreciated.”

“You probably wouldn’t understand the intricacies of them anyway, you dummy,” Willa said with a grin.

“You’re probably right.” I laughed. “So, in a nutshell, you’re thinking of bringing monsters into the ranch? I can see why you thought not everyone was going to be on board with this.”

Willa nodded.

“What creatures were you thinking?” I asked. “You’ve obviously put some thought into that already.”

Willa nodded again. “Yeah. We’ve been doing a bit of scouting, a bit of reconnaissance, and we’ve narrowed it down to three likely creatures, the pillars of which are not too far from us.”

“And? What are they?”

“Well, my personal favorite,” Willa said, “is the hippogriff.”

I was a young man. I’d been raised on Harry Potter. I knew what a hippogriff was, but I decided to ask just to be on the safe side.

“These would be the majestic creatures with the body of a horse and the head and wings of an eagle?”

Willa nodded. “I imagine you learned that from Orlando Furioso?” she said with a wry smile.

“Is that a chapter from the Prisoner of Azkaban?”

Willa’s face creased up in that way I knew and loved which told me I had really cracked her up.

“Jeez, Devon! No, it was Italian epic poem written by Ludovico Ariosto. A goddamn Renaissance masterpiece that was first published in 1516 and later expanded in subsequent editions.”

“Oh, that Orlando Furioso,” I said, slapping my palm into my forehead. “Duh.”

“In Orlando Furioso Ariosto describes a fantastical creature called a hippogriff, which is a hybrid of a griffin and a mare,” Willa continued, reeling off the obscure information with that peculiar ease that I envied so much. “The hippogriff is portrayed as a majestic and powerful creature, and its inclusion in the poem has since contributed to its enduring popularity in various works of fantasy literature.”

“Got it. Thanks for not rubbing my ignorance in.”

Willa winked at me. “You’re welcome.”

“And why do you think they’d be the best bet?”

“I was thinking that trained hippogriffs could help with transportation and aerial surveillance. They’d be great for traveling across the countryside too.”

“They do sound like they’d be helpful.” I felt a little prickling bubble of excitement start in my stomach, as it always did when something that made sense, some project that was being shared with me, came out for the first time. “And what’s the second creature?” I asked, fighting down the excitement before it got too great a hold on me.

“A hippocampus.”

“A hippo-what?”

“God, honestly, what do they teach you at university these days?”

“You were the one at university,” I reminded her.

“Good point. Well, anyway, hippocampi—that’s the plural of hippocampus, Dev. Try and keep up.”

I laughed. “Yes, ma’am.”

“Anyway, they’re part horse and part fish,” Willa explained, “and I was thinking that they might be handy to domesticate for tasks in aquatic environments. I mean, we live right next to the Stillwater. Why aren’t we making use of it as a highway?”

“They might help with fishing, underwater exploration or transport across bodies of water,” I mused.

“Precisely. Now you’re getting it.”

“And the third creature?”

“On one of her exploratory missions, Dayna came across a pillar for muckelavee, Willa said.

“You’ve lost me,” I said. “Well, I’ve never even heard of a… What did you call it?

“A nuckelavee,” Willa said again. “They’re another kind of aquatic monster, I suppose you’d call them. I was thinking that a tamed version might be used for maritime activities, you know? Deep sea exploration and stuff like that.”

“And transportation across bodies of water,” I repeated.

“Precisely.”

I pursed my lips.

“What are you thinking?” Willa asked me. “You’ve got that look in your eye. I can tell that you’re doing some serious thinking, Dev. It looks like it’s hurting.”

“Man, cut me some slack, why don’t you?” I said, laughing once more.

“Don’t tell me you’re on the fence about this.”

“No, I’m not on the fence,” I said slowly.

“Good. Because a man who straddles the fence is usually going to end up with sore balls, you know that, don’t you?”

I laughed again. “You sure do have a way with words, Wil.”

“Damn right.”

“I was just thinking, that if I had to go for any of those, I would probably lean more towards the hippogriff.”

Willa nodded and smiled. “Those were precisely my thoughts. Having aerial creatures is going to be an advantage for us on a number of levels.”

“If you can make this work.”

Willa’s smile faded a little. “Have you got no faith in me, Dev?”

I chuckled. “Don’t try and pull on my heartstrings, Wil. You know that I’ve got all the faith in the world in you. It’s just, well, I mean, we don’t know if this can even be done, do we? I doubt it’s ever been tried before.”

Willa tipped her head onto the side. It was the kind of look that would have melted many a heart. Personally, I had never seen Willa as anything other than a sister. And for her part, she viewed me as simply a brother from another mother, as the saying went.

“We’re in new pioneering times, Dev,” she said.

“I know it.”

“And as such, we’re going to find ourselves doing a great many things that we never thought we’d ever do.”

“I feel like I’m doing things that I never imagined I’d be able to do on the regular.”

Willa snorted. “Ain’t that the truth? My point is that, yeah, no one’s ever tried to do this before, of course, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. We’re going to find a way. Me, Dom, Andrew, Dayna, and Amber. That’s why we were meeting in a little while to discuss these things, to figure out a way that we might be able to do it.”

“Ah. It makes sense now. The whole Occult Engineer, Blood Mage, Necromancer thing.”

“Don’t forget the Artificer,” Willa said, jabbing her chest with her thumb.

“Of course not. Just be careful, though, Wil.”

“I always am,” Willa assured me.

“It’s like what Clint is so often telling us.”

“And what’s that? That Englishman talks a bunch.”

“That’s true, but something he said to me once stuck with me. He said, ‘Genius has its limitations, old bean, but stupidity knows no bounds.’” I stood up and moved towards the door. “I’ve got to get going, Wil. I’m going to do some scouting myself. Have a look at the country. Make sure all is quiet and sanguine.”

“Fair enough. Thanks for listening, Dev.”

“Any time. And for what it’s worth, keep doing what you’re doing, but maybe keep it on the down-low for now.”

“Noted. I’ll tell the others to keep it under their hats so no one freaks out over nothing.”

“Cool.” I opened the door. Sunlight streamed in. The clouds that had been massing across the Montana sky had broken, at least for a while. I sniffed at the air. “Smells like snow soon.”

“Yep,” Willa said. “I’ll see you later, Dev.”

“See you later.”

I walked off across the yard. Now that I was looking for them, I saw Dayna and Amber hanging out by one of the barns. Dominic and Andrew were walking over towards Willa’s workshop. I nodded to them as they approached and they nodded back and smiled, but I didn’t let on that Willa had confided in me.

Everyone needs a project, I thought. It’s good for the brain and good for the soul. It will be interesting to see where this line of inquiry goes.