Hallvar was left unable to move for around half an hour before the darkness started to change.

In those moments, their mind wandered.

Ilyna was right that they did have interesting features that people seemed to flock to, physically and emotionally.

The beastshaper appearance was intriguing, albeit scary for cultures with existing superstitions and folk beliefs.

In their old world, there was some group roleplay thing – maybe a board game, the kind you play on a tabletop – where the normal social interactions weren't just dictated by charisma or prettiness or glamour or whatever.

Instead, it used intimidation or ruggedness or other visual cues that weren't just supermodel hot.

Hallvar wasn't supermodel hot, unless the model was for reconstructive facial surgery, but the viking/pirate thing wasn't wrong! They had a scary charm about them.

One might even romanticize the vaguely dangerous yet teddy bear persona Hallvar was slowly building! They hoped Stella would…

The hero found themselves stuck on a phrase that Ilyna mentioned. Enduring happily. Or per-sever-ing happily. Persever– You know, enduring worked for a little, internal conversation.

Did it just mean they were capable of taking emotional and physical damage? Or did the endurance attribute affect enduring, as in lifespan?

Could Hallvar maybe live longer if they increased their endurance? Or their constitution?

They didn't want to live forever, only to live with Stella for as long as it was possible. They wanted to do interesting work and live a happy, peaceful life with their family.

(The pressure at their eye socket began, an insistent poke like a fingernail dug into skin.)

Apparently, the expected vision was a full dream-like experience. They were predicting an altered state, like lights behind their eyelid, or other sensory input but not… this.

The sound of distant ocean waves was a hushed shimmer in the background, drowning out the thoughts of Stella and the inevitability of time.

Just as they were lying on the padded frame, Hallvar found themselves lying in the water. They didn't have to move to see, their eye half-submerged as they looked over reeds and tall grasses embedded in the sandbars of the salt marsh.

Hallvar waited for the vision to change, to shift, to do anything that would make it enlightening and meaningful, but…

Did… did Hallvar ask for peace and… get it?

The sun was shining bright and warm and hot. The water was cool, waves lapping at their sides. There was a contented feeling that made it hard to move, hard to even want to move.

Was that the paralysis or the vision?

Their body felt weird, like they were stomach down, but their head was comfortably upright. Were they the kjerrborn, sunning and relaxing in the water?

It didn't feel like the kjerrborn. No tusk in their periphery.

What was this?

Maybe it was a suggestion for their final form. The magic one. That could be it.

There was no rush to find the answer, not with the sun and the breeze rolling over the marsh.

The languidity and half-submerged eye suggested reptilian. The… what was it called? The korekun? The crocodile dog? Hallvar seemed to be far too large to be a dog-sized creature, though.

Some kind of crocodilian, perhaps? If giant, sharp-toothed salamanders existed, then certainly a larger crocodile beast could be found somewhere.

Wasn't… weren't the eastern countries known for having swamplands? Or marshes? Could there be a magical crocodilian somewhere out there?

(The pressure in their eye socket shifted. There was a sharp twitch of light as a nerve fiber was stimulated.)

Hallvar blinked.

The blue sky was suddenly full of the white outlines of pop-up windows, system notices replacing the drifting clouds.

what will you do to live?

will you grow stronger? will you get faster?

how much magic can you hold?

what is the capacity of flesh and bones?

is it enough? it can be more. you can be more.

who will you bow to? who will bow to you?

WHAT WILL YOU BECOME?

Another blink, languid despite the fervor of the messages.

Every notice was the same now.

what will you become?

The beast-Hallvar ignored the notices. What did that matter when there was basking to be done?

After more uninterrupted time in the sun, they grasped the sandy inlet and pulled their body toward the ocean.

They couldn't see any parts, no hands, no feet. Nothing to notice, nothing to hint at what this beast could be.

But they labored away toward the ocean, rivulets of water pouring off of the beast's back as it flopped onto the shoreline, crawling gratefully into the vast water.

Where it disappeared under the surface.

Hallvar awoke with a jolt, the vision-beast's dive under the waves triggering a startle reflex in the human.

There was a furry butt in their sightline, curled up on their chest but now staring with his one-eyed, pathetic gaze at the hero. Kamin darted away as soon as he was observed, lest he be caught and tamed.

Across Hallvar's vision was a notice. Their eyes flicked rapidly across it, trying to process the information.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

SYSTEM QUEST unique draconic event access

to complete: - attribute: strength 18 - attribute: agility 15 - magic capacity increase - subclass mastery: beastchanger (magic form) - gain draconic acknowledgment (3 / 4) - gain unicorn acknowledgment (primary glad of amnasin) - introductions (determined by quality not quality) - travel (1 / 6)

Subtle. But they didn't have time for system games.

There was a new feeling in their body, lingering somewhere between their heartbeat and their hindbrain. Not adrenaline, not caffeine, but close.

It was the pounding, frustrating drive to move, to do, to be productive when your body wouldn't cooperate.

It was a sense that Hallvar was missing out, that they needed to listen closer and look harder and just pay attention.

Ah, yes, the repercussions of their choices.

Hallvar snapped to attention when they heard a huff nearby. Queenie, snoring; Pipkin, nestled in her fur.

The hero was sitting on the bed in the greenhouse, clearly brought here after the surgery.

The bed was massive, so it was not too strange that Ilyna lie on the other end of the mattress, a book open under her hand as she watched the beastmaster come to terms with reality.

"How do you fe–"

"Sharp," Hallvar answered quickly, honestly. They winced and apologized. "Sorry, I reacted faster than–"

Ilyna held up a hand to stop the groveling. "I usually send patients to their homes to recover before they wake, but I am aware of the effects of the tea."

The hero hated how this felt. It felt like mania or paranoia that led them to observe every small detail in a second's time, as if they were a main character from one of those genius detective tv shows.

Now, Hallvar had no option but to look at Ilyna, whereas before they were avoiding any unnecessary gazing.

She had long blond hair, curly and shiny, that reached her hips. It was loosely braided in places to help keep it from tangling in bodily crevices as Ilyna was still, in fact, nude.

However, she was less nude than Hallvar initially thought. The scales they noted before were the visible ones, like armor. There was a litany of transparent glass-scales covering almost her entire body, flexible like snakeskin.

On her sternum, between her breasts, was an oval shaped gemstone, like a cabochon made of the same glass scale material. It caught the light, flickering like opal in a rainbow of colors.

Her horns were the same material as the stone – three horns, one short one near the center of her forehead, two more near her temples.

Fates, this only illustrated how bewildering sex still was to the hero. One set of nice tits and they missed noticing horns on the woman's head.

"Hallvar, are you able to focus?"

"I hear you, if that's what you're asking."

There were a few birds in the greenhouse. Hallvar could hear them too, over the sound of the kjerrborn snoring.

"You have stitches near your scar; do not heal the injury with magic."

They gingerly touched their eye with the back of a knuckle, trying to avoid catching their talon on the stitches. Several. Three. Tight thread.

"Look at your attributes, what is next to awareness?"

Hallvar's eye shifted as they checked the number on the display. Wait…

"25? How? It was 15."

Ilyna interrupted before the hero started hyperventilating.

"The tea is traditionally used as an enhancement before research or tasks that require focus. The awareness attribute is modified by your luck, which means you have a luck of… 7?"

It was the dragon's turn to be stunned. Rodu said Hallvar was lucky, not guided by the fates themselves.

"My [unique skill] causes permanent luck increases," the hero said impatiently. "Tell me about the quest. I need to move."

It was a weird mania. They needed to get going. Maybe activity would make them sweat the drug out faster. Or process it internally faster. Just… anything was better than sitting here and waiting.

Ilyna was not offended. She wanted this quest done as soon as possible, so Hallvar's urge to get going was a benefit.

"The foal is on the other side of your kjerrborn. He seemed to find her presence comforting."

Hallvar stood and wobbled. They caught their balance before they slipped on the tiles – stone, modeled after the surrounding ground – and hurt themselves again.

The disorientation faded after a few steps as Hallvar rounded the four-poster bed with its flowing curtains that looked like one of those vacation beds on a private dock in a tropical island resort.

Shit, Stella had an awareness 18. And Viktor was at 30. No wonder he was such a bitch all the time if he had to cope with constant information being fed into his brain.

Queenie. Her baby spots were almost completely gone, faded under the grey adult coat that grew in for the winter.

And the foal, it was—

It was foal. Ahem. It was a foal.

Not a fawn. It was a small, baby horse that was a patchwork of white and brown splotches. A gangly, long-legged beast with a scarred hind leg. The marks looked like damage from a trap, the kind Guillaume had bought the day of hir death.

And the foal had a singular, tiny bud of a horn at the base of his forelock.

To Hallvar's credit, they didn't lose it. The hero had no mental, physical, or emotional bandwidth to lose their mind over this new revelation.

"Unicorn," was the response.

Not measured, nor whispered or stunned. Just the plain statement of someone who was thinking 'this might as well happen to me today.'

"Good, it worked."

Hallvar slowly turned to look at the dragon. They only had one eye with which to cast a judgmental gaze, but they channeled as much exasperated energy into the look as they could.

The dragon didn't have the courtesy to look placated.

"Unicorns are the most magical and therefore the most hunted beast in Aestrux. They have ways to prevent humans from noticing their presence. Until you broke the illusion on your own, there was nothing I could have done to convince you that the 'fawn' was a unicorn."

She gestured to the sleeping beasts. "I could have held your hand and forced you to feel that the foal had a singular hoof and not a split hoof like a deer. I could have made you touch the horn itself. You would not have been able to understand that the beast was anything but a fawn."

Hallvar looked over the foal once more. There was a reddish undercoat to the white spots. He had the thickest eyelashes and a tiny white splash on his otherwise brown nose.

Extra hair around the hooves, weren't those called feathers? And the tail was… whippy. Long and tufted at the end, almost like a lion's tail rather than a normal horse.

"Why?" the hero asked for the second time that day.

Ilyna chuckled but this time she sounded legitimately nervous, maybe even scared. "Do you not know?"

A moment of silence was the answer. Hallvar chose to grab Pipkin off of her kjerrborn bed, giving the soft little akergryph scratchies to distract from the existential dread that was creeping in.

Ilyna took the hint.

"Currently, dragons and unicorns aren't enemies, but they can be. They used to be. We are careful to maintain distinct boundaries between our land claims so that no dragon encroaches on known unicorn land."

Amnasín, right. The unicorn kingdom.

"A single unicorn is as much of a threat to a dragon as a human assassin is. Not likely to succeed, but capable of harm when advantages align. A group of unicorns, coordinated and armed with magic, can readily overwhelm a dragon, especially a cornered one."

It was hard to imagine, but Hallvar took Ilyna's word for it. Dragons had to sleep sometime, and unicorns were small and nimble in comparison.

"The issue is that… dragons used to eat unicorns. If I am caught harboring a unicorn foal, there will be many questions. If they find out that the foal's guardian is dead, all they will learn is that I cremated the remains even though I did not kill the beast."

Ah, so Ilyna couldn't deliver the foal home herself, as it would appear that she killed a unicorn then kidnapped the child. She couldn't ask for help from a local, since humans were known to hunt unicorns as well.

So, why me? Hallvar asked for the hundredth time this year.

They thought back on what Ilyna said before the surgery.

The beastmaster was willing to do hard things. To take on tasks that others couldn't.

They were kind despite being hurt again and again.

And, even if the tea made them feel on edge and impatient, Hallvar did want to help the unicorn.

It was a baby, a child. It was innocent in all of this.

"Where do I–" Hallvar began, but the question died before it could be asked.

Their heightened awareness did provide extraneous information. It could provide useful information sometimes.

The weird, magical deer. Of course.

Of course, the fucking deer that healed Hallvar's eye were unicorns. It was in Amnasín. It was an isolated place that Guillaume couldn't find, despite Hallvar staying there for days.

"Fucking fates, where was it?" the hero muttered, pulling up a map in the system.

Hallvar ran through information as quickly as possible, internally pinning up strings to a corkboard of loosely connected ideas.

In Amnasín, at least two days kjerrborn travel past the stream near Kiran's cabin. Before the desert in the Qhai Republic. They were feverish so add another day.

It was a three-to-four-day carriage ride from the capital to that city on the border, Khenok. On roads, not strictly through wilderness.

With some fucked up Pythagorean theorem math and measuring how far away the Staargraven was in their memory of the skyline, Hallvar had a rough, rough guess of where the unicorns were.

It was at least a day's walking time in diameter, but it would be an okay place to start.

And it was important to remember that kjerrborn-Hallvar could recall scents and hunt them from miles away. They had a baby unicorn to sniff for a lead; the glade had to smell similar.

"Yeah, I'll do it," Hallvar groaned as they rubbed the butt of their palm against their eye.

Did they have a choice?

The system's cryptic words flashed across their memory.

what will you do to live?

Deliver a damn unicorn across three kingdoms, probably.

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