In this new world, so mysterious and full of magic, there were many continents inhabited by wonderful and deadly creatures. Some had built pretty houses in the forest, others dwelt on the bottom of the depths. Still others had taken refuge on a green and lush continent, full of wonders, fruits and legendary artifacts.

And exactly on this continent a human had suddenly arrived.

He could have landed in soft prairies crossed by herds of cows, or in clear oases full of fruit; instead, he found himself at the bottom of a cave, whose only escape route was an opening in the ceiling, as if someone had pierced a mountain on a whim. In fact, it was more like a kind of crater with a large opening at the top. The sun's rays came in like little intruders, on tiptoe, trying to throw some of their warmth inside.

The walls were rough, providing numerous handholds, but they were so steep that they were almost impossible to climb. And all around the perimeter a very luxuriant vegetation proliferated, with leaves that tended to rot, but with branches loaded with gnarled nut-like fruits.

How they could grow on the rock was a mystery.

Tall, cyclopic columns rose from the floor and reached some points of the sloping ceiling; they were smooth, dripping with a slight condensation, which made droplets of water flow elegantly along their entire length.

The stone in which the cave was dug was dark, completely black, and gave off bluish and purplish shades; for some strange reason, however, instead of swallowing the light as it would be expected, it reflected it in a gloomy but fascinating way.

In a corner of the cave a corridor opened, illuminated for a few meters by the light that entered through the hole in the ceiling. It was not possible to see further.

Octavian - this was the name of the man who had appeared into the cave - had limited himself to superficially observing what was around him.

He had only worried about three things: first, what to drink; second, what to eat; third, where to sleep.

In the cave he had found a sort of trickle of water that came from the still unexplored corridor and ended on the opposite wall, sinking into an underground passage. But somewhere in his brain an alarm bell had sounded, and he had wondered if it was drinkable.

[Disease Resistance - Minor] was a skill he had acquired through his class, [Survivor]. He had acquired it after drinking a lot of rainwater, which had accumulated in the centre of the cave, in a natural basin.

Octavian supposed that his immune system could help him a little: he had gone through several trips to Africa and South America, which had left him with rather unpleasant memories, unfortunately. His lungs still remembered those times very well ...

Around the basin of water grew a small cushion of moss, which was hit directly by the sun. Part of it was edible, so it was rightfully included in Octavian's survival reserve; the other, on the other hand, served as a bed for the many hours of rest he indulged in.

Octavian was not an energetic person: he was always sleepy and had never arrived on time at school. He was such a lazy person that he had developed the ability to do things faster than others in order to have a chance to rest sooner.

But at that moment he was devoting himself to study. He was seated at a black stone desk, which was directly under the trees, sitting on a sort of stool, a square block made of the same material as the desk.

Octavian with one hand put the greyish musk mixed with nuts and bitter roots into his mouth. With the other, he took a large leather-bound tome, engraved with gilded lettering. No, Octavian realised, not gilded. Made of pure gold.

The man had been in there for about a month and had spent most of his time deciphering, with little success, the writing inside various large tomes he had found in the cave, some diagrams engraved on the walls and the inscriptions on some parts of the floor.

The place he had ended up in was visibly different from the world Octavian had come from. It had been easy to understand when he heard the first notifications ringing in his head. First [Survivor], then [Scholar - Level 14] - yes, there were levels, too, in this world.

It was hard to understand even one word from those books. However, one word at a time, Octavian had found out a sort of vision formed in his head. It was as if there was a text that he could see and not see at the same time, over and superimposed on the runes. Slowly, the words had also taken the shape of the text itself, replacing the runes. This happened thanks to one of the oddities of this world.

Skills.

[Intuitive Understanding]

He used the ability, already at level 10, which allowed him to grasp the links between the words he saw and their meaning in Latin. Or rather, the runes seemed to have a natural translation into the language of the ancient Romans. [Intuitive Understanding] allowed him to explore that link more quickly.

Despite the supernatural aids of this world, reading remained cumbersome. He had gone through the tomes looking for a key to get out of what had now become his home. For a week he had looked at characters that were incomprehensible to him, before earning his [Scholar] class.

He had discovered the link between Latin and the runes almost by accident: exhausted, he had thought that maybe his classical education would finally come in handy. It was not despair, but just weariness; his head was so full of those strange symbols that his unconscious had forced him to throw himself into the arms of something more familiar.

Well, the most impressive thing was that part of his brain had managed to reconstruct some sort of syntactic structure between those strange symbols, like a spider's web. Then, as if by magic, the alphabet he already knew was superimposed on some runes, translating them into Latin. Octavian still didn't understand how it happened. He'd only been speculating, but he must have had some kind of weird machine translation mechanism in his head.

He had been able to understand some of what he had been reading for less than a few days - almost a full month after his arrival.

His arrival… where?

He didn’t know.

He had gone to sleep and woke up in a cave.

Some would have been terrified, lost.

Instead, Octavian had calmly accepted his fate, as he had done all his life. He would certainly not have begun to react disproportionately now.

Whether this "new" life was real or not was not important. All he needed to do was stay alive, drink and eat. A couple of hard-to-read books wouldn't spoil his otherwise pleasant stay.

Being alone was what Octavian had desired for an incalculable amount of time. Now that he had the chance to do so, he hoped at least that his vacation in an unknown world would not cost him his life.

The pages he read, as far as he could understand, told him about potentially deadly experiments, frightening beasts and magical feats. There was a lot of information to be found in the pages and, who knows, maybe even outside the cave.

Surely it could not be said about him that he had not faced dangerous experiences. He had worked for Doctors Without Borders, he had helped populations abandoned by every God and handed over to terrorists. He had definitely taken big risks. He could remember at least three times he had come close to losing his life. He also remembered the sensations he had felt when a machine gun was pointed at his back. A shiver of euphoria ran through his body.

He took a deep breath and tried to focus on the book again.

The funniest thing, he thought, placing the book again on the large stone table in front of him, was that he had never studied so hard in his entire life. [Scholar]? None of the few people who knew him well would take him seriously. If there was one thing he never got along with, it was deadlines, exams and all that stuff.

In fact, he had failed twice in a row in high school. His parents had been furious, but they had made a round of calls and, magically, his grades had been adjusted to mere Ds in no time. His parents were such influential people in Manchester that they made his prestigious private school change what they needed.

In the cave, however, he could concentrate, but only because he literally had nothing else to do.

The dark corridor, he had decided, did not interest him. When he tried to approach it, luminescent, neon-like crystals had faintly lit up; they were very few, most of them shattered and scattered on the floor.

This meant that the activity that would occupy him most of the time was impossible.

The second thing Octavian could have done to pass the time was try to climb the wall. He wasn't sure he had a very good perception of distances, but at the moment he must have been more than a hundred meters underground, no, maybe more like two hundred than a hundred, or something in the middle.

Climbing that rock face would have been the equivalent of climbing a skyscraper with his bare hands. Octavian thought he wouldn’t be capable of such a feat.

He had played many strategic video games: he knew there were options other than trying to become a [Climber]; not all of them were obvious to an idiot. Climbing would make him level up. Still, the levels went up together with the difficulty and the risk. But if he didn't understand a book, the risk was some pain in the head, the risk of falling from a skyscraper, instead, of breaking said head.

His experience told him that he would not gain much from climbing attempts, or even from exploring recesses abandoned for centuries and populated by who knows what kind of beasts.

The best solutions, in games, were always found where the player was least willing to look. This is why Octavian had developed a tendency to think diagonally, as he liked to say. Like a diagonal, his mind divided things in two equal parts, was located perfectly in the centre of everything it analysed, and created symmetries ...

Octavian took the book in his hand.

His ability to distract himself was nothing short of amazing.

After about half an hour he narrowed his eyes slightly and frowned. There was something about what he was deciphering that looked a lot like a… recipe. There were several lists, followed by what appeared to be explanations.

***** the energy needed to complete 1337's formation process is definitely *****

Still, the preliminary experiments were promising, they said that ******** nature would ...

Experiment number 0 *************** mind is still ******** and rebellious.

There were words that were impossible to translate. His class helped make them similar to Latin, yes. But everything remained confused. There were too many references to things that could not be translated in Latin, or, when they could, the translation was extremely difficult.

It was still amazing how much Latin was giving him an edge in this world. It wasn't enough, however. He needed more understanding, and also books that were really about magic.

There had to be other books down there besides the ones he had found in the main room of the cave. Who knows how long they had been there. It was unbelievable that the humidity or the insects hadn't completely destroyed them. There must have been spells to protect them. Some Enchantments. He had found the word several times, in books, and the use of Enchantments was very similar to spells in stories about magic.

Octavian would have liked to find simple and safe directions that would allow him to fly and shoot lightning. But no, just useless lists of things he didn't understand.

He lay down on one of the thicker mosses, too tired now to pursue his research. A few days earlier he had started exercising. Or rather, he had tried. He had done some push-ups, squats and all those things that gym people usually did. Unfortunately, he wasn't interested in fitness at all.

Not surprisingly, he had stopped after the first five minutes.

In the course of his miserable life he had never needed to move for health reasons and he had never been interested in going to the gym. Besides, impressing girls wasn't for him, nor he had to impress himself.

He sighed.

He needed to get distracted. The books were making him lose his mind. The belly of the cave was comforting, but at the same time scary. It was as if a part of him was sucked into the darkness and gradually tried to drag him into a chasm.

Was it time to give the moss the shape of a man? That way he would feel less lonely. Or perhaps, because of gender equality, he should have shaped abundant curves and added a thick array of green hair?

Maybe the moss ball would have been transgender at this point.

Octavian indulged in a roar of inner laughter.

He had even gone so far as to think about things he had always thought useless. Was he becoming one of the much-hated young Communists with rich parents?

The idea made him shiver.

All this time spent thinking alone was making him lose his mind. There were times when - and he could have sworn he didn't do it on purpose - he'd been tempted to compose memes out of the runic material he'd found in front of him.

He smiled thinking about what Georgia, his only true friend, would tell him.

Tavi, if you don't get out of your house a little more, you'll become like the people who commit school shootings in the US.

Not liking to leave his house was not a crime.

Octavian suddenly felt a shiver go down his spine. He got up slowly and looked up at the tunnel that led into the deepest parts of the cave, the ones he hadn't explored, where he suspected there might be something that would frighten him.

He had a bad feeling, as if there was something in the depths of the cave that could tear his soul away.

He realised he had held his breath for several minutes, staring at the bleak tunnel.

Octavian took a deep breath, trying to calm down.

He turned to lie down on his mattress—

“AHH!”

Octavian saw a figure less than a meter away from him jumping backwards.

"GAAHH!"

Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

The creature put its hands on its face, as if it wanted to protect itself from a blow that would come, fast and violent, on its face.

After a first moment of intense fear, Octavian calmed down. It wasn't like him to lose his temper like this. He was not scared by horror films, he was not afraid of the dark and few things could make his heartbeat go up… Well, a non-human creature after a month of solitude could be one, right? The fear could be understood.

But first he had to find a weapon to defend himself.

However, despite being in a cave completely carved into the rock, there was no trace of stones he could use for protection.

But ... Octavian heard moans.

Was the being in front of him ... crying?

“Don't hurt me,” were its first words.

Octavian was speechless.

Was it pretending to be harmless? Was it a trap to kill him easily as soon as he let his guard down? Not that he had a [Gladiator] class, anyway.

"I'm not here to hurt you, if you're afraid of that."

Octavian tried to calm the… creature? It...She had a woman's voice, but she was obviously not part of the human race. Her thighs were muscular and covered with hair, as well as most of her body. She remained in a crouched position, hands placed over her head, trying to cover with little success two long bunny-like ears, hanging down either side of the head, in the midst of long chocolate hair.

For some strange reason, the creature was dressed in a crumpled jacket torn in several places.

She slowly opened her index and middle fingers, peering at Octavian with one dark blue eye - the same shade as Octavian's eyes. The man's gaze did not have to be reassuring, since she burrowed her face again behind the shield of her hands.

Octavian did not know exactly how to behave on such occasions. He couldn't feel sorry for the creature in front of him, but he feigned interest and cleared his throat with a cough. He did not feel - nor had he ever felt, to be exact - any empathy. But he knew how to approach these kinds of problems.

"Hey. I really don't want to hurt you. I would like to know where you came from. I've been here for a month and I've never seen you before."

She raised a trembling finger, showing that she at least understood what he was saying to her. Octavian followed her finger pointing to the tunnel that led into the depths of the cave. Just as Octavian had imagined.

Well, now he was sure and a mystery was solved, at least.

He felt a drop of sweat run from his neck to his loins, under the frayed shirt he wore.

"My name's Octavian," he said, "Nice to meet you."

He didn't know whether to reach out with his hand or not. When in doubt, considering the poor sanitation of the figure in front of him, he decided that the cons outweighed the pros.

"Ae-Aemilia."

The answer was almost a whisper, it seemed that the... woman - woman, Octavian had now decided - was ashamed of her words. There was an ethereal quality in her voice, as if her words were transparent.

Octavian had an idea.

[Intuitive Understanding]

This time he looked at the woman with renewed intensity.

Her hair stopped on her forearm, and it was dark brown. It did not look like the fur of a normal monkey because, despite the layers of dust and dirt that covered it, it possessed a normal silkiness visible to the naked eye.

Her face was very strange: her features were wider than those of a normal girl, her nose more flattened and broader. And then she had big, round eyes, one dark blue like Octavian's; the other of an unnatural colour, a bright purple mixed with red. It seemed that they had removed a monkey's wrinkled face and replaced it with the kinder muzzle of a rabbit.

Besides, the creature was unnaturally long-limbed, powerful. She by far exceeded Octavian in height, although he was not short, reaching almost two meters.

If the existence of this creature was not the definitive proof that he had ended up in another world ...

Octavian continued to observe the woman with his skill, [Intuitive Understanding]. He noticed that she had deep marks on her hands, scars that ran through her palm to the back, and looked like stigmata.

Finally, Octavian was able to notice that there was a light and imperceptible greenish powder in his hair that gave off an almost unhealthy light. This last detail would have been imperceptible without his skill.

Well.

What should he do now?

Octavian sat on his moss bed thinking. He did not care that the woman might attack him at any moment: he had made peace with the possibility of being killed in his sleep when he had decided not to explore the whole cave.

He made a decision. He would wait for the woman to speak again.

For several minutes, she stood with her hands in front of her face, peeking only occasionally and never longer than a split second. At one point, he decided to lie down and close his eyes.

Interacting with people exhausted him, even in absurd cases like this. He had a lot of questions for the woman, but it was clear that she was unable to answer for now.

With his eyes closed, he began to slowly slip into the oblivion of sleep.

Then, suddenly, he felt a finger touch his side and, without opening his eyes, he gave a cough.

"Aemilia, I'm quite tired. You surely know this place, so do what you want. Except waking me up, of course. And then we will discuss what to do."

He couldn't see her, but still he felt the woman's body curl up beside him, a little farther away. Since the moss blanket wasn't that big, anyway.

Octavian slipped into Morpheus's arms, hoping to take a nice afternoon nap - if it really was afternoon, since it wasn't easy to tell what time it was through an opening that only looked out on a patch of sky.

…

A hand touched Octavian's filthy jeans.

He took a deeper breath than before and slowly opened his eyes, immediately feeling the hand retract from his leg.

He didn't know what he should say to this woman, exactly. He did not know how she had survived in this place for so long, nor what kind of creatures she was, because she looked like a cross between humans, monkeys and rabbits.

He rose on his elbows, a neutral expression on his face. The most positive thing about his nap was that he had woken up - better: that Aemilia hadn't killed him in his sleep to drink his blood or do him who knows what.

Some predators like to play with their prey and give it a false sense of security, was the thought that crossed his mind in a flash.

Immediately after a positive thought, a negative and most disastrous one always came. Octavian's brain worked just like that: he created infinite scenarios, from the most terrible to the least frightening, and consequently forced himself to a perennial chill of the soul. This is why it was so difficult for him to communicate with other human beings. And even non-human beings, he supposed.

"How long have you been here?" Octavian asked.

Of so many personal questions he didn't care much about, this was perhaps the most important.

"Very long," Aemilia replied in a whisper.

Octavian found it slightly irritating. No, not exactly irritating. That word meant feeling emotions. For him, that was just a problem to be solved.

"More than twenty years?"

At a guess, if her semi-human features weren't too different from human ones, the woman must have been in her thirties.

She nodded slowly.

"Were you born in this cave?"

It was a bit like playing 'Guess Who'.

She shook her head.

Octavian remained silent to think.

So, she had been brought there by someone. It was impossible otherwise because her terrified reactions suggested she had been abused.

Octavian shrugged. Anything that had happened in that place was not his problem. And, judging by the state he had found it in, it wasn’t even Aemilia’s problem anymore.

"Are we in danger?" the man asked again. Maybe the danger could have come back. This would be a real problem.

"Nooo..."

This time she responded by dragging the vowel and extinguishing it like a flame at the end of the wick.

Octavian got up and went to his reserve of edible moss and pots of rusted metal he had found abandoned in a secluded corner of the cave. In there he had managed to collect more rainwater.

He stopped there, in silence. His breathing was normal. Behind him, a few meters away, Aemilia was following him, as happens sometimes with rather desperate stray animals.

For the first time in a month, since he arrived, he felt the need to wash and took off his shirt. The stench emanating from his body was not as bad as he would have imagined, but annoying enough to make Aemilia take a few steps back.

Octavian looked at his chest. He no longer had the scars he had gotten under the knife. And his left side didn't have the big scar from when one of his kidneys had completely ceased to function due to malaria. The doctors had told him he had been incredibly lucky. Usually, the kidneys stopped functioning together.

How lucky.

Octavian smiled slightly as he remembered the astonished expression the doctors had made when they explained to him the tests performed and the result of the operation to save him.

“No scars. My journey into this world has given me back a body that seems new. Incredible.”

He dipped his clothes in a pot and left them to soak. With a handful of moss, then, he began to briefly rub his body. He picked up the clothes, wrung them out and spread them out on the floor to dry. End of his new cleaning routine.

Now, he could ask Aemilia to help him, if she wanted to. Perhaps he would ask her if she knew where to find something to eat that was tastier than moss, nuts and roots.

Maybe he should have started worrying about vitamin deficiencies.

Octavian picked up a new book and, after putting it on the desk, began to read.

Judging by the cover, this book seemed to contain what he had been looking for a while.

******'s Introduction to Magical Systems and Basic Magic

Octavian swore he had laughed for at least half an hour when he discovered the title of this book. Translating the covers had turned out to be a smart choice, to understand their content even before starting to read, but he did not imagine that he would find the same boring method of naming that there was on Earth.

He concentrated on the first pages for at least half an hour.

Now. It is necessary to understand a fundamental thing about Octavian's character.

If there had been a competition to elect the most calm and measured person in the whole world, Octavian would have arrived in one of the top places. Since he was a child, he didn't remember more than a couple of times when he really got mad, and it wasn't normal for him to lose his temper in any way. His mother had also taken him to some psychologist, to find out if her son was normal. And the answer had been that he was just a very calm kid (poor deluded doc).

For all his calm, worthy of the proverbial Job, when Octavian realized he was faced with a thirty-page introduction, written by a friend of the author to praise the quality of the writings within the book itself, he almost had a seizure.

He felt measured anger build up in his body, but he dispersed it with a simple but intense breath.

With some effort, about another half hour later he managed to find the real beginning of the book. With rare enthusiasm, he began the translation of what was in front of him, but after several hours he only obtained a huge headache and a lopsided translation. He looked at the fruit of his work.

All new practitioners of the magical arts must keep in mind the essential principles that govern our world.

As ********* explained to ******, mana is a finite substance with an infinite possibility of being.

To understand its nature, just think of ******* while ****** with a ****** in your hands. Or even imagine the control of ****** over all the things that ******* and ***** when ***** ...

The number of references and metaphors was terrifying. A successful student of magic would have found this manual really easy, thanks to the numerous references to known subjects and the colourful metaphors that simplified explanations. For Octavian, absolutely ignorant on the subject, it was a real nightmare.

The first two pages seemed to explain how to manipulate an airflow using the fingers as a kind of rudder. Here, that had been one of the few similarities he had been able to grasp.

He put his elbows on the pages and let his face sink into his hands. He had kept his eyes open without blinking for so long that the headache extended from his brain to his eye sockets.

He thought that sometimes being gifted like him could be a problem. How many times in his life had he really struggled to understand something? If he had failed school, it was because he had never opened a book for subjects that did not interest him, not because he was not an absolute genius. Some of his teachers had even cried in front of his mother, exasperated that someone with a brain like his had no intention of applying himself.

The gods send nuts to those who have no teeth, it was a saying that Octavian had sometimes heard the elders say.

The ones who, like him, had not only both teeth and nuts, but also an entire kitchen and all the rarest ingredients that could be found, what had they been sent?

Only the desire not to do shit.

Octavian went to lie down again on his makeshift bed. While Aemilia had remained more or less motionless staring at him all the time.

The man stopped to think before going to sleep. He turned to Aemilia, who was looking at him with curious eyes, less frightened than a few hours before.

"Do you happen to know this abstruse and impossible language?"

He heard no response and sighed, keeping his eyes closed.

"Yes."

Octavian suddenly opened his eyes and sat up.

"Can you read those characters?"

The man asked slowly, pointing to the desk on which the books were arranged in a disorderly fashion.

She nodded.

It was then that Octavian saw her better. He paid her attention.

He looked at the hair smeared with mud, moss, dirt and blood. Several wounds on the woman's body looked infected and, looking calmly at her neck, he noticed that her heart was beating very quickly. When Octavian was able to concentrate, it was not difficult to interpret those little signs. And an infection often resulted in tachycardia, especially if it was close to causing sepsis.

He looked at the deep brown hair, almost mingled with her coat, kept short and almost clean, the only thing that bordered on civilization in this creature.

And it was Aemilia's hair that gave him the real impression of being in front of a human being. It didn't matter that she, technically, wasn't one; if she preferred to keep them short, perhaps, it meant that she knew she couldn't wash them too often and that she wanted to avoid soiling them. This had struck a chord in Octavian's soul.

How a small detail like this could make all this difference, Octavian didn't know.

"Aemilia, do you mind if I take a look at your wounds?"

His fatigue forgotten, the first sincere smile appeared on his face after more than a month of isolation.

The woman stepped back on her long legs, spreading them out in all their glory.

She really is taller than me, Octavian realised.

"Don't worry. I have experience with this," he reassured her.

After high school, he had chosen a course of study that he was really passionate about, medicine. His exams, as expected, had never been brilliant, and his parents' connections had done much of the work required to graduate.

He had been the one with friends in the right places.

If he had continued on the path that his parents had set up for him, he would have found himself at the head of several private hospitals, and not only in the UK. Instead, he had chosen to travel with Doctors Without Borders. He had cut all ties with his family and made himself impossible to find.

Inside the university he had been nothing, but on the field there was something about him that changed, which made him a formidable doctor.

Octavian had to admit, as he slowly approached Aemilia, that it was frustrating to be a decent person only in certain situations - but it was still the best he could do.

Sensing the nauseating smell of a wound on the woman's arm, which he had brought within inches of his nose, he reflected on what to do.

"Do you know magic?" Octavian asked, trying to move the woman gently, without shaking her or raising his voice too much.

She had let herself be touched without too much fear, considering the previous reactions. Had sleeping by his side helped her gain more intimacy with him?

Octavian closed his mind to thoughts that were not related to medicine, concentrating all of himself on finding a solution. Since the infections hadn't killed her with terrible sepsis yet, he assumed her immune system was strong enough.

Aemilia shook her head.

The man looked around, searching for something he might need to disinfect the wound. He remembered that he had found a lot of what looked like rotten wheat, a possible source of fermented alcohol.

Looking at the woman's wounds again, he decided she didn't need such treatment. Alcohol would have inflamed her tissues even more and, given her alien anatomy, increased the possibility of something going wrong.

He had to wash the wounds with sterile cloths, nothing more. Feed her and hope that was enough.

“I need to start a fire. You know if there is anything in here that is useful for this purpose? "

Aemilia thought about it for a moment, before nodding her head uncertainly.

"Wood..."

Aemilia got up, walked towards the darkness of the corridor, entered it, and was swallowed up by the darkness. After a few minutes she returned with some wood in her mighty arms.

In the next hour, they lit a fire as far away from the moss as possible, to avoid burning it, but under the opening at the top of the cave to prevent the smoke from disturbing them too much. They put a pot full of water to boil, and Octavian threw pieces of his clothes into it.

Octavian hoped Aemilia had antibodies as big and powerful as her arms.

As he began to gently cleanse her wounds, the woman pricked up her ears, shaken by the pangs of pain. The annoyance passed quickly as Octavian checked more wounds but, without any bandages, he could not help but leave them uncovered.

…

"Do you think you can point out to me and explain which of these spells creates a flame?" the man asked as he leafed through the book.

Aemilia’s eyes widened.

"We need more clean water to keep your wounds clear," Octavian explained. “The trickle of water that crosses the cave does not seem safe to me and the rain collected in the basin and in the pots could worsen the situation. The best way to purify water is to boil it and I have no idea how much wood is available. The less we use, the better. However, to boil it I need a flame and a metal pot: we have the latter, we need the first."

Aemilia nodded cautiously, her shoulders dropped and a resigned expression appeared on her face. Her ears lowered as she took the book from his hands and began leafing through it listlessly.

Octavian found the scene rather cute. Aemilia did not seem to be as old as her body suggested; it seemed, however, that she was still a child in many aspects of her personality.

After a few minutes of peaceful silence - and Octavian had to admit that he loved someone who could be silent without being uncomfortable - she turned to him and pointed to a page with her index finger.

“Can you read aloud and illustrate the passages I don't understand?” Octavian asked

Aemilia nodded and, in a faint voice, began to translate and explain.