IWUAaDNW: Growth 3.7

“Taylor? Could you get us a minion you won’t miss too much, please?”

I picked an ant. While I needed them to dig, I could spare at least one, and if it turned out I didn’t want them to grab any more of my bugs for themselves, then at least they would have something that would help them build their defenses and infrastructure. The boy made a startled squeak as the ant skittered out of my staircase. I made it stop a few feet from them. A good number of villagers stopped what they were doing to look at the scene.

The boy stared at my ant for a good moment, until his grandmother’s massive hand whapped him behind the head.

“Well, boy? Get working already!”

The boy nodded and frantically pulled the bag open. Inside the bag were… gold coins? He took one and closed both hands around it, just like I’d seen Kamella and Maryll do with the spell crystals, and he said,

“Planet, I ask for your help to control your creation.” And he dropped the coin while reaching for another. The coin fell through the ground like it didn’t exist, creating a short-lived water-like ripple in the dirt, and––

Fwoosh

There was a sound like a gas torch lighting up. A bright white heptagram appeared around the boy’s feet, the same symbol that was represented by Kamella’s necklace. Both his and the old woman’s eyes widened in surprise.

“Drop the coin, boy! Second phase, now!”

He did so, moving both hands so they were aimed at my ant. He took a deep breath and furrowed his brow in concentration. A moment later, his hands started glowing softly, little motes of white-beige light floating up from them. He took another breath, then said,

“Planet, this child of yours begs you to please link this filter’s child to my soul, make us one in spirit and free it from its parent!”

A felt a hackle rise in the back of my mind, the same kind of I-must-stop-this-now pressure that I knew would come up when I was about to make a mistake. My ant’s mind rebelled as well, struggling uselessly against my control. I felt its wish to attack the boy, to try and rip him in half, and its feeling of betrayal when I held it back and allowed him to continue his work. The pressure mounted as he repeated the sentence again, and then a third time, every time pushing more mana from his hands into my ant. A drop of sweat dripped from his forehead to the tip of his nose.

And then…

…I lost control of my ant. The boy’s eyes widened in shock, and he fell to the ground as his legs suddenly gave out from under him. I heard a few people in the crowd make noises of alarm.

My ant approached the fallen boy, even as he tried to scamper away. For a moment, I was afraid the taming had failed and that the ant would go after the boy’s life, but it didn’t. Instead, it tilted its head left and right and moved its antennae to curiously touch the boy’s legs, then chest, then face. Nervously, he reached over and touched it, and the ant, contrary to those I controlled, seemed to revel in the contact, pushing its hard-shelled head against his palm. The boy’s nervousness dissipated, and within moments he was chuckling, then laughing merrily.

The adults stared at Horzel and the ant… his ant, with smiles, grins and, in Ulfric’s case, a lopsided smirk.

“A success, then,” he grunted.

It was. But that had been quite unpleasant. I wasn’t eager to repeat the experience, especially since my minions did not like it. I wasn’t able to feel its emotions anymore, so there was no way for me to tell if its current puppy-like behavior was coming from itself, or if it was some kind of master effect that left the ant’s mind prisoner in its own body.

That was… an unpleasant thought.

“Is something wrong, Thogra?” I heard Kamella ask quietly.

The boy’s grandmother wasn’t smiling. Her grizzled face appeared troubled instead. She looked at Kamella in the eyes.

“Did he do it wrong, somehow?” the village leader pressed.

“No, he did fine,” she replied. Her voice was rougher, almost frog-like when she was trying to be quiet. “The thing is, it took only one coin. Rituals never take only one coin. I expected him to use up most of the bag.”

Kamella frowned. “I… I am not well versed in ritual magic. What does it mean?”

The old woman shrugged. “I don’t really know.”

“Maybe it’s because because Taylor was cooperating?” Kamella suggested. “Maybe she accepted the price immediately?”

Thogra croaked an acknowledgement. “That could be it.”

It wasn’t, and I used a wasp to tell them so. The option of accepting or refusing the ritual hadn’t even come up. From the wording of the first part of the ritual, I had a feeling it wasn’t exactly an option.

Planet, I ask for your help to control your creation, he’d said. ‘Your creation’, in this context, referred to me. So the first part of the ritual was meant to ask the planet to alter the rules of the dungeon system somehow? To let them do things to the dungeon––to me––that they weren’t supposed to be able to? I wasn’t sure I liked that.

Maryll had said, what felt like months ago, that she believed the planet had a plan for me.

The fact that it had only taken one request for the planet to respond seemed to give credence to that theory.

[...]

It was only about an hour later, when I realized I was still seeing Horzel through my ant’s eyes, that I learned the true potential of taming.