Page 53 of Monster's Pet

She laughs. “Oh, don’t exaggerate. You’re still hurt all over. You must be struggling, at least a little.”

Of course I am. I can’t remember the last time I’ve been hurt this bad. But also, I want her to know that it doesn’t bother me that my body hurts. Because we won.

And we did it together.

“You’d be surprised by how quickly I can heal. Once, I lost almost half an arm to a mouth that I thought was a cave. Barely a week and it grew all the way back.”

“Well, prepare to be surprised by how much I can worry,” she says and sits down on the bed. “This is something I learned to make when I was young. It stings at first, but it will make you feel better.”

She picks up a cloth and dips it into the liquid she’s prepared. She then undoes one of the bandages and presses the wet cloth against the wound.

I wince. “You weren’t kidding about it hurting at first.”

“I know, I know, but come on! You’re not going to fight an entire elf navy and then be scared of a little sting.”

“No,” I tell her. “I’m not.”

I don’t know if her medicine will help me or not. I’m very different from a human. But I like her applying it to me. I like being cared for by her, almost as much as I like caring for her. If she tells me that it will help, I’m willing to listen.

She bandages the wound back up and moves to the next one.

“It’s to do with this temple, isn’t it?” she asks suddenly. She’s trying to sound casual, but it’s clearly a question she’s been thinking about.

“What do you mean?” I ask.

“I mean, how quickly you heal. It has to do with the temple doesn’t it?” She undoes another bandage and dips the cloth in the ointment. “That’s why I brought you in here when you collapsed. I thought that the temple would help you heal somehow. And it does, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” I admit. “I’ve lived here for as long as I can remember. Probably there’s a connection between us, but I don’t know if it helps me heal or not.”

It sounds plausible though, somehow. There is something about the temple that goes beyond simply familiar. It’s friendly to me. I return to it any time I get hurt or something happens, just by instinct. I don’t know what most of my instincts mean. Maybe I don’t have to.

“Is there any particular reason you ask?” I say as she reapplies the bandage.

“I think the temple helped me when I was fighting the elves who managed to force their way into it,” she answers. “I don’t know exactly what that means. I wondered if you did.”

I shake my head. “I don’t know what this temple is, or who it’s for, if anyone. You’re right that there’s a force here, but it’s an old force. An ocean force. One thing I’ve sometimes wondered…”

I trail off. It’s the kind of thought I haven’t shared with anyone. Not that I’ve had anyone to share it with before.

“What is it?” she asks.

But now I do have someone to share these things with. I have her.

“I’ve wondered sometimes if I was born the creature that I am now, or if it was the temple that found me and turned me into what I am. If it made me into a guardian, and if, without it, I might be less… alone.”

She looks up from my wound and into my eyes. “Well, you’re not alone now.”

“No,” I admit. “I’m not.”

There’s a pause. It’s all funny in a way. I never would have imagined that the one I would find to be a companion for me would be a human. Until we met, she didn’t even breathe water like me. And yet, here we are. And she’s absolutely right. I don’t feel alone, not even a little.

“You said you fought elves in the temple,” I say suddenly. “Is that true?”

She shrugs. “Just about five of them who managed to swim past you. It certainly wasn’t the kind of big battle that you were fighting.”

I look at the bandage she’s wrapped around her ribs. “Was it one of them who gave you that?”

“He… kinda snuck up on me.”

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