I was twelve the first time I felt mana answer my fear.
The village was already burning when I woke—smoke curling under the door, the sky outside an angry shade of orange. Screams echoed from the far side of the valley, sharp and short. The kind that don't last long because the mouths making them don't either.
I should've stayed hidden. That's what my mother said, before the wall cracked and she shoved me into the cellar beneath the floorboards. Her hands were shaking. Her voice wasn't.
"Don't move. Don't cry. Don't come out. Not for anything."
I didn't.
Not even when I heard her die.
Not even when the beast howled.
Hours passed in darkness. I didn't know how many. Just the sound of crackling wood, the heavy thump of something massive walking through the ruins of my home. And then, silence.
Until he came.
Not the beast—the stranger.
A man cloaked in ragged furs, his body marked in tribal ink and glowing sigils that pulsed like heartbeat. He smelled like smoke and earth and blood. But his eyes… his eyes were calm. Kind.
He crouched near the broken cellar door and held out a hand.
"Are you the one it spared?" he asked.
I didn't speak. Couldn't.
He didn't press.
Instead, he looked toward the edge of the village, where the smoke thickened into a spiral. "It's still here," he murmured. "It's looking for something."
That something, I realized, was me.
The stranger's name was Kael. A rogue tamer—exiled from the Guild for reasons he never shared. He didn't rescue me out of duty. He rescued me because the beast hadn't killed me. And that made me interesting.
He called the creature Emberfang. A fire-class direcat, rare and volatile. Said it was once a guardian spirit of the forest until the Arcanite storms corrupted it. Now it was just rage and ruin in fur and flame.
And it wanted me dead.
"Why?" I asked him, after the first night we camped in the burned-out chapel.
Kael studied me. Then said, "Because it smells the system on you. It knows what you could become."
The next week was training. Brutal, fast, no explanations unless I earned them. He taught me how to move without sound, how to hide mana within my heartbeat, how to draw sigils into the dirt using only my breath and blood.
And every night, I heard Emberfang.
It stalked the forest like a vengeful god—its roars low and sad, like it hated what it had become.
The first time I saw it, I nearly passed out.
It was massive—fur made of smoldering ash and glowing streaks of orange. Its eyes were not red but molten, like veins of lava in the shape of sorrow. It moved like fire given thought.
And it felt me.
Even from the trees, it turned and looked—right into my soul. I should've run. Should've screamed. But something held me there.
Something called to it.
"It's bonded to you," Kael said later, grim-faced. "Not tamed. Not controlled. Bonded. It wants to kill you, but it can't. Not entirely. Part of it still sees what you are. What you could tame."
That was the first time I realized taming wasn't about power—it was about connection. About reaching into something wild and broken and not trying to cage it, but understand it.
"I want to try," I told him.
Kael didn't answer. He just handed me a bone dagger and said, "Then bleed."
The ritual took three nights.
I carved the sigils into my arms, fed them mana with every breath until I felt like my veins were lit with wildfire. I followed Emberfang's path through the ashlands alone, no protection, no blade. Just instinct.
When I finally stood before him, he roared—louder than thunder, hot enough to sear the trees behind me. But I didn't flinch. I just dropped to my knees, pressed my hands into the scorched earth, and offered.
Not dominance.
Not control.
Trust.
And something shifted.
His fire dimmed.
His breath slowed.
He stepped forward and pressed his head to mine.
In that instant, our minds collided—pain, grief, rage, all crashing into my chest like a tidal wave. But beneath it all was something softer. Lonely. Searching.
I let it in.
And Emberfang let me live.
He stayed with me for two years after that. My first bond. My first family, after the flames. We hunted together, trained together, survived together.
And when the Guild came looking—when they tried to cage him, dissect him, control him—he gave his life to protect me.
I still remember his last thought, the echo in the bond as it snapped like breaking bone:
You were never meant to be tamed, little fire.
Only to burn brighter.
I never took another beast for three years.
Not until him.
The Hunter with infinite mana. The boy with another world in his eyes. He doesn't know it yet, but the bond we're forming?
It's the same kind.
Not of control.
But of recognition.
The kind that says: You and I, we don't belong in cages.
And we never will.