The moment Zora saw his new transfer student step into his classroom with manacles on all four arms was the moment he knew he was getting involved in something dangerous.
“This is the girl the Headmaster wanted you to meet, Mister Fabre,” the academy mage standing behind her said, his wrinkled face grim as he gave Zora a serious look. “If you can’t translate her words and figure out what she ate to look like this within two months, I’m afraid we’ll have no choice but to kill her before she loses her humanity.”
… Well, he thought, returning an amused smile to the mage. If she could understand your words, she would surely have ripped your face off ages ago for your bluntness.
The evening bell rang right on cue, and Zora’s class of twenty-one children raced out the back door, evidently terrified of the four-armed girl with skin as dark as obsidian. There was no hiding the black wings jutting out her back, the chitin shards creeping across her arms, or the bony face beneath her fall of feathery white hair. The bloody red eye on the right side of her face darted around nervously, while her milky human left eye occasionally latched onto his—and the abyss in it was cold. Distant. Fearful.
Even a blind man could tell she didn’t want to be here with him.
Sighing, he pocketed the chalk in his hands and walked slowly, stopping right in front of her. She reeled away, clenching her jaw—she looked like she was trying to hold herself back from snapping at his face with her razor-sharp teeth—so he knelt until they were looking eye-to-eye, sending her a soft smile.
The girl tilted her head and gave him a small, puzzled frown in response, as though wondering why he wasn’t terrified of her gnarly appearance.
That white human eye, and the fact she isn’t looking straight at me…
He’d hit the nail on its head. She was blind, but perhaps not completely.
"Where’d you pluck her from?" he asked the mage, not breaking eye contact with her just yet. “Her mutations are an onset of having eaten too many critter bugs without a system, correct? How’d she manage to mutate this far without anyone noticing?”
“One of our scouts found her devouring her parents in a secluded snow cabin in the Elchgott Marheim mountain range,” the mage said. “Her parents must’ve been force-feeding her some kind of winged insect over the years in hopes they’d be able to control her once she grows stronger, and that she’d be able to defend them in case anything ever showed up at their doorstep.” Then the mage shook his head, sounding forlorn. “Charlatans, they were. As if anyone could tame a human on the verge of turning into a bug.”
Zora pursed his lips. “You don’t say.”
“Some parents believe they can control a life because they brought one into the world. Shame life doesn’t always go as planned.” The mage paused for a moment before sighing, gesturing at the girl again. “Now, since she still has some human sanity left, we’re hoping we can reverse the mutations and cure her somehow… but we need to know what she ate in order to brew an antidote, and we can’t ask because we don’t know what language she speaks. She’s white-eyed, so we can’t get her to draw the bug she’s been eating, either.”
“Your scout found her in… Elchgott Marheim, you say?” Zora scanned the girl up and down, noting the little loop braids behind her ears. “That's quite close to here, isn't it?”
“Just over yonder, yes, but it’s truly a gargantuan mountain range. There are dozens of households and hundreds of tongues in the area she was found in, and that’s just the area she was found in,” the mage replied quickly. “Our contact said the cabin’s architecture seemed foreign, almost empire-style, so she could very well have moved from the far south where there are hundreds more tongues to–”
When the girl tilted her head to the left and bit the upper right corner of her lip, Zora spoke in a harsher tongue: the rayner tongue that was most spoken by the far southeastern Elchgott Marheim locals.
“Do you like my voice?” he asked.
“...”
The girl didn’t respond. No twitch of a brow, no twist of a lip, nothing. Matching her second head tilt to the right, he tried a tongue a bit further to the east, the vallum tongue most spoken by the cloud mountain dwellers. No response again, but the girl’s eyes stopped darting around nervously.
He smiled softly back at her, knowing he had her full attention now.
She’s probably hungry for dinner about now, so… He glanced at the clock above the doorway, watching the minute hand tick towards seven in the evening. Five minutes is more than enough.
The phola tongue. The koch tongue. The lossia tongue. He started with the Marheim tongues at first, but quickly realised that the way she bit the upper right corner of her lip was distinctly southern. Only southerners do that out of instinct. Moving down the continent, he tried the filis, chilo, and lynae tongues near the borders of the empire, before noticing she tilted her head more often when he spoke the far southern tongues’ word for ‘voice’. Now it came down to brute-forcing his way through the rest of the hundred far southern tongues, one sentence at a time until he reached the cephalo tongue—spoken only in a small chilli-farming town near the empire’s southeastern shoreline.
“Do you like my voice?” he asked, and her human eye immediately widened, lips parting slightly.
He’d done it.
“... N-No,” the girl murmured, rubbing her hands together as she squirmed where she stood. “Your voice is… loud.”
Faking a groan, he clutched his heart and mimed falling over backwards, making the academy mage frown and the little girl gasp in surprise. When she realised he was just playing around, though, she started giggling—an adorable sound more befitting her age.
So she does know how to laugh after all, he mused. Temper your voice now, Zora. Don’t frighten her with volume.
He sat upright, shooting her a teasing grin as he held out both hands for her to shake. Her eyes widened even more. She may be blind, but it was quite obvious her mutations let her perceive her surroundings in some way… and for southerners from the empire, it was customary to shake both hands for their first greeting.
One hand joins two fates together, he thought, crossing his left hand over his right, and the other binds them unto death.
A peculiar tradition, but the other children from the empire do seem to enjoy making a cross with their arms.
“I’m Zora Fabre, but you can call me Mister Fabre,” he said, smiling from ear to ear as the girl snatched his hands with a wide, dumb grin on her face. “I’m twenty-two, I like eating sweets, and I teach every single language class in this academy. What should I call you?”
The girl shook his hands violently, having far too much fun jerking his arms up and down. “I’m… I’m Emilia!” she said, her teeth sharp like daggers. “I’m… uh, I’m twelve, I also like candies, and I like… um, I like candies!”
“Oh?” he said, feigning shock as he leaned away slightly. “What don’t you like to eat, then? Sour plums? Roasted onions? Anything charred and mushy?”
“I don't like… I don't like bitter, either!”
“You don’t like bitter food?”
“Yeah!”
“I’ve tried eating bugs once. They’re very bitter.”
Emilia nodded excitedly. “Yeah! Papa likes making me eat them, too, but they’re always yucky and, um, wet!”
He gave a discreet look to the mage, and the man quickly whipped out a notebook as he let go of her hands. “Their little legs just get stuck in your teeth all the time, right? I don’t like eating bugs either. Do you know what you’ve been eating for… how many years?”
“Um…” she trailed off, counting her clawed fingers one by one. Then she raised five fingers and beamed at him. “Five years, I think! Or maybe four! And, um… I dunno what I ate! They’re hard to describe!”
Zora reached over her head and took the mage’s notebook, whipping out a stick of chalk from his pocket. “Hm. Let’s play a guessing game, then. How many legs do you think they had? Eight? Ten?”
“Bugs don’t have eight legs, Mister Zora!” Emilia puffed her chest out, planting her hands on her hips proudly as she raised six fingers. “Six! I remember! They’ve got six legs!”
“Oh, you’re quite right. Insects only have six legs, don’t they?” he replied in a steady tone, scribbling in the notebook. “Were they hairy? Scaly? Do they make crunchy sounds when you bite on them?”
“Not scaly, a bit crunchy, but what’s… um, ‘hairy’?”
“Touch your forehead,” he said, and she obliged, running her fingers through her smooth white bangs. He only noticed now that she had two little nubs for antennae; they weren’t fully developed yet, but in time, they’d make her look more insect than human. “That’s what ‘hairy’ means. Did your bugs taste like your hair?”
Emilia had to think for a moment before shaking her head. “Um… Yeah! A bit! Its little wavy horns were hairy!”
He paused. Then he grinned, erasing parts of his drawing. “Not scaly, a bit crunchy, and it has hairy antennae. Any special tastes that you can remember? Like juices that burn your tongue when you bite on it?”
“Um... I don't… um, I’m not sure–”
“That’s okay. Take your time,” he said, patting her head with the notebook and sliding it to the mage in the same motion. “Can I talk to the uncle behind you for a second? I’ll be back really quick.”
Emilia nodded happily as he stood up, showing the mage to the door. “Her name’s Emilia, and she’s twelve this year,” he said, switching back to the local tongue. “She says she doesn’t know what she ate exactly, but if she’s certain she tasted something with only six legs, two hairy antennae—and considering the fact that she’s already mutating fabric-like wings—then she probably ate–”
“White-winged moths of some sort, hailing from the Black Witch’s den,” the mage muttered, nodding gratefully as he placed his hands on Emilia’s shoulders, guiding her out the door. “That’s a good enough start. I’ll relay the message to the Headmaster and… what tongue was that, anyways?”
“It’s the cephalo tongue from the southeastern bank of the Attini Empire. The only people who speak it are locals from the Chiloco farming town, practitioners of Hawanpawar: the tradition of ‘silence to all but blood’. An old tradition, to be sure,” he replied, “but I think you’d be hard-pressed to find a physician who knows the tongue. The locals don’t teach it to any outsiders, and the last tongue hunter who tried to steal one of their dictionaries? They tied him to a blood totem and stuffed him with chilis until his tongue fell off. True story.”
The mage blinked, not amused. “And you can speak it because…”
“I speak every tongue on the continent,” he finished plainly.
“...”
Zora shrugged. Silence was the typical response whenever he told someone he could probably speak their twice-removed great-grandfather’s forgotten tongue, but having to elaborate would be a pain.
Instead, he simply resumed scrubbing the chalkboard while the mage shook his head, chortling under his breath as he patted Emilia’s head.
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“Well, I suppose the children don’t call you ‘Thousand-Tongue’ Zora for anything less,” the mage said, bowing curtly as he started nudging Emilia out of the classroom. “We’ll still have to figure out the exact type of moth she ate if we want to make an antidote, but… we'll do our utmost to find a physician who speaks cephalo. Thank you for your assistance, Mister Fabre. If we can save her life, I'm sure she'll–”
Emilia suddenly shook out of the mage's grip and dashed into Zora's legs, burying her face in his waist.
He had just enough pain tolerance to pretend her teeth didn’t hurt as she gently bit into his shirt, and enough common sensibility to figure she probably didn't want him to see the tears in her eyes.
“... Old man. How long until she mutates past the point of no-return?” Zora asked quietly, rubbing the back of her head as she mumbled into his shirt; a plea to not be separated from the only person in the academy who could understand her. “You said… two months? How accurate is this estimation?”
“Quite,” the mage replied, every bit as quiet as he was. “I’ve seen mutation cases like hers before, though, and when the unwell is a child like her, they never last longer than a month. Most don’t survive the mutation into a full insect, either. They simply… crumble away.”
Zora’s lips thinned into a line. “And how long will it take to brew an antidote once you figure out the type of moth she’s been eating?”
“Within a day or two. The brewing process itself doesn’t take long. The moment we figure it out, we’re going straight to the academy physician.”
“Then transfer her into all of my classes for the next month, not just into my homeroom,” he said, peeling Emilia away and extending a hand for her to hold onto; she blinked up at him for a moment before taking it gleefully, sending him the brightest smile her bony face could muster. “Eleven days a week, three weeks a month—her mouth is too small for the faucet of her heart, so I’ll stay with her and give her private lessons until she speaks our tongue perfectly. Feel free to listen in and be on standby until you have enough information to go to the physician with.”
The mage didn’t look convinced. The old man probably didn’t want her to mingle too much with the other kids just in case something went wrong, and to a certain extent, Zora understood his hesitance. They were just children, and Emilia could agitate easily with her mutations. Chewing another kid’s head off over some silly playground dispute would go straight into the Amadeus Academy’s records of horror in an instant.
But right here, right now, there was only one person Emilia could talk to without feeling like a complete outsider, and the mages most certainly wouldn’t find a physician from a small farming town thousands of kilometres away in time.
Zora knew this.
The old man knew this, too.
“... I’ll send word to the Headmaster, then.” The mage sighed, scratching the back of his head; Zora gave him a courteous smile. “For your sake and hers, I hope you can figure something out before she goes feral on all of us–”
“And loosen her manacles for me, will you?” Zora interrupted, frowning down at the heavy steel rings around her wrists. “As chains become an accessory, submission becomes second nature, and a child’s posture, their nature, and even their fate begins to take the form of a ‘prisoner’. She may be turning into a bug, but right now, she is just a child—don’t treat her like a monster, and you won’t get a monster.”
The mage looked at him pointedly. He was asking for a lot, and he knew it, but he wouldn’t teach with the sound of rattling iron in his classes, so the mage sighed reluctantly again before pulling out the key to the manacles.
“You like sweets, don’t you?” he asked in the cephalo tongue, grinning down at Emilia as the chains were dropped and collected. “I know just the store that sells the best sweets in the school. Feel like stuffing our bellies until we can walk no more?”
Emilia nodded exuberantly as she rubbed her sore wrists, returning to him a bright, pained smile.
Alright, then.
And so an agreement was made, a pact was signed in silence—he parted ways with the academy mage as he walked out of the classroom, hand-in-hand, with the girl who only had a month left to live.
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Two weeks later, Zora was still no closer to figuring out what kind of moth Emilia had been eating all her life.
With the Headmaster’s permission, Emilia had officially transferred into the Amadeus Academy for Orphans Indiscriminate—given the flowery black and gold uniform, the hair comb, a room in the dormitory, the whole package—and began her academic studies for the first time in her life.
It was readily apparent she’d never been to school before, which meant she lagged severely behind the other kids in his classes, and considering she couldn’t even speak the local tongue he conducted most of his classes in… well, he hadn’t minded working overtime every day for the past two weeks just to help her catch up. That included basic arithmetics, natural sciences, and general linguistics, of course—it was a shame the other students in his class didn’t seem to like her all that much with her eerie appearance, but he couldn’t really fault them for it, either.
She was, by far, the toughest student he’d ever taught.
“... When you’re holding your pencil, pinch one side of it with your thumb and index finger first, and then slip your middle finger under the other side,” he said, putting his pencil in her hand and wrapping her fingers around it. “When you’re writing, you’re only really moving your index finger. Try.”
Sniffling, two rolls of tissues stuffed in her runny nose, she hovered her shaky pen over her homework and tried to spell her name. Learning the local syllabary took her quite a while, but with only twenty-six letters in the local alphabet, it was a far easier undertaking than teaching her the cephalo syllabary. He was certain she knew how to write her name theoretically; she just needed to actually do it once, and that feeling of success would stay with her for the rest of life.
So, the moment she finally managed to scribble her name down, he leaned forward in his chair and held his hands up for double high-fives.
“Good job,” he said, grinning at the teary-eyed little girl. “No more homework for the rest of the week. Go to the washroom and blow your nose at the basin, okay?”
Emilia looked up at him, let go of her pencil, and felt the sheet of paper on her desk with her palms. When she felt there really was only one question box in the centre of the sheet—and she was the one who’d filled it in all on her own—she jumped out of her chair with a crying smile, high-fiving him with everything she had.
He groaned a little when her palms slapped into his, but managed to keep his pain under wraps for the most part. Her mutations made her inordinately strong, far more than the average twelve-year-old, but… she was still just a kid, and his colleagues would laugh their asses off if he let it be known he toppled over from a simple high-five.
And why are you glaring at me like that, old man? he thought, shooting the academy mage standing by the doorway a pointed squint. I know she doesn’t have a lot of time left, but we need to establish the basics first. She can’t possibly describe what she ate when she can’t even tell me what ‘wood’ or ‘stone’ feels like.
The wrinkled mage gave him a pointed squint back, as though to say ‘start probing her for more information now’.
… Oh, fine.
But I’m sure she’d rather be at the cafeteria picking up her dinner by now, so if she starts complaining and saying human heads smell delicious, I’m siccing her on you first.
By the time he sighed and turned back around, Emilia was already staring blankly out the window on her left, taking in the afternoon summer winds. White hair flowing, orange sunlight bouncing off her scarred cheeks—she looked so utterly tranquil that, for a second, Zora thought about simply letting her sit by her window seat until sundown.
But then she glanced at him with her bloody moth eye, and he figured there was no better time to start probing for information again–
“Mister Zora,” she whispered, pointing out the window. “Why’s it so hot today?”
Pause.
Eyes softening, he followed her finger out the window and surveyed the landscape.
Built in a mountain range in the middle of nowhere, Amadeus Academy was an old lord’s castle refurbished into a school for orphans by the Headmaster, and today as usual, the glass dome surrounding the entire academy kept it hidden from the wars of the outside world. The academy mages could control the seasonal fluctuations at their own pace, increasing or decreasing the temperature under the dome whenever they wanted.
So, it was a little strange now that Emilia pointed it out.
Warm summer colours dotted the rolling meadow plains outside, and sunlight refracted gently through the dome to keep the academy at an even, tolerable lighting, but the winds diffusing through the magic dome were particularly blustery today. Hot, strong, and humid. Like a storm was churning right outside the dome, and he just couldn’t see it through the completely opaque glass a few hundred metres away from the window.
“... Well, it is summer right now,” he finally said, shrugging lightly as he leaned back in his chair. “The armies of giant bugs outside the dome—the Swarm—are usually more active during spring and summer, because bugs can’t usually tolerate the cold winter brings. I bet it’s hotter because there’s something burning right outside, and the fire is heating up the winds that come in through the dome.”
Emilia turned and gave him a puzzled tilt of her head. “F… Fire?”
“Mhm. Do you know what that is?”
“No.”
“Well, it means…”
He trailed off, hesitating as he thought about how to define the word. He’d never had to explain ‘fire’ before—it was always easy enough showing his kids what it looked like with a matchstick—but since Emilia was blind, he wondered what fire even looked like with her moth senses.
So, he whipped out a chalk from his pocket and started drawing on her table.
“Bugs leave when they are satisfied with their meal, but the hunger of ‘fire’ knows no bounds,” he said, drawing a ball of flames with jagged tips at the top. “It’s… when something burns with air, and then there’s a flash of heat, a flash of light. It hurts when you touch it, but you need it to cook food and make candies and keep yourself warm in the cold. It’s formless, and it changes shape at the slightest of currents. Can you imagine something like that?”
She shook her head readily, feeling his drawing blankly. “It’s always snowy and cold in papa and mama’s house. They always say the ‘su-hk-mu-ths’ they raise in the basement don’t like hot places, so whenever I need water, they take snow from outside and make me hold it in my mouth until it melts.”
“... Is that right?”
That was another piece of information he’d give to the mage later, but, frankly, he didn’t know how useful it was going to be. She genuinely didn’t seem to remember much about the moths she’d been eating. No amount of delicate probing the past two weeks ever yielded any actionable answers, and… the way the mage stopped coming by as often to listen in on their after class conversations, he couldn’t help but think the academy was starting to give up on her.
Just the thought of it made him clench his hands into fists.
Like hell all of you are giving up on her after bringing her to me.
I didn't become a teacher to give up on kids like her.
I’ll show her ‘fire’, and then I’ll get her to–
“Mister Zora,” she said, tugging on his sleeve as she pointed out the window again. “Look.”
So he did with his brows furrowed, still ruminating in his head about all the ways he could teach her the definition of ‘fire’—and then he blinked, staring out at the strange, strange glimmer of light near the top of the dome.
He heard wind rushing into the dome.
He smelled char and rot wafting through the air.
And he saw…
…
… A crack?
He didn't even finish turning around to ask the mage if there was supposed to be maintenance on the dome today when the glass splintered with a deafening crack, and the last thing he saw was the mage dashing madly forward, rushing before the two of them with a wand yanked out.
Then he blacked out as a boulder smashed through the side of the classroom.
----------------------------------------
Crushing darkness.
Cold moonlight.
The faint sounds of a hundred giant insect legs skittering across the earth, heading straight towards the academy.
Zora awoke with a cough, a flail, and a mumbling Emilia in his arms. He was on the floor. Stone and glass and wooden debris were scattered around them—and he let out a shaky exhale, realising it was a complete miracle that the glass shrapnel sent firing towards the academy completely missed the two of them, annihilating only the rest of the classroom around them.
Then he blinked, coughed out a mouthful of dust, and realised it was no miracle at all.
The academy mage lay next to him, groaning and tapping his shoulder weakly to catch his attention.
“Mister Fabre,” the mage rasped. “Are you… and Miss Emilia alright?”
“... You’re worried about me?” Gritting his teeth, Zora let go of Emilia and rose onto his knees, ignoring the dull throbbing in his head as he tried to tear a piece of fabric from his cloak. “Keep your eyes on your own thread before seeking your neighbour’s, old man. You’ve a spike coming out your chest. This will hurt, but I'm going to apply–”
“I apologise, Mister Fabre, but… you’re going to have to take my place,” the mage interrupted, coughing ash and blood as he did. “I am simply… far too old to be casting defensive spells like that.”
Slapping Zora’s helping hand away, the mage reached behind him and ripped something small and black out from his nape.
Zora flinched when he saw it was a little metal cicada, its legs kicking and wings flapping as it tried to get the mage’s blood off its body.
“I’m certain you know what this is, a learned man as you are,” the mage breathed. “Eat this, and your system integration will immediately begin. I don’t know if you’ll survive it, but… well. You were one of the first students in the academy, so hopefully we’ve strengthened your immune system enough over the years with our medicines. Just remember: you must speak the word, and you must believe, with all your heart, that you can manifest it into reality.”
Then, the mage shoved the little bug down his throat, and the suddenness of the motion made him clamp his jaw shut and swallow.
He immediately retched, doubling over and trying to cough it out, but it was already too late at this point—the mage’s head fell limp, and his wand fell out of his bloody hands.
…
The old mage was dead, and Zora couldn’t even bring himself to pity the man, because something was gnawing through his flesh. Eating its way into his spine, burrowing into his nape, and then–
The little metal bug curled around his nape, and he saw the infamous status screen popping up next to his head.
----------------------------------------
[// STATUS]
[Name: Zora Fabre]
[Class: Magicicada]
[T1 Core Mutation Unlocked: Resilin Tymbal]
[Brief Description: Your words can become reality]