Page 47 of His Human Believer

“Answered,” I repeat. “It has a language.”

The crowd starts animately talking amongst themselves.

I raise my voice to bring them back to order and declare the most important part. “I formally withdraw the central conclusion of Fireside Predators of the Southern Continent, of The Hidden One: A Taxonomy of Regional Variance, and of Absence as Evidence. Every methodological finding in those works stands. The catalogue of variants stands. The analysis of transmission stands.” I keep my voice level. “The conclusion does not. The conclusion was that no such animal exists, which was incorrect and I am correcting it on the record this morning.”

Nobody says anything for a moment.

Then a Fellow near the front — an old female marine biologist, one of the ones who has been here longer than I have — says, not unkindly, “Dr. Coalstone. This must be difficult for you to admit.”

“It is not difficult. It is correct.” I look at the room. “I was wrong. The evidence shows that I was wrong and I am proud to say I follow the evidence, no matter where it leads.” I put my claws on the rail. “I would considerably rather be a male who was wrong, than a male who was living in denial and not able to see the truth.”

Most of the assembled are nodding their heads in agreement.

“And now that I have concluded that this legend does in fact have an actual animal, never before documented, what are we going to do about it?”

I have their attention.

“In four hundred years of accounts of this animal — every regional variant, every fire-warden’s report, every transcription of oral tradition in the restricted collection, and I have read all of them — it has never taken a child. Even though there is a tradition amongst parents and grandparents to tell their children stories of the Skyggjar who will come for them at first flame, this is not true in real life. There is not a single documented instance in four centuries of a Skyggjar harming a Hyrrokin offspring, and I can cite every account that says otherwise and demonstrate to you that not one of them survives examination.”

“Last night it came into a clearing in which a fourteen-year-old male was being held at weapon-point by an armed offworlder. And it placed its own body between that child and the weapon, and when the child attempted to step out from behind it, it moved him back with one hand and stood over him again. It would not leave him. The offspring was ordering it to go. It would not leave him.”

“The folklore is correct that the animal is drawn to the first flames of the young. It is correct that it appears at alignment. It is correct about the eyes, which I have been dismissing as ornamentation and which are the single most reliable detail in the entire corpus.”

“But it is wrong about the intent.”

“We have told our offspring that a thing comes out of the dark for them. It does not. It comes to them and it stands over them, and it has been doing so for as long as we have been recording it, and every grandmother on this continent who has ever frightened a child with that story was describing a guardian species and did not know it.”

“I would like the harm of that error entered into the record as well.”

Because this is why I came. This is why I have spent sixteen years in a department this Academy invented to be rid of me.

“Three beings, in my career, walked into preserves at night carrying weapons because they believed something was coming for their offspring. None of them came out. I attended two of those inquiries. One landowner in the southern district destroyed a fire beast on his own land. A protected animal. An endangered animal. He was entirely certain of what he had seen, and he wept at the hearing, and the fire beast is still dead.”

“There are households in this region where offspring are not permitted outdoors during an alignment. A youngling comes into her first flame — which is the proudest diurnal of her small life — and some being tells her it makes her prey. A story that is not true still kills,” I say. “I have spent sixteen years attempting to retire this one. This is why I took the vow of Celibacy, to help retire this harmful legend. But I was attempting to retire the wrong half of it.”

“Which brings me to the urgency.”

I put the exchange listing on the chamber display.

Nine million credits. Open for eleven years. A mounted specimen, intact.

“As of the fourth hour this morning, that listing is fulfillable.”

The room changes temperature.

“There is a Gravian male in Molten Lava custody who spent two years assembling legitimate credentials and a sponsored research visa in order to be standing in that preserve during alignment. He placed a capture rig over a period of weeks. He abducted a Hyrrokin offspring to use as a lure and he shot a guardian animal at three meters to do it. He told me himself, while he was being restrained, that he is not the only one. That he is only the first.”

“I am asking this council for three things. The sighting entered today, with all forty witness statements attached and my full instrument record. An emergency protected-species listing, sought through Sir Bane Ashmoor’s office, today, before the close of business. And a public statement from the Royal Academy today, describing what this animal is and what it is not — because the version of this story that reaches the public without one gets an offspring hurt inside a month.”

I step back from the rail.

“That is my report.”

Bane Ashmoor stands up before anyone else moves.

He has never made a speech in his life; he is the least theatrical being I have ever known and it is possibly the reason I like him.

“I have known this scholar since we were both nineteen years old,” he reminds our peers. “I have reviewed his work for twenty years, frequently unfavorably, and I have never once known him to publish a finding he could not defend, or to withhold one that embarrassed him.”