My father was intimidating.

  All fathers had the potential to be intimidating to their sons. They were physically larger for the entirety of childhood, and as a possible source of punishment, there was a very real disparity at play. Even for a father who never made their child feel physically intimidated, there was an unavoidable psychological intimidation at play between a father and his children as well; the deep-set fear of disappointment or disapproval.

  Though I was still small, I didn’t feel physically threatened thanks to my stats. I had hoped to have a better relationship with my family in this life, but this strange new world and way of living for my new species had thwarted that. Having barely even seen my father, and him already being my third, I wasn’t particularly concerned about his approval from an emotional or psychological aspect either.

  But still, my father was intimidating.

  His four arms bulged with muscle, as did the corresponding twinned pectorals which stretched across his elongated chest. Even more powerful legs were taut with visible striation as he moved—our raw meat diet and his hunting lifestyle didn’t allow for much in the way of fat reserves.

  Maybe it was from time out in the sun, but unlike the orange of my skin and the skin of my siblings and mothers, his was a darker red. That alone would have stood out, but decorating that skin, extending out from the center of his bare chest—where his heart was located—and winding down his arms and legs was a sequence of black characters.

  Tattoos weren’t frightening in and of themselves, as I could vaguely recall them being popular in my youth on Earth. I hadn’t noticed any in Argadia, but there was no stigma against them; they just didn’t seem to have existed.

  These markings seemed more ominous than mere tattoos, though. They felt almost etched into his skin. Paired with his generally violent bearing, intense gaze, enormous tusks, and the bones woven into the long braid that ran down his back, it was hard to not viscerally react to his presence.

  Bar-al Uqami had reached the age where it was time for him to leave the creche, and my father had come for him.

  My half-brother very clearly was concerned with this Uli’s approval, and practically trembled as he stood before him, being appraised.

  I had seen this happen a number of times in the years before. The Uli never rejected any of the boys, so Bar and the others needn’t be so nervous, but I didn’t think it was a logical fear. It was the same instinctual response to the male’s presence that I felt twisting in my gut, even with all my supposed perspective.

  My father only came for the boys. The girls spent longer in the creche, until they had their first estrous cycle. Uli were monestrous, as far as I could tell, and upon coming into their first heat, the girls were taken away and cared for in private by one of their mothers until it ran its course. After that, they left the creche, presumably as a prospective mate for one of the other tribe’s males. I hadn’t seen one such girl from another creche yet join my own mothers as a new mate of my own father, though, so I wasn’t totally sure.

  When I first heard the mothers mention become “Bloodied”, I had thought that it had something to do with that; either the girls going into heat, or maybe the boys claiming one such girl. Over time, through context, I came to realize it was something else entirely, likely to do with the Blood stat. It was something that happened to the boys, unrelated to the girls entirely, and I was pretty sure that was what my father had come to claim Bar for.

  Intense eyes stared down at my trembling half-brother.

  “What’s your name?” he finally asked, his voice a deep, gravelly baritone.

  “B-Bar-al Uqami,” the boy answered.

  “Hmm,” my father grunted. It wasn’t exactly the shining approval Bar had likely hoped for, but it wasn’t disapproval, either, not that I could imagine any cause for that, nor what the consequences of it would be.

  Our sire’s eyes lifted from the boy, and quickly raked over the rest of his children. With that, they would be leaving shortly, based on how I had seen this go in the past; all I had ever seen or heard from this Uli were these few moments as my brothers disappeared to their uncertain futures.

  This time, though, his eyes stopped on me.

  I couldn’t say I was all that surprised. I wasn’t of age yet for the Uli, but it had been enough time that I was able to develop my body more in line with my Brawn stat, which put me ahead in terms of my growth and muscle mass compared to those starting from a base Brawn of 1.

  “This one’s not of age?” my father asked, turning to my mothers.

  “Not for another year, Daru-an Bauq,” Loma-ar Nuiq said, further lending credence to my suspicion that she was my birth mother.

  Daru-an Bauq turned back to me, and Bar scowled slightly at me stealing attention from his graduation. Sorry, Barbar.

  “What’s your name?” he asked me, breaking the usual protocol, as he had already done this for my brother.

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  “Mali-iq Rumi,” I answered.

  Daru looked me over again.

  “Hmm,” my father finally grunted.

  Perhaps it was my imagination, but it seemed like a hum with slightly more approval than Bar’s. My half-brother’s expression told me he felt the same. I mentally apologized to him again.

  The approval shouldn’t have mattered to me. Despite that, I couldn’t help but feel a small sense of unearned pride. Boys and their fathers, I thought with a mental sigh, as Daru turned back to Bar and led him from the yurt.

  As with my other brothers who left before, I never saw Bar again.

  * * *

  The following year passed relatively pleasantly. Now that I was the oldest boy, there were no bullies to contend with—though that actually was a bit of a negative, since I could no longer test out my [Grappling] on deserving foes.

  Instead, I left the younger kids alone to their meals, making me rather popular by comparison.

  With no one to practice my new skill on, I focused entirely on my personal physical training, and testing out the limits of my Uli body.

  Despite all my training as Tovar, there were some things that always eluded me. I never quite managed to succeed at the planche push-up, for one; holding my full weight on my hands while keeping my legs off the ground and doing a push-up always seemed like an impossibility, even when I succeeded at doing a one-handed push-up.

  New appendages meant all sorts of new configurations, though. With four arms, I was able to create a fairly sturdy base for myself. My legs were heavy, but once my back and core muscles were strong enough, keeping them up off the ground while I supported myself with just my arms was doable, and in time, I finally managed the Uli version of a planche push-up. Nadi celebrated my success, as she had with the handstand and even the handstand push-up. That, she thought was even more impressive, since it was only on two arms, but there was no lever to contend with in a handstand, it was just pure shoulder strength.

  I held no expectations of managing a true Uli planche, where I managed to do a push-up on only two of my four arms, but I did experiment with push-up variations using two of my four arms while my feet were on the ground: upper arms only, lower arms only, and alternating arms, crossed both ways.

  The bigger problem was rowing movements, since I had limited access to ledges to pull from. There were no trees I could do a branch pull-up off of, and even if there were, I wasn’t allowed out of the creche.

  Thanks to my good relationship with my siblings, I was able to rope two of the next-eldest boys into my training, and with them standing on either side, I could use their arms to do bodyweight rows, again with both pairs or arms and then alternating crosses. They, in turn, also did some of my training, motivated by my progress and hoping to accomplish similar feats. And, probably, to see similar interest from our largely absent father, when he next appeared.

  In all this time, I didn’t gain a single stat point, only further adapted my new body to my past life’s accomplishments. Had I access to my magic, I could have risked pushing harder and then healing, and maybe might have started to see true gains, which I hoped could come faster in future lives. As it stood, it would likely have to wait until I was a full-grown adult before I advanced my Brawn to 54.

  The year passed in no time at all. Despite having little to do but train, play-wrestle with my brothers, show off for Nadi, and try to pry information from my mothers, I was now operating on a time-scale where a day was an even smaller fraction of my overall existence than my childhood as Tovar. Each day was only one of something like fifty or sixty thousand days, now, and when I did get bored, I simply meditated, making the time pass even more quickly.

  It was almost a surprise to me, then, when I was informed by my mothers that my father would be coming for me, and I was told to say my goodbyes.

  “I’m going to miss you, Malimali” Nadi sobbed, clutching me in a four-armed hug. She would likely still be in the creche for another year, if her development was like the other girls, so I would be the first to go.

  One advantage to being a four armed race was that it made hugs twice as nice. I hugged her back tightly, though cautious not to squeeze her hard enough to hurt her. “I’m going to miss you too, Nadinadi.”

  She pulled back from the hug and sniffled. “You’re strong,” she whispered. “Maybe when I come of age, you can claim me as a mate. Then we can stay together.”

  I stopped myself from immediately recoiling, to spare her feelings. From my limited understanding, it wasn’t common for a male to try and win a creche sibling as a mate, but it wasn’t prohibited either, since odds were they had a different mother, at the very least.

  In theory, I could claim her as a “mate”, and just never breed her. But then, would we even be staying together like she wanted? I saw my mothers in the creche every day but never saw Daru with them; they only seemed to leave to be with him when actively in heat. If I did claim her, then never called on her, it would likely lead to her losing face among any other mates I ended up having. She would come to hate me for that, despite wanting to stay together now, especially if she did want children. As far as I could tell, my mothers were all treated well enough by my father, and so long as that was representative of the other males, there was no reason to deny her a proper future with one of them.

  “We’ll see,” I lied, extricating myself from her grip now that it felt distinctly less comfortable to me. I no doubt shared some kind of blood relationship with most of the tribe, but I had grown up with Nadi, so there was no way I would actually consider it. Perhaps it wasn’t that different from when little girls vowed to marry their fathers, and would be something she would grow out of, but she was already old enough to be taken seriously, saying something like that.

  One of the major lessons I took away from my last life was that, to live my best lives possible, I would sometimes need to do things the way the locals did. Wholesale importing my worldview in each life would lead to a lot of conflict, both internal and external. Had I insisted on only eating cooked meat in this life, for example, I would have already starved to death. When Argadian marriage customs began to affect my life as Tovar, I started to develop a code of conduct for how I allowed myself to act that fit within the local norms without doing anything I considered truly unethical or immoral.

  I owed it to myself and my future worlds to live as best as I could within them, in order to find meaning in and to these lives. Had I firmly rejected the idea of arranging a marriage while young, and Felris had been arranged to marry another noble, I would have missed out on decades of happy marriage, four beautiful children, and scores of grandkids and great-grandkids.

  Whether or not claiming a creche sibling as a mate was acceptable in this tribe or the larger world, what Nadi suggested was certainly far outside said code of conduct. The notion had somewhat soured our goodbye for me. I tried to shake it off as our father entered the creche and stood before me.

  “Mali-iq Rumi,” he said, breaking the usual form. He had remembered my name, whatever that meant for me. “It is time. Come with me.”