Cohost writing prompt: @Making-Up-Adventurers — Beastmaster who is trying to explain to their apprentice that they do not in fact "gotta catch em all"
"Gerda."
"Yes, elder?"
Alfhild Bear-Friend leans on her staff, purses her lips, and stares until her apprentice begins to squirm.
"I'm just feeding the animals, elder," Gerda says, twining her hands together in front of her chest, face reddening.
"What's that in your pocket?" Alfhild doesn't break eye contact; Gerda's voice climbs an octave.
"...Acorns?"
"I never knew acorns wriggled so, or had such ears."
One of Gerda's hands involuntarily flies in front of her bulging, shifting pocket, as if she can somehow stop Alfhild noticing, even now. "It's a rabbit," she says eventually, shamefaced.
"Gerda."
"I know!" Gerda says, then, quieter, "I know, elder. The first rule is to be a friend to beastkind, but that doesn't mean bringing them all home, Gerda. I — I'm sorry, elder."
The girl has potential, but she's no Beastmaster; in the way that someone can spend their whole life infalliably knowing the next change in the weather, spark fire from their bare hands, wright miracles and dooms, and never make any wizard. The way that holding a knife doesn't make a warrior.
Alfhild grips the staff, feels the slowing and aching of her age, and stares at someone lacking the ruthless instrumentality to do more than gather an endless menagerie of woodland friends. A girl whose energy and talent slowly disspates over a motley of disparate creatures — never meant to settle in such a spot, let alone in such proximity to each other — just to keep them all from fretting themselves sick or eating each other.
She could amount to more. She could amount to more than a herder with a particular knack for her herd; that's why Alfhild plucked her out of that.
But it's hard, to look into her shining face and say: take your happy little herd and go home, I'll teach you no more. To say: aye, now make them useful at all? To say: if you can't see any creature and love it and leave it where it is, or let it go again, you're a waste of my time and teaching.
"Gerda," she says wearily, and shakes her head.
"I'm sorry," Gerda says wretchedly, grinding a toe in the dirt, seeing sorrow and only knowing to interpret it as disappointment in her.
Tomorrow, Alfhild tells herself, the latest in a winding brook of days of saying the same. Tomorrow she will say: I can't teach you more, you're not fit for it. Tomorrow: return to your family at the end of the summer. Tomorrow she will bruise Gerda's tenderness, to spare her the hardness she'd need to become more than she is.
Tomorrow.
"What name have you given to this little bastard," she says, grudging and helpless, today.