She had never been scared of her mother nor feel like she could do harm, but within the moment she felt like she was witnessing a breakdown. Not just any from the buildup of all of the bullying she had endured, but one of so much more anguish and suffering than one could imagine from her body language and crying.
Even the doctor was shocked by her sudden outburst, trying to calm her down as she continued to pry at Isaac, where had he heard that? It was like a light switch went off in her mother's head as she stared at him silently, voice creaking as she turned to Theia, "it was the Duke, wasn't it?" she asked, trying to get up.
Instinctively, Nyx took a step backwards and Isaac tried to pull her down, not like the sudden change of her demeanor. "She's not…" she whispered, fists clenching, "she can't be a beast tamer, right?" she asked, fear rising within her as she yelled for Nyx to give her back, she wouldn't let the Duke touch her too.
The room had a mixture of fear, confusion, weariness, and concern. She had a feeling no matter what, she couldn't allow her mother to hold her in the moment. Tightening her arms around Nyx's neck, she shoved her face into his shoulder as he effortlessly move from the edge of the bed to the middle of the room within a single motion, holding onto her tighter.
It took several minutes to calm her mother down with both the doctor and Isaac, while Nyx tried to listen but console her instead, just squeezing her cheeks and smiling. "I'm sorry, mother." She heard her brother apologize after she drank water, and calmed down but still hiccuping and gripping the sheets tightly.
Her mother wiped her tears, she could see her calming down. "Eins, promise me. Please." She looked straight up at him, pleading with her eyes. Just how severe was this issue, she wondered?
"Please do not let the Duke kill her, too." Upon hearing that, the room was filled with unease again as her brother got the doctor to leave. Kneeling down in front of their mother, he tried to work through her hysteria.
After a few more minutes, his head was in her lap as she began running her fingers through it, apologizing to both him and Nyx for her sudden actions. She couldn't understand the complexity of her mother, enduring everything until her bottled up emotions broke, and then acting as calm as ever within the next five minutes as though she didn't just say her daughter was going to be killed. "This was an event forgotten from history, the massacre of a family for an unknown reason."
Gripping onto his shirt, her mother breathed shakily but continued. "There was once a family a long time ago. This family was unlike other nobility and commoners who feared the ones they called beasts, instead, they would actively raise and tend for them.
The family had a long history of beast tamers within their ancestry. Each generation, the ability to tame even more monstrous beasts emerged, from small animals to large. Their power was relatively unknown within their little village, never seeking any power for their abilities.
Instead the people protected their village with the help of these animals. They helped with farming, protecting, hunting, and more. The village was happy, and so were they. That all changed as one of the villagers had left to the big city, incorporating themselves in the nobility lifestyle. They climbed so high up the ranks even the emperor had heard of them.
They kissed the feet of the emperor, bowing before him as they proposed a suggestion to fix a problem. After the war against a neighboring country, there was much to rebuild, and to replant, the villager suggested the help of the family within his village, the one they called a beast tamer.
Amused by the thought that the person to control wild beasts exist, the emperor went personally, to see it in fact, was. The family refused initially, but they only heard screams of their father as he was taken, never to return in anything but letters. One by one, the family went missing, the emperor visiting as he became greedier for their power and labor.
One day, all that remained was the mother and her child, screaming and pleading to not take her child, the emperor who had gone mad over the years seized them both, burning down both the house and village as a lesson. With the fear of death hanging over every head of each member of the family, they were forced to exert themselves until breaking and eventually succumbing to their own madness.
The emperor forcefully kept them alive and under surveillance, even as their powers began to reject and become weaker in newer generations, until the point they could no longer tame the beasts. They still found themselves capable of playing with them, but they were unable to tame them and ask them for help anymore, nor did they want to.
The next generations stopped caring so much about this family as they grew weaker, but the royal family decided to keep them locked away, never once exposing them to the public eye to not own up to their past actions. They took all the credit of the beast tamers for themselves.
A young girl's grandparent was the last beast tamer who controlled the beasts and tamed them. Afterwards, not a single person remained who could, but the family preferred this. Even if they were trapped in a cage hidden by society, at least they and the animals would no longer be in pain. Unfortunately, peace would not last.
The girl was playing out in the fields with small animals, all by herself. As the animals scattered away, she heard a loud noise from their house and ran in, panting as she had an ominous feeling.
The girl came home only to find them all slaughtered. 'You're free now,' she heard a man say, or rather a child, covered in blood from the tip of his sword to his cheeks, his gaze almost empty. 'There are no more beast tamers, right?' he asked her, walking close and staring down at her.
His glare intimidated her as she shrunk, falling to the floor. 'From this day forth you're the only beast tamer, understand? Dead men don't speak.' He warned, telling her to forget her family's history, and everyone else. Her family only had the ability to befriend animals easily as a beast tamer, not control feral beasts. Her family died naturally, and she was taken in. She was to live the rest of her life as though it had always been like that if she wanted to live.
Later, the girl turned into a woman and married the man, and had her first son. Like they predicted, the son did not inherit any beast taming capabilities to her relief. Then the woman gave birth to her daughter. Not just one that was suspected to have a passive ability to befriend animals, but one the very man who slaughtered her family to call a true beast tamer."