"It's night now?"

Jump-touch tested out her new language capabilities as she found herself standing in front of the spire.

It felt less like a language and more like a coat, something she was choosing to wear, still itchy and uncomfortable, but something that would in time wear in, something she would stop noticing, stop even thinking about.

"I don't know how I feel about that." she said, this time in Given Tongue. Good, she hadn't lost her ability to speak other languages, which had been a slight worry. The coat was still something she could take off.

She felt herself shiver at the sudden cold air on her skin. She needed a new coat, a real one, not one made of words. She was dressed for winter in the valleys, where the high walls provided shelter from the winds. Down here on the plains, even here in the heart of the city, it was much colder. Maybe she could trade in her token for one? The Stone had said she could get new clothes with it.

Oh yeah, the token. As she thought about it, Jump-touch realised she could sense where it was, a small disc of metal lying on the floor of her Heart, next to her book and her backpack.

An instant later it was in her hand, heavy against her palm. That was going to be useful.

She willed it back, then staggered as if she'd taken a hit, suddenly sleepy. Was there a cost to sending things to her Heart?

"Guess I'll find out later," she yawned in Other, still disliking how Human- Resper, she corrected herself- felt to speak. The taste of it was wrong in her mouth, the words not quite making sense, despite the fact she was speaking them.

A touch of bile in the back of her throat, and she gave up thinking about it.

"I guess I'll get used to it," she pulled the blanket out of her Heart, wrapping it around her shoulders, the soft rabbit-fur lining helping within moments.

"So you made it!" a voice shouted from the grass, "come over here!"

A shadowed figure gave her a wave, and Jump-touch shrugged. It sounded like My-he-kal, but she couldn't be sure, she'd never heard him speak anything other than gabble before. The way it formed into words-

No, stop thinking about it.

"Res-per," she tried out, splitting the syllables as she moved towards him, trying to get the new skill in her brain to spit out what the name meant. She knew her name in Given Tongue, and now in Res-per. She had been such a flighty thing as a child, always struggling to get free of any touch or hug, and that dislike of being touched had followed her into adulthood. When she was ten, the villagers had come together and named her Jump-touch.

Not all kobolds stuck around that long, so there was a tradition of waiting to give people names. Sometimes they would walk back out into the woods, or head back to the Peak, or some mornings the others would wake and find them gone.

But those who stuck around long enough tended to stay forever.

"My-he-kal," she tried in Resper. It didn't sound right though.

"That's me, I suppose," he grinned. Beside him, An-jel had also risen out of the gloom.

"We thought you'd never come out." She said.

Jump-touch shrugged, looking around, feeling the shape of words on her tongue but suddenly reluctant to speak them.

"I guess we'll go home then." My-he-kal said finally, after a pause, directing his words to An-jel. "We'll come back in the morning, get her sheet scanned, and then they can charge us out the nose for whatever daft options she's taken."

An-jel laughed, something awkward in her stance, brushing the grass and dust off her coat. Jump-touch followed them both back across the overgrown field, following the path she'd made on the way in.

"What do you think she picked?" My-he-kal spoke as they walked through the city. The streets were so different at night. Less animals and vehicles, more foot traffic. There was the smell of food in the air, and all the buildings were lit with small lights. Little orbs, like fairy lights. She had always been warned not to go into the swamp at the end of the Valley, lest the light-bringers whisk her away, but here they seemed... Tamed?

Her stomach grumbled at the smells. When had she last eaten? It was either the last of her dried fruit this morning or the birthday cake the previous night.

She kept a lookout for the lights as they walked, enjoying how each one was hidden. They were always placed under eaves, or beneath the corner of a windowsill, or, rarely, in cloth-covered vessels in open windows. Whatever the source of the light was, it was never directly visible, always a soft, indirect light.

An-jel caught her looking and smiled. "I guess the little scrap's never seen the night-lights before. She really must be from some backwards nowhere-place."

"I told you," My-he-kal answered, "trader-brat raised by bandits. I'd put coin on it. Bought here a couple of years ago, family lost in the woods to-" something she couldn't discern the meaning of, the name of an animal or monster perhaps? "-and raised by wolves or dogs. After an experience like that, these kids often forget their pasts, they become feral. It's too much for them."

An-jel gave him a look.

It was interesting, what people said when they thought you couldn't understand.

"I'll believe it when I see it. If I hadn't used the Fragment-" My-he-kal gave her a startled look, "-then I'd think she was just pretending she couldn't speak a civilised language. What a mess that was."

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

"You shouldn't mention that out loud," he protested, "what if people hear?"

An-jel shrugged, rolling her shoulders back, "there's nobody listening here, and it's long worn off now. Anyway, what's done is done."

He seemed to hunch up on himself, sticking his hands into the pockets of his baggy trousers, much different from those he'd been wearing the day before. "It wasn't worth it," he grumbled.

An-jel shrugged. "I needed to be sure, before we wasted more money on another one of your charity cases."

They were leaving the busy part of town. The 'night lights' still around, but less common than they had been. The buildings were bigger here too, and set further apart from each other; the empty voids between them lit only by the odd light, hidden deep in a hedge or in amongst the ground cover.

Do you all really need this much space, she wanted to ask, but her tongue had been stricken mute in the darkness, by the fairy lights and the hungry evening walk. Maybe it was nice to have your own space, when you lived in a walled city. Up on the Mountain she'd always been able to get away from others by taking a day-pack and heading away for a day or two. Here there was nowhere to go that other people weren't going to be.

It made more sense the more she thought about it.

"Do you think she eats normal food?" An-jel asked from somewhere ahead of her. "The fast before meeting the Stone was required, but she must be famished by now."

She had been meant to fast? Nobody had told her that, and the Stone had never mentioned it.

"Meat and cakes, as far as I can tell," My-he-kal responded, "Stone Blessed, I wish I'd saved you some of the meat she fed me last night. If that's what the caravan taken last week was carrying, then I think the city's better off for its loss. That stuff was like a deadly weapon. No wonder they're fleeing the forest in droves."

So there were words for places bigger than… She tested them out silently. Village, town, city. Outpost, hamlet, settlement. Each one denoting something different as she shifted her perception.

There was a creak as An-jel pushed open the metal gate at the back of her garden, and a moment later they were standing beneath the maple tree, where she had awoken hours before. The big glass double doors were still wide open, and My-he-kal made a face.

"Didn't Tabbouleh-" a name, it had to be a name, "- see they were still open? What's that girl doing."

"It's her day off today," An-jel shrugged, silhouetted in the moonlight now as they walked towards the house. "She normally takes Sunday afternoons, but she helped with all the setup yesterday, after somebody decided not to come home."

My-he-kal didn't answer as they headed inside, the contrast of the warm wooden floor indoors to the grass outside a pleasant contrast. She hadn't realised how cold she was until they stepped in out of the cold.

My-he-kal made a noise, and a moment later he had taken a small lamp from one of the many tables in the room, lighting it with a flash of something magic.

"You're too easy on her." He complained, focused on the lamp. "even after she 'lost' a whole set of forks that one time, and yet you still-"

"Don't you start. Just because she didn't swoon when she saw your fancy blue coat. You thought just because-"

My-he-kal turned suddenly and slammed the lamp down against the table, the flame inside jumping, before going out. Jump-touch took a step back, towards the exit.

An-jel was like a statue in the dim room, only a touch of moonlight illuminating the back of her form.

I should leave. She thought. This is some human stuff. I'm not involved.

Should I go and find a… her new skill supplied her the words for warrior, solider, and politeía, all with different flavours of meaning, and Jump-touch stood there for a moment caught in the swirl. She wanted somebody who broke up fights, not whatever all those people were!

The two of them were shouting now, accusations of 'you always do this' and 'why can't you let it go' flying through the air, all the words jumbling together in her head.

"Michael-," An-jel finally spoke, and as he swung towards An-jel, Jump-touch crouched to the floor. She had thought he was going to throw something, but all he did was push past the both of them, walking back out into the garden.

The woman sighed softly as he left, and then seemed to shake herself.

"Well," she made a jarring start towards the unlit lamp, "that was all very dramatic. Children, eh. They don't know what you've done for them."

Was My-he-kal a child, she wondered, from her spot on the floor. He seemed awfully tall for a youngster, but he had just tried to throw something and then stormed out.

As the light was rekindled, and then as more were lit, Jump-touch got her first look inside a human house.

Kobolds weren't animals, they had furniture and houses, but it was very different to what she saw here.

Wood was rare up on the Mountain. The tables and drawers, shelves and cupboards they had were kept and used and repaired until there was no way to repair them any longer. New furniture was rare, and those they had tended to be made of the light woods of the valley.

The houses of her home consisted of one or two small rooms, lit by hearth-fires and hanging lanterns. You did what you needed during the day, and most kobolds either slept through the night, or had good enough night vision not to care.

For warmth, and because they enjoyed it, they decorated the walls in dyed cloths, both made at home and traded up from the Lower Village. Bright colours hung everywhere, protective cloths over surfaces, blankets and shawls readily available for those who felt the cold.

Kobolds tended not to bother with chairs, instead preferring cushions and pillows, and their floors were always strewn with sweet herbs and dried wildflowers, taken from the Dip near the Peak, where the cold weather denied to land.

Each house had its own mix, its own scent, and the blanket over her shoulders still carried the faint scent of home. She had sat there on the floor and watched Star-light stitch it together herself, skin by skin, all secured to a layer of thin, hand-spun woollen cloth.

Here though, in this human place, everything was wood. The floor, the overly large table in the centre of the wood, even the walls were wood.

She caught herself staring at the table. How had they moved that? It had to be as thick through as her arm. Was it made from one tree?

Wooden cabinets, dressers, small boxes, large boxes. Wooden chairs with polished wooden seats; there was even wooden panelling covering one wall, for what she could only assume was entirely decorative purposes.

This was only one room. How much wealth was there here in this huge, cold house?

She kept staring around as An-jel busied herself tidying the room; closing the huge glass doors, ringing a small bell, probably to ward out the dark spirits of the night, and lighting more lamps.

There were no night lights in here, although she had spotted one in the garden, and there was a darkened holder like those she'd seen in the city windows sitting in a corner, near the now closed doors.

An-jel gave her a look, rolling her shoulders again and pushing the chairs under the table.

"Food will be here in a minute," she said, then winced to herself. "Guess I lost your language, huh. Hopefully you pick up ours fast enough, if the Stone hasn't given you a Boon anyway. I can't imagine it didn't, you were there for hours and taking full attention. The politeía didn't half complain."

She hummed, pulling one of the chairs out and sitting down on it, leaning back and rubbing the back of her neck with both hands.

After a moment of thought, Jump-touch pulled out a chair across from her and climbed up into it.

There wasn't a single cushion or piece of cloth in the room, bar what they were wearing, and it gave her the strange sensation of having left something somewhere, but being unable to remember where or what.

She laid her arms on the table, only to discover that the table was both a bit too tall, and that she couldn't move the chair now she was up on it. Inconvenient. After a bit of shuffling she ended up with her knees against her chest, perched like a gargoyle, An-jel watching her with an unreadable expression.

An-jel watched her quietly for a moment more, then looked up as there was a sound from a door on the other side of the room.

"Ah," she said, getting to her feet, "the food's here."