I
“Go on, then,” Nivlac said.
“I’ve got nowhere else to be.”
The stranger — who introduced himself, after a beat, as Perrin — leaned back against the noticeboard with the easy slouch of someone settling in to tell a story he’d clearly told before, possibly to anyone who’d stand still long enough to listen.
“Judged three days ago,” Perrin said.
“Got ‘Beastspeaker.’ Sounds decent on paper, right?
Talk to animals, form bonds with creatures, maybe ride into battle on the back of something fearsome.”
“Sounds decent,” Nivlac agreed cautiously, already suspecting where this was going.
“Turns out,” Perrin continued, “the local wildlife around here mostly consists of extremely stupid rabbits and one deeply unpleasant species of territorial goose.
I’ve spent three days ‘bonding’ with a goose that — and I want to stress this — actively despises me.”
II
Nivlac found himself laughing before he could stop it — the first genuine laugh he’d managed since waking up in this world, and it came out rustier than he expected, like a door that hadn’t been opened in a while.
“A goose.”
“A goose,” Perrin confirmed grimly.
“Its name, as far as I can tell from several hours of increasingly desperate bonding attempts, translates roughly to ‘the one who bites.’ Very on-brand, honestly.” He rubbed absently at a spot on his forearm that, on closer inspection, did appear to be a fresh, unmistakably beak-shaped bruise.
“The bonding ritual’s supposed to involve some kind of mutual trust exercise.
I tried offering it bread.
It ate the bread, made unblinking eye contact with me for a solid ten seconds, and then attacked my arm anyway — purely, as far as I can tell, out of principle.”
“That sounds less like bonding and more like an extortion payment,” Nivlac said.
“That’s exactly what it is,” Perrin said, with the flat conviction of a man who had made peace with his situation through sheer repetition.
“I’ve accepted it. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
The goose and I have an understanding now.
I feed it, it tolerates my presence for roughly ninety seconds before losing interest, and neither of us pretends this is a friendship.”
“At least you have a bond,” Nivlac offered, gesturing vaguely at the noticeboard behind them.
“I’ve got a notice specifically asking people like me not to apply.”
III
Perrin’s expression shifted into something more sympathetic.
“Light Support?”
“Light Support.”
“Yeah, that one’s rough,” Perrin said, with the particular gentleness of someone acknowledging a worse situation than his own without being condescending about it.
“Saw a guy get that judgment right after mine, actually.
Whole crowd near the temple gate started placing bets on how fast he’d wash out.”
“Comforting,” Nivlac said dryly.
“I didn’t say I bet against him,” Perrin added quickly.
“I don’t actually know the guy — just observed the betting.”
IV
They stood together for a moment in a silence that felt, oddly, companionable rather than awkward — two people who’d each drawn a losing hand, comparing notes on the specific flavor of their bad luck.
“So what’s the move?” Nivlac asked.
“For someone with a class nobody wants?”
Perrin considered this with more seriousness than Nivlac expected.
“Honestly?
I’ve been trying to find an angle nobody else has thought of.
Everyone assumes Beastspeaker means taming some big, impressive mount.
But there’s guild work — scouting, message-running, pest control — that barely anyone wants because it’s unglamorous, and having eyes and ears that can talk to local wildlife turns out to be useful for exactly that kind of work. You are reading on novelping.com, the official source.
I haven’t cracked it yet, but I think there’s something there.”
V
Nivlac turned that over, filing it away alongside everything else he’d absorbed today.
It was, he thought, a genuinely useful piece of advice, delivered without any particular expectation of return — the kind of thing you only got from someone who understood, firsthand, what it felt like to stand in a room full of people who’d already decided your ceiling before you’d taken a single real step toward it.
“Thanks,” he said, and meant it.
“For the goose story.
And the rest of it.”
“Anytime,” Perrin said, pushing off the noticeboard and stretching.
“Misery loves company, and company that isn’t actively trying to bite my ankles is a nice change of pace.”
He nodded toward the counter at the far end of the hall, where the queues had thinned slightly.
“Good luck in there.
If it helps at all — nobody in this town has any idea what any of us are actually capable of yet.
Including us.
That’s probably worth something.”
He wandered off before Nivlac could respond, presumably back toward whatever fresh diplomatic disaster awaited him with his goose.
Nivlac watched him go — noting, with some amusement, that a large, irritable white bird was in fact waiting near the guild’s outer steps, watching Perrin’s approach with what could only be described as premeditated malice — then turned toward the counter himself, Perrin’s parting words settling somewhere useful in his chest.
Nobody knows what we’re capable of yet.
It wasn’t much.
But it was, he decided, enough to start with.