The jungle path narrowed until they were walking single file, the taller humans hunched over to avoid injuring themselves on the sharp vegetation.

"Are you sure this is right?" Shrike asked Yaris, "surely it's not meant to be this bad."

"It's the right way," Yaris snapped back. She had lost a chunk of hair earlier to a badly placed leaf, and she had a cut across one cheek that she was refusing to let Eim heal. Jump-touch suspected it wasn't helping her mood.

Being a head taller than everyone else wasn't always a boon. Down near the floor, Jump-touch felt quite protected.

She was also pretty sure they were on the right path. There were all sorts of signs of previous travellers, if you looked for them. Slashes on the trees, cut branches, and chopped vegetation swept off to one side. Somebody had even sprinkled a thin trail of gravel on the floor, to mark the way.

"Why copper?" she asked, trying to diffuse the tension between the Yaris and Shrike, it had been building up for a while now.

I'm supposed to be a mediator, I should mediate!

Shrike glanced at her. "It's just how this area is. It changes to other metals, further in, further down, and there's some parts which aren't metal-touched at all. Allegedly, there's a whole level that's entirely touched in gold, but nobody I've spoken to has ever seen it, and I couldn't find anything credible about it in the library."

That sounds dangerous, a whole level of gold. The flecks she collected out of the melt-water stream were bad enough. She had learnt early on that there were certain kobolds she should never show them to, Rat-tail amongst them.

Even to her, it called, but the pull was weak enough that she could resist.

I hope Feather-paw's doing okay, she was still holding the leaf between her hands, we've never been apart for this long.

She wasn't quite sure how long it'd been since she'd departed the Village. Ten days? Ten days sounded about right. Some on the road, some in the city, some in the dungeon.

"Are humans weird about gold too?" she asked, realising as she said it that her wording made her non-human.

Shrike nodded, ignoring her blunder. "Extremely so, even more so than ---"

Odd, that last word hadn't translated at all. Some kind of monster perhaps?

Feather-paw might try to join me, the thought came unbidden, and she quashed it as fast as it had arrived. He wouldn't come find her, that was madness. He couldn't, for the same reason Sweep-claw couldn't step on the black stone road, and for the same reason some of the more animal-like people never visited the Lower Village. It would take them too far from the Mountain, and too far into places where they might be called monsters.

What's the word for somebody you grew up with? She asked her Boon.

Family, it gave her, but there had to be something more specific. Not a father, or a mother, but…

Brother, the Boon suggested. That meant a male sibling, somebody you had grown up beside.

"Brother," she said out loud.

Ollie blinked down at her, "are you trying to learn to swear? Because that's rather tame. I can teach you some better ones if you want."

"What, no? I was asking my skill for words."

"Huh," Ollie glanced at her hands, and then picked a leaf of their own. "I have brothers, they're all termites."

"Is that wh- Wait, termites?" from Eim.

"Yeah. They come home once a week, eat everything in the house, spend a couple of hours chewing on the furniture and then disappear again," Ollie was dismissive. "They're all older than me, so half of them had moved away by the time I was old enough to get to know them."

Why did Ollie call them Brothers then, if they hadn't grown up together? Humans were so confusing.

"I have a brother," Jump-touch whispered carefully under her breath, listening to how the words felt. They felt correct. "He's waiting for me at home."

"I am going to go home."

None of the others heard her, talking now about termites, but that was okay.

****

One moment they were walking single file on the narrow path, and the next it opened up, belching them into a clearing full of blinding light.

"At last," Eim sighed, "I thought we were-"

"Hush," Yaris whispered loudly, as they all stumbled to a stop, "there's something-"

Oh, so there was. She saw it now. There, in the middle of the clearing was an animal. Bigger than the Peck Peck, bigger than any of them.

A huge, white snake, or a worm, she wasn't sure. But its eyes, slowly cracking open, were bright and intelligent.

What is it?

It was obviously not an animal, it was too... Designed for that. The creature in the clearing wasn't something that could ever have come out of nature.

As it moved, she saw that it had a brush for a tail. Not a brush-like tail, but something she would use for writing, or painting, white bristles soaked with black ink, banded with gold around the base. A flick of the tail sprayed black ink onto the ground, which bubbled and smoked as it touched the copper.

Around its middle, it was wearing some sort of sash, but the cloth or paper it was made from was so old and cracked that it was almost disintegrating.

She stared up at it, even as the others backed away. Its eyes were fully open now, and it was looking around with a curious gaze.

On its head, it wore a little hat.

"We should speak to it," she whispered, as everyone backed away. "It looked smart."

"You can't speak to it," Yaris hissed. "It's a monster, and a monster out of our league, at that!. We're level one, Jump, we're meant to be killing slimes and beetles, not- not whatever that thing is!"

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

"You can't speak to it," Shrike took up the lecture, his voice low as Yaris hurried everyone back down the narrow path. "It's a monster. Maybe wherever you come from, people can speak to monsters, but not here. Not in the dungeon."

She frowned, looking back down the path towards the clearing. "But what makes it a monster?"

"That's a deep philosophical question we do not have time to answer," Shrike hissed, and the others nodded, "we'll explain it to you later. But for now, we need to back the fuck up. If I'm not wrong, that's an area boss, and not one we're even the slightest bit equipped to handle."

She blinked at him, and then looked back. It had looked friendly to her?

"You should let me talk to it, that's my job."

"It's not your job. Your job is to carry things for us. And are you listening at all? It's a monster, a boss. It's not something you can talk to!" Yaris snapped at her. "Monsters are mad things, there is no talking to them. You need to get this idea out of your head before you get us all killed."

"But- But what if it's friendly, and it's just waiting for us to deliver it's package?"

Yaris stared at her, fists clenched, stance wide as she stood in the middle of the road.

"I'm not going to hit you," she said finally, "because you're still a child and you haven't grown up here. You don't know things that regular people know. But you are a child, and I'm supposed to be the group leader, and that makes you my responsibility. So no, Jump. I'm not going to let you go back and talk to the monster."

Jump-touch frowned but kept her mouth shut, as the girl took a shuddering breath, turned, and started marching down the road.

She didn't want Yaris to hit her, it looked like it hurt.

I still think I could talk to it, though.

Most people knew at least a little Given Tongue. People other than humans, that was. They were all too caught up in themselves to bother. But the worm wasn't human, so why not try it? She had seen its eyes, and it looked smart. There hadn't been anger there; or hatred, only a sort of sleepy curiosity.

"We can take a different path," said Yaris as they walked. "According to the map, there should be an alternative route, it's just takes us a bit more out of the way. But even if everything went perfectly, it would have taken us another day until we got to the drop-off point. So no, Jump, the giant snake monster wasn't simply waiting for a parcel."

"We'll have to report it," Eim sounded worried. He'd asked her for a pencil and paper earlier, and was now sketching the worm.

"You're missing the sash," she told him, standing on her tiptoes to look, "and its little hat."

"That wasn't a hat, it was a crest," Shrike said, also leaning over to look at the paper. "I never knew you were an artist!"

Eim flapped his hands at both of them, "get outta here!" Then he realised they couldn't, not without retreating into the jungle. "It had a hat?"

"A crest," Shrike corrected, "a hat would come off. A crest is a part of its body."

"Hm," Eim wrote the word 'crest' on the page, and then drew a little arrow to the head. "There, happy now?"

Shrike shrugged, rolling his shoulders and stretching as he straightened back up. He was much more relaxed now that they were moving away from the clearing. "That thing shouldn't be up here, it looked like one of the First. It should be two levels further down, at least."

"One day you'll have to tell me what books you read to get all this info," Eim grumbled, rolling up the drawing around the pencil and giving it to Jump-touch to store. "First? That's not a guild term."

Shrike frowned. "Maybe whoever was writing that book made it up. While most monsters will return somewhere between a day or week after being killed, the First take almost a full year. My last party was dead-set on killing one, so they went on about it a lot, they thought they'd get a good achievement and a bucket full of levels for doing so."

Eim rolled his eyes, "not wrong, but you can't get an achievement for dying."

Shrike nodded. "Within the last decade, there have only been a handful of successful hunts. It shouldn't be this far up, they're going to have to call in twenties to deal with it, at the least."

"But why First?" Jump-touch asked.

"Because they were one of the first creations of the one who made the dungeon," Shrike said. "Created before all other monsters. Each one is unique. They're not like the slimes- ignoring that those are somewhat of an outlier- there can only be one of the First around at once, and they remember."

"They remember?"

"If you fight one or kill one, it will know you, when it finally returns."

"Because they're smart," she nodded. "We should talk to it. It's my job."

She could see the blank refusal on their faces.

"Its my job. I talk to people, that's not just- the worm there might be a person."

"We're going to have to have a discussion with you about-"

Shrike cut Yaris off, "your class was [Cultural Scholar], right?" He gave Yaris a look, before returning his gaze to Jump-touch. "A [Scholar] is somebody who writes, so you're more like- like an anthropologist. Your job is to study people and then write about them. Not to try and talk to monsters. If you were meant to speak to monsters, then you would have gotten a [Language] or [Beast Speaker] class or something, not a [Scholar] one."

She narrowed her eyes at him. [Beast Speaker]? She could read the implications behind the words now, and she didn't like them.

"The first class it offered would have me taught me all languages," she said, "but I-"

She wasn't prepared for the bout of coughing from Shrike, taking a step back as he almost fell over with the violence of it.

"What?!"

Eim was having to hold him up, and the whole group had come to a halt.

"All languages? You were offered a skill that let you understand all languages, and you passed it up? You didn't take it!?"

She stared at him. Was that so bad? His normally amber-pink face had gone a bright red, and his eyes were wide. She could see the veins standing out in his head. He was shouting, too.

She took a step backwards, and then another. Was he going to attack her?

Ahead of her, Shrike took a step, forgot he needed the cane, and hissed as he fell to one knee, Eim's hands scraping against his shirt as the other boy failed to hold him up.

"Eim," Shrike shut his eyes. "Please, make her repeat that."

Eim looked at him, and then at her with raised eyebrows. "What rarity was it?"

She had to think back on it, the conversation with the Stone was so long ago now.

"Ul… [Ultra Rare]? But there was a star on it. I don't think the Stone ever explained what the star meant."

Shrike stared at her from the ground, on her level for once, his eyes wide.

She shrugged, suddenly awkward. "I didn't want it though, so it changed it. I didn't want to speak all languages, I just wanted to be able to learn them a bit faster. I didn't need magic for that."

Shrike was silent, the wildness draining out of his gaze, leaving behind something she wasn't sure she liked.

"Is it that big a deal?" asked Yaris. "I mean, once you know three or four languages, isn't that most of them? Isn't that enough?"

"It's not enough," he hissed, struggling to get to his feet in the narrow confines of the path. "It's not enough at all! Do you know how many languages we've lost. How many we only know exist through single scraps of parchment, most of which we have no way of interpreting? And you were offered that as a starter class?"

He finally made it to his feet, breathing heavily, and then almost fell back into the jungle, only saved by Eim's hands on his shoulders. "Read me your description again, slowl- or never-mind, just show it to me."

She took another step back, a little afraid of him. Yaris was looking at him like she'd never seen him before, Eim's face was carefully blank, and she still hadn't learnt to read Ollie, but she thought maybe they looked thoughtful. Or they needed the toilet. It could be either.

"This class will allow you to comprehend languages more easily. It will also help you understand different people and cultures."

She read it out, and then, after a moment's hesitation, also gave them the second part, which read: 'The skill included with this class will allow you to create a safe space, where either you yourself, or those you wish to protect, can be safely hidden.'

The Stone had said she should be subtle about what she had, but it didn't say anything about the skill that they didn't already know.

Well, yes it did. It told them that she could hide in her Heart, but maybe they would overlook that.

She hadn't exactly been hiding it, but she had never told them told them. She had been keeping it back, just in case something happened.

Shrike took the description from her with both hands, staring at it and leaning heavily on Eim. His cane lay forgotten on the floor.

She wanted to add that all the magic had gone into the skill, not the class, but the Stone only spoke to them in numbers. How was she meant to know that? She had already pushed it today.

This keeping of secrets upset her on a deep level. Was it a betrayal, to not tell them things? She should trust them, right?

Something inside her rebelled against the idea of holding back. These people were her friends, if not her family. She had to trust them with her life every time a Peck Peck or a Blue Slime attacked, what were words, compared to that?

She should tell them about the Stone, and what had happened to her, when she received her class.

Shrike looked up at her as the paper glittered away. "I can see you're going to say something insane," his voice sounded distant, "so please, for my own sanity, maybe don't?"