The Almighty Dominance (by Sunshine) novel Chapter 711

Alex looked at the fox, then at the old woman's face, and understood — with real irritation — that he'd already lost.

The fox wasn't dying. That would've been simpler. A dying thing he could argue himself out of.

This one was just old: one back leg curled wrong from a break that had healed badly years ago, wheezing thin and soft, like a bellows with the leather gone.

"Please." The old woman's nerve had run out on the first try. Her voice dropped to almost nothing. "He's all the company I've got left."

Behind her, Monica wasn't even trying to hide her smile.

Alex exhaled through his nose. "Inside. Not out here where the whole street can watch."

He worked fast. No ceremony this time, no long search for the heart by feel — he knew where it sat on this body now.

Three needles. A thin thread of inner force, in and gone again inside a minute, just enough to unknot old scar tissue and settle the lungs. The fox jolted awake, blinked up at him with wet black eyes, and immediately tried to bite his thumb off on principle.

"There." Alex pulled his hand back before it connected. "He'll outlive you now. Congratulations."

The old woman started crying before he finished the sentence.

She tried to press coins into his hand — not many, from the weight of them, probably everything she owned. He closed her fingers back around the purse.

"Keep it." His eyes cut to Monica, who'd gone very still, watching him build a policy in real time. "If you hear anything —anyone who's crossed the Feral Line and come back to talk about it — bring me that instead. That's the price."

The old woman blinked at him like he'd asked for the moon. She agreed to something she didn't understand and left with the fox tucked in her coat, already asleep.

Monica waited for the door to shut. "So we're a charity now."

"I'm not a healer. I told you that."

She didn't put it on the sign. Didn't need to. Willowmere ran on gossip the way better neighborhoods ran on credit, and within a week the whole arrangement had spread without either of them saying a word:

the new man at the Reagent branch would look at your beast — if all you had to offer him was a story. About the roads. The Line. The places past it nobody official liked to name.

He never asked twice. Never explained why he wanted to know. People decided — the way people always decide what makes them comfortable — that he was simply eccentric.

A driver told him about the three checkpoints on the eastern trade road, and what each one searched for.

A retired trapper — missing two fingers to something he wouldn't name — sketched him a rough map of where the Feral Line bent closest to town before curving away again.

A boy no older than twelve, whose lizard had swallowed a fishhook, told him — trying to sound older than he was — that his uncle used to run goods past the marker stones. Until one year he stopped coming home for dinner. And never started again.

None of it was a map. Not on its own. Together, slowly, it was starting to look like the edge of one.

The shop slid into an easy rhythm. Monica finally put her beautiful niece on the counter for good — wages agreed with a handshake, never written down.

When the news started turning ugly — the same story looping on the radio like a stuck record — Monica stepped into the role of manager without anyone naming her to it. She told Yolanda to post the healing f*e.

Alex looked at the number. "Double it."

Monica went still. "Set it that high and no one comes."

"That's the point."

He walked back to his room, where a small shelf held everything he owned about the history of the Dominion of Beasts — and grew, book by book, every time he passed a shop that sold one.

The Cinder hound — still unnamed, answering to nothing more than a low whistle — took up permanent post by the door. It did more for foot traffic than any sign ever could.

Shelves filled in slow: wards and tonics bought cheap, marked fair. Nobody in Willowmere trusted fast money. They trusted a man who was still there in the morning.

Two weeks in, the shelves were bare enough that Monica finally said what she'd been holding back since day one. "We need supply. Real supply — not what I can barter off the noodle cart. There's a trading floor two streets over. Everyone who deals feed, wards, creature goods comes through it eventually."

The floor turned out to be a covered market built into the shell of an old grain hall — loud with barking and chittering, thick with a hundred kinds of feed fighting for the same air. Monica cut through the crowd like she still owned the block.

Alex followed, cataloguing exits out of old habit. Watching her move through a place like she'd built it, he almost said something. He didn't.

She led him to a stall buried under hanging charms, dried herbs, and — inexplicably — a full rack of knitted sweaters sized for something with four legs and a long tail.

Then a staff member came running, straight at Alex, ignoring everyone else in line.

"Sir. The guardian wants to speak with you."

"What?" The whole line went silent. Nobody talked to the guardian beast. Ever.

"Please," the staffer said. "Follow me."

Monica moved to follow. A second staffer stepped into her path. "Only him."

They led him into a single room that went utterly silent the second the door closed.

A curtain of cloth hung between him and whatever waited on the other side — and even through it, Alex could feel what stood there. Old. Older than old. Something between a wolf and a fox, and neither.

Its voice, when it came, was heavy. An animal's voice that had learned, a long time ago, to sound like a man's.

"Royal blood." A slow inhale. "Five hundred years since I last caught that scent. What are you doing here."

“Tell me way to the Empire.” Alex asked.

"Ahh." The beast made a sound that might have been a laugh, might have been a cough. "The royal blood wants to go home. No wonder." It coughed again, wet and old. "You will find no way to the Empire."

"What do you mean?"

"Only a legendary beast can carry you there. That is the only way there has ever been." Another cough. "And in five hundred years, there has been no legendary beast. Except me. I can take you to the Empire — but it will be my last journey."

Alex went still. He understood now — this thing had called him here for a reason. "What do you want."

"Smart." Something in the beast's voice sharpened, almost pleased. A medal shot out from behind the curtain and landed in Alex's palm before he'd even moved to catch it.

"I heard you treat my kin. Inside that medal is a way to learn the skills of every beast there is. Fill it. A thousand skills, mastered to perfection — and I will carry you to the Empire myself. That is the only road you have left."