“My apologies,” Captain Rayden said, as her anger subsided as suddenly as it had come. “But I have to ask - and please think carefully - the woman you mentioned, was she a Mind Mage?”

No doubt the woman fixing her uniform now had a history with them, and not a good one. But even if I wanted to, and I did, there wasn’t much to say.

“I...I was forbidden to look.”

“I see. Unfortunate. Anything else you can tell me about this...woman? You said she was able to control minds, right? Your personal experience?”

“Yes, and yes. She spoke to me in my mind and...and made me listen to her. She threatened to give me to her daughter as a pet.”

“Well...that certainly fits with the way they operate. The mind mages and that's a broad term - they use the beasts they control, the monsters, and the people to fight for them. Not the fate I would wish on anyone; death is more merciful than being their thrall. If she indeed was one of them, and that’s a conclusion better not to rush. You were lucky not to end up in her hands, Grey.”

Not something I needed to be told. It gave me the creeps just remembering the disgusting voice of that shoelace bitch and her yapping about...

“Oh, that assh...I mean Dungreen, called her Cognizant something.”

My fur bristled anew at Captain Rayden’s rage, but this time, it went no further than the flash in their eyes. “So, Frederic Dungreen works with mind mages - why am I not surprised?”

“I-if...if I may, it’s actually more like he’s working for them. The bitch...the woman, she mentioned that they’re the ones supplying him with materials for his...experiments. And...and they were the ones keeping him safe. Oh, and she also mentioned other alchemists working for them. If it helps any.”

Yeah, I spilled out what I could. After experiencing her anger the second time, whatever was keeping me from opening my mouth snapped. If there was anyone who could bring that deranged asshole to justice, it was her - at least, that’s the vibe I got from the woman.

“Yes, it definitely will. And while no less disturbing, it explains a lot. Like how he managed to disappear from the Imperial hounds a few years ago,” Captain Rayden said more to herself, actually stopping short as her eyes fell back on me. “But it does make me wonder - how come you didn’t end up like that pet you mentioned? Cognizant is a fairly high rank among mind mages. It’s not someone an untrained single array gal like you should be able to put up a fight with.”

‘Shit!’ Here it was, the time to reveal the bloody truth about me.

“Well...she was there alone, no beasts.”

Captain Rayden just smirked at my lame last-ditch attempt to brush it off, to take advantage of what she’d told me about the mind bastards like the bitch. “Even so, you should be her thrall by now.”

‘Shit, shit, shit...shit!’

“Well...you see, what that asshole did to me...made me turn into...into a beast.”

There, I said it - I was a freak, a feral beast in the skin of a human, and not even that. Anyone could see at a glance what a beast I harbored within me. But instead of disgust, her eyes flashed with interest.

This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

“He made you into a shifter?”

To hear someone else say, “He made you,” sounded wrong in so many ways. Yet, whether I liked it or not, it was the painful truth.

“I g-guess so?”

“You’re not sure? I thought you said you turned into a beast?”

“Well, y-yes. I just haven’t met another shifter, so...”

“I see. And what kind of beast did you shift into that you were able to escape from a mind mage of the cognizant’s rank, if I may ask?”

“The dangerous kind she ran away from,” I said a little cheekily with undisguised pride, coming from deep within me, and without really thinking through the possible consequences of my answer. It wasn’t until Captain Rayden stared at me in silence for longer than I would have liked that I realized that she was probably considering just how dangerous of a beast I was turning into, whether she could even let me into the city or if I would be better off locked in a cage.

“Well,” she said, trailing off as if on purpose, making me stress a little longer in anticipation of my sentence. “Call me impressed, Grey. If we weren’t sitting in this room, I’d consider you a liar. Is that how you escaped? In your beast form - run off into the Wilds?”

‘I wish.’ Although it hadn’t turned out so bad so far, the fact that the shitty bug was behind my apparent freedom didn’t sit well with me at all. And while neither did the slight nudge of the room’s runic enchantments in my mind, I didn’t need it prompting me to tell the whole truth when the woman sitting across from me looked like someone could finally tell me what the bloody heck had actually happened to me.

“No. No, I didn’t manage to get out.”

“Care to elaborate? You’re clearly here.”

“When… when I was about to kill that - kill Dungreen in my beast form, he called, I don’t know, this weird bug? It was a little bigger than my fist, but bloody darn powerful. Like...I couldn’t even see its name, just those weird runes. Dungreen told it to kill me, and it did. Next thing I know, I woke up in the middle of that forest.”

“Where Merchant Scoresby found you, correct?”

“Yes.” I nodded, gasping lightly as I blurted it all out in basically one breath.

However, once again, instead of giving me an immediate answer and making sense of what had actually happened to me as I had hoped for, Captain Rayden leaned back in her chair, lost herself in thought, leaving me in suspense. To say it was unnerving would be an understatement. While the talk concerned that deranged asshole and shoelace bitch, she had acted so resolutely, but now when it came to that shitty...

“The bug? Did it talk?”

“Yes. Yes, it did.” I nodded. “It knew the asshole’s name and did a trade with him.”

“Fuck! And the Obscures? How many?”

“The what?” Either [Eleaden Standard Language] failed to translate to me what she said, or the word had some strange meaning in English.

“How many Obscures? The number of the runes you saw on the lattice info on the creature?”

“Oh, six.”

“Just as I feared.” Rayden sighed, rubbing the bridge of her nose. “Not only does Frederic Dungreen seem to be involved with mind mages, but he’s also dealing with the Fae.”

“And Fae is...?”

“A term for a creature like the one you met, Grey. Spirits that have taken physical form - powerful, really powerful buggers. They are very tricky to deal with and usually, you pay more than you bargained for.”

“Oh, okay, get it.”

Captain Rayden leaned closer, her gaze boring into mine, studying me. “That wasn’t the first time you’ve seen the creature - was it, Grey?”

At that instant, I froze like a deer caught in the headlights, unable to take a breath.

‘How the bloody heck did she know?’

Searching my memory, I couldn’t find a single moment that might have given her reason to think so. But much to my distraught, lying was not an option. Just by thinking about it, I evoked the truth-telling enchantment of the room. And so, afraid I might say more than I wanted to by opening my mouth, I merely nodded.

“As I thought. You’re one of the Lost.”