… No.

This isn't a hand.

What is this?

It wasn’t Mister Zora’s hand. The moment Emilia started chewing, she quickly realised it didn’t have the texture of human flesh. The ear in her stomach had been a lot stretchier, a lot warmer—Mister Zora’s ‘hand’ wasn’t that. It was just plain, regular meat, pulled cold right out of the pantry and stale like day-old bread.

She didn’t mind the meat not being cooked, though. She liked cold meat more than warm meat. Jerking her head back, she ripped the skewer out of Mister Zora’s hand and whirled around to face the window, chewing with blood and tears trickling down her lips.

Hungry.

Tired.

Cold.

Skin and flesh and wood and all, she devoured the entire skewer and swallowed a hard gulp, refusing to turn around and face Mister Zora. She couldn’t use a ‘mirror’, so she couldn’t tell what her face looked like—but it couldn’t be anything good. It couldn’t be pretty. She didn’t need to see to feel chitin plates growing across her skin, hardening her body, making her joints sharper and claws pointier and hair coarser.

If she were to turn around now, she’d scare Mister Zora, and that would be the end of that.

…

In response, Mister Zora flicked his wand at the door and slammed it shut, stopping warm air from seeping into the room. It was instantly colder here. She could start shivering again, and if she crawled back up to her corner and wrapped herself in her threads, she could recreate that cosy, swaddling environment again, where she wouldn’t have to look at or interact with anyone again.

However, Mister Zora sat down cross-legged behind her, and he wagged a piece of bloodberry candy in front of her as though he were tempting a stray cat. There were a few of those in the academy, and though none had ever approached her by themselves, they were always drawn to Mister Zora and the other teachers.

But I’m not hungry anymore.

I won’t… be tempted… by…

She caved.

Her antennae were still tingling. Her mouth was still watering. She turned around slowly and slid off her table, prying her claws out, and then she immediately pulled Mister Zora’s outstretched hand forward as she bit into the piece of candy.

She clenched her throat. She sniffled hard. She was so, so hungry, and though she didn’t want to show such a feral, animalistic side to anyone… Mister Zora patted her head while she sucked on the candy he was still holding onto, and apart from the taste of her own blood, his hand was the only other ‘warmth’ she could tolerate in this world.

“Thinking, at times, is the thief of joy,” he said. “Simply eat—that is all there is to this night."

She didn’t attack him. Her extra arms didn’t move on their own. Her mental fortitude ran out, and deep, stuttering exhales escaped her as all the built-up tension left her body—she cried and choked and sucked on the rest of the candy, blubbering incoherent words as she did. She cried about missing her home. She complained about not being able to talk with any of her classmates. She cursed her extra appendages and screamed about wanting to rip them off her skin. She apologised to Titus, his friends she’d scared, and the rest of the teachers who were trying their best for all of them. She wished she knew the local tongue perfectly. She wished she could just talk better, and while Mister Zora stayed quiet throughout, his lips parted to respond to her wish.

She didn’t even hear what he said; she simply grinded her teeth together, cracking the candy altogether.

“You don’t understand, Mister Zora!” she snapped. Fury and revulsion snapped into existence inside her, cold and sharp as they froze the blood in her veins. “You’re… you’re the perfect language teacher! You speak every tongue in the world! And then some! You understand everyone at the same time, and you can even… you can even–”

“For the longest time, I thought being able to speak so many tongues was a curse.”

Her throat felt tight as a flame lit up inside her. Mister Zora had never sounded so… plain before. She couldn’t exactly describe it, but she felt he sounded disappointed. In her? For snapping at him? For scooting away from him even though he came here just to feed her?

So she flinched and reeled away when he stood up, expecting a lashing, a scolding, or even worse, being ignored and given up on—but he did nothing of the sort.

In hindsight, she should’ve known he wasn’t like her papa—not one bit—but it still surprised her when he reached over her table to pull down the curtains, plunging the room into absolute ‘darkness’.

Bright or not, sunlight or moonlight, none of it mattered to her. She couldn’t see anyways. But even cold moonlight had its own warmth, and now there was none of it; she could ‘see’ well enough with her moth antennae, but there was no way Mister Zora could see anything.

That didn’t stop him from sitting back down and taking one of her hands, pressing it gently against the floorboard as he started carving shapes into them with his wand.

Drawings?

Is he drawing something?

“... I come from the Fabre Household, a family of interpreters and translators,” he said, letting go of her hand so she could feel his drawings for herself; a large mansion with a pointy roof, lots of mountains in the background, and a lot of stick people standing in front of the mansion. “There were one hundred and one family members across the main bloodline and twenty-one branch bloodlines of the Fabre Household, and all of us could speak at least a hundred tongues. We were trained from birth to be able to do so, and those of us who were particularly skilled would be sent out to serve as wartime translators between the different factions across the continent. After all, in humanity’s war against the Swarm, it is paramount that humans can understand other humans in the heat of battle—and because most of us were also trained as couriers and messengers as well, we were widely respected as the most prestigious interpreter household there was for many, many decades. Every major army wanted one or two of us in their ranks.”

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

Then, he flicked his wand and mumbled a quiet spell, shaving away the carvings of the mountains and the crowd of stick people. Now, there was only one stick person remaining, sitting in the open door of the giant mansion.

“Twenty-two years ago, I was born as the only son of the main bloodline, so you can guess how high the expectations that were placed on my shoulders were,” he continued, shrugging slowly. “My father and mother brought in language teachers from all across the world, and I was spoken to in a thousand tongues since I was one. I didn’t grow up with a ‘native tongue’. Words have always been rather… vague to me. They have definitions in dictionaries and encyclopaedias, yes, but they always mean different things to different people.”

He stopped carving for a second to look at her.

“Emilia.”

“... Huh?”

“What do you think about when you hear the word ‘silence’?”

She sniffled, rubbing her nose with her extra arms as she kept her human ones on the floor. “A… a room. A small room. Quiet.”

He patted her head, and she felt him smiling at her. “In the far northwestern soighe dialect, ‘silence’ shares the same meaning as ‘empty’ and ‘cold’. Their dictionary does not differentiate between the three words.”

“Why?”

“Ask the people who wrote the dictionary,” he said. “In the far northern yiyuan dialect, ‘silence’ also shares the same spelling as ‘void’, which also shares the same spelling as the second half of the word ‘nihility’. Go a bit further south where the northcentral cair dialect is spoken, ‘silence’ is spelled with the characters of ‘not loud’, which confuses a lot of children when they’re first learning the word in school. They see the character for ‘loud’ and immediately jump to the conclusion that ‘silence’ is ‘loud’... but they’re clearly not the same thing, right? Silence isn’t loud, right?”

She puffed her chest out, shaking her head vehemently. “They read too fast, then! They should read slower!”

“Right?” He chuckled, moving his wand again to carve a dozen, two dozen, three dozen more people surrounding the child sitting in the door of the manor. “But think about it from the perspective of the Fabre children. You’ve been learning the Amadeus tongue for the past two weeks, so you know how tough it is to link the words you already know to the words you don’t know, don’t you? Can you imagine how difficult it is to link together words from a hundred different tongues in your head? Can you imagine how confusing it’d all be, born to speak a thousand tongues and think in a million more?”

He laughed softly again, shaving away the carvings of the other people and leaving only the manor and the child. The child’s hands were clamped over their ears, adamant on blocking out all sounds; she immediately felt sad for them, and wondered if they could even think in their own head.

What tongue would they think in?

Would they rather not think?

“... Suffice it to say, I wasn’t a good talker when I was a child, and it wasn’t just me,” he said, carving a few more children sitting around the manor, all with their hands clamped over their ears. “It’s quite ironic, but for a family of expert translators and liaisons, most children in the Fabre Household were very, very poor at communicating. None of us had a lot of friends in or outside the household. A child from a branch bloodline may not be able to communicate at all with another child from a different bloodline, and we’re supposed to be cousins. ‘Family’. And I was the worst of them all—if you had the ability to speak every tongue in the world, you would have spoken for nothing. For all the good we do for the rest of the world, that is the evil of the Fabre Household.”

“...”

“And it wasn’t until I was brought to Amadeus Academy—when I was allowed to focus only on one tongue—that I became rooted in reality,” he said calmly, shaving away the manor, the cousins, and the rest of the household before carving in the star-shaped academy behind the child. “Language is an ‘anchor’. You may not be at home even when you are with your blood. You may not be at home even when you share the same food, share the same room, and share the same water in the bath. You are home when you speak your native tongue, though, so isn’t it only natural that not being able to speak the Amadeus tongue is making you homesick?”

Her eyes twitched. He flicked his wand up and drew the curtains back up, letting cold moonlight pour in again, but she found she didn’t quite dislike the light this time.

If there wasn’t any light in the room, the little carving of the child wouldn’t be able to see anything.

“You’ve only been here two weeks, and you’ve barely learned the Amadeus tongue as is,” Mister Zora said, standing up slowly with a heavy, pained groan. “It’s incredible how far you’ve already come with the basic words, so the more you learn, the more you’ll see Amadeus Academy as your home, and the easier it’ll be for you to connect with your classmates.” Then he rubbed her head and tickled her scalp, making her giggle and squirm around. “You may not be able to see it yet, but your classmates are just like you. They’re all orphans who come from cold, dark places, and just like you, they share more in common with you than differences… so apologise to Titus tomorrow morning, okay?”

He held out a hand, offering to help her up, but her blood was still cold and pulsing in her veins; she couldn’t help but gulp as she looked up at him.

“Will… will Titus forgive me if I do?” she whispered.

A pause.

Then he tilted his head, smiling softly. “Are you apologising only for forgiveness, or are you apologising because you think it’s the right thing to do?”

The right thing... to do?

Lips still quivering, nose still sniffling, she took his hand gingerly and let him pull her to her feet.

“There’s more cold meat downstairs, just for you,” he said cheerily, guiding her to the door. “The other kids are all eating in their own rooms, so we can eat next to the hearth if you want. No one will disturb us–”

“Why’d you leave the Fabre Household and come here, Mister Zora?” she asked in a small, shaky voice. “I thought Amadeus Academy was for people with no parents, but you said you had… parents… and cousins. Why’d you come here to be a teacher instead of that… wartime… translator thing?”

Another pause.

Mister Zora tilted his head up and tapped his chin.

“Because I wanted to help you find your home, like I did with the academy,” he said quietly, “and because the Fabre Household is no longer, and the Headmaster knew I had no blood to return to.”

There was a tone of ‘finality’ in his voice, and Emilia felt—even if she asked again—he wouldn’t tell her anything more than that.

But… that was fine.

She didn’t want to talk about her time in her snowy cabin, either, so it was only fair if he didn’t want to talk about his manor, either.

“... What does ‘silence’ mean to you, Mister Zora?” she asked, sticking close to him as he pushed the door open.

He thought for another moment, tapping his chin again. “It’s the fear in the air when a naughty student gets their name called on in class.”

“And what about ‘fire’?” she asked, squeezing his hand tightly. “What does ‘fire’ mean?”

This was the only question he laughed off with a little wave. “I’m still figuring that one out. Give me a bit more time, will you?”

She nodded, baring her teeth to give him her needle-row smile.

After all, she had no doubt he’d show her ‘fire’, and she had no doubt it’d be the third kind of warmth she could grow to tolerate.