She was standing in a valley.
She was standing in The Valley, the one where her people travelled to every summer, to harvest the fruit and avoid the harsh storms that made the Mountain uninhabitable for months at a time. She knew this place, this spot, like she knew herself.
The trees around her were in bloom, covered in flowers. The smell of them was heavy in the air, and she could see the pollen drifting in the wind.
She had never been off the Mountain at this time of the year, they always got there as the fruit was ripening and then left with the snow, but she knew about it in theory. She had always wanted to see it, and one year she and Feather-paw had begged Rat-rail to let them leave early, so that they finally might. He had refused them, sensibly, but the desire had never truly gone away.
She stared up at the tree above her, heavy with white flowers. A cherry tree, she decided. There would be sweet wine later in the year, and dried fruit for their trip back home. She wished Feather-paw was here with her, he had wanted to see it as badly as her.
"Am I really here, or is this a dream?"
Something stirred, and Jump-touch sensed a presence enter the grove. A warmth on her back, the prickle of eyes on the back of her neck. A sense of no longer being alone.
She lowered her gaze from the branches above, and turned to see who had come to greet her.
****
She was somewhere else for a moment, as she looked at the new presence. She was in a place of wooden floors and clinking glasses, of conversation and song. Wooden benches, a stage, and soft music in the distance.
Then she was back in her Valley, the trees around her late summer bare, frost touching the tips of what few leaves were still clinging on.
She wasn't great at telling human ages, but this one looked old. Kobolds didn't age much, not unless they were very, very old, like the current leader of the Lower Village, or Rat-tail, but she knew humans changed year by year, she had herself as an example.
This human was all hair. She didn't know they could grow that much hair! It was a white cloud haloing his head, and yet more covered his face, leaving only a small space in the centre for his eyes and nose. Even his stomach was covered by his long white beard.
He was wearing furs and skins, and even his arms were muscled and hairy. He reminded her a lot of what Sweep-claw might look like if he'd been turned into a very old human.
"Hello?" she asked, and the man stood and looked at her. His form was changing, he was thinner now, taller, and almost all of the hair was gone. Still in the furs, but the style had changed.
"——" he said, and Jump-touch frowned.
"I don't speak that, I'm sorry?" she offered, watching as the figure shifted again.
She was shorter now, and maybe even older, using a cane to stand, leaning almost all her weight on it through shuddering hands.
"———" she said, in a different language to what she had spoken when she was a man, and Jump-touch shook her head. It was a sing-song language, but not one she spoke.
"I think I heard that once, from one of the Old People, when they came to trade, I'd like to learn it, but-"
She slowed as the form changed again, even shorter this time. A child, a man in a fine suit, blurring through figures again and again. Four languages and an infinite number of forms later, Jump-touch sighed.
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"Look-" she said in Other, "I'll tell you what I know, and then you tell me if you know any of them."
She switched rapidly from there. Given Tongue, Other, Lower Tongue. She didn't try any of the other languages she knew, they were too specific, and even if this figure did speak Shriek, she wasn't going to try it.
The form in front of her seemed to shudder, and then it shifted one last time, into that of a large kobold. Four legs with long, clawed feet, an animal head and torso, but the face of a human. Wings so wide that Jump-touch knew they would be able to glide, if not even fly. Golden fur.
"This is very expensive," the kobold said wryly, sitting upright like Feather-paw when he was interested in something. "I have not taken this form in many millennia, and have spoken to your kind outside enough to know that they will not like this."
Jump-touch frowned, "kobolds?"
The kobold laughed, "no, humans. Are you not human, are they not your kind?"
Jump-touch shrugged, staring around at the trees, now winter-bare.
"It's difficult," she said finally.
The thing hummed out a laugh. "You are a strange one. Most humans have visited me many times by your age, but I do not know you at all."
She looked back at the thing. Her- she was pretty sure that it was a her right now- her fur was a mottled gold, almost like a gryphon, but with none of the shimmer of magic that surrounded them, and her long claws shone like jewels where they dug into the grass. Pawing at the soil like a mountain lion.
"What are you?"
The thing shrugged, "I am the Stone, but I am stone in the same way you are a human, I suppose. It is what people call me, and therefore the role I fill."
She thought about that. Above her, the trees were in bloom again, the blossoms starting to scatter, like the first snow of the year.
"Does everyone get to talk to you like this? I wasn't warned about... Well, I wasn't warned about much, actually. I was told touch the big rock, get a job, go do the job. Nobody said..." She gestured outward with her arms, indicating the being before her.
The Stone shook her head. "I meet most humans when they are very young. I know them, like I know all who walk my roads and all who are born in my city. But I don't know you, so I must take more care. I know I have not met you, for I would remember your birth and your tread, even if you had been gone a thousand years."
The Stone paused for a moment, taking a breath before carrying on.
"But I do not know you. So I cannot talk to you through text and numbers, like I do to them. You speak languages I have not heard in many, many years, and others I haven't heard at all, not even through the memories of others."
Jump-touch shrugged, looking away. "That's because all you get here are humans, with their gabble-tongue. They don't listen when I talk, they don't try to understand. They just expect me to already know. Kobolds would try to understand, to listen."
The Stone nodded. "That is true," she said, paused with her mouth half open, and then seemed to change her mind about saying more.
They both sat in silence for a moment. There were no birds or insects here, and the only sound was their breathing and the rustle of the breeze through the branches. Branches which never moved, no matter how long she looked at them.
It felt like the first quiet moment she'd had in a long time.
"But you are here because you want something of me," the Stone finally said, breaking her out of her reverie.
"Oh. Yeah. I need to know how to understand the human gabble-tongue, just a couple of lessons, and I need a job. Rat-tail told me you'd give me a job I could do for the city, and then once I've done it for a while I get to go home."
The Stone stared at her for a while, then she turned to the side, as if looking for somebody else.
"Nobody explained this to you, huh?" she said finally, when nobody else showed up.
Jump-touch shrugged. "They did their best. They know I need human magic, because I'm human, and a job, because that's what humans get, and that I get both of those by coming here and touching the Stone- that's you I guess. That's all they knew. Then I got here and nobody can understand me apart from one weird human woman, and she's having to use some sort of magic to do it."
The Stone frowned, the first time her face had been anything other than placid. "I have seen her, and I will speak to her about what she has done next time we meet, but that's not important right now. What's important now is you. Let me explain."
She took a breath, although Jump-touch was pretty sure she didn't need to breathe.
"I will give you 'human magic', yes. There is a price for this, but it is a price that has been paid a hundred thousand times over. You will use what I give you to grow and improve yourself, returning here to strengthen it through me each time you grow in power. I will let you choose-"
The Stone hesitated. "I will let you choose a job from a list of those I think will suit you. If none of them do, then we can work it out together." Something in her voice changed, "this is very irregular, and I would appreciate it if you didn't discuss it with the other humans outside, they may get jealous."
Jump-touch nodded, sinking down to sit on the soft grass, and the Stone did the same, folding her paws in front of herself neatly.
"Alright," she said, "let's start with the job. That's the easiest bit. Tell me how these strike you."