Heimurn Chronicles (No, SV, you're a young valkyrie in the middle of a bizarre and dangerous journey)

Being left to your own devices, you found yourself trying to resolve the conflict between your plans. A part of you wanted to ask Amalia to go to the bathroom and to help you enjoy more of steam and warm water. The other part (probably conscience) indicated that it was a day since the last time you communicated with Ulren. After your journey here, it felt a little bit awkward to spend a day without him being around. The last thing you wanted was him thinking that you dumped him as soon as your living conditions sharply improved. But that wonderful warm bath though... After barely suppressing the onslaught of more hedonistic urges, you set yourself up to find your friend. After studying his spark, it was easy to track his location: he was on the same floor as you, somewhere near lady Rosaline's chambers. Not thinking long, you ventured to see what was he doing.

Carefully navigating yourself through the corridor empty of others, you ended up peeking at your friend standing on the balcony from which you enjoyed the scenery yesterday. It was still new to you to see him unarmored: without the steel carapace, he was involuntarily showing off the constitutional features of his race. What added familiarity to the scene was his brooding look. Judging by his facial expression and body language, he felt nervous or impatient for something. Not as nervous as in the stone chapel about a week ago but surely with something that made him steam off the tension by drumming on the balcony railing with the fingers. Recalling how your intervention calmed him down in the previous instance, your choice of tactics was limited to the trusted trick.

Grinning deviously, you crouched behind him and then swooped at him, embracing clutching to his massive back and wrapping with the wings for some extra cute effect. Your "fling" predictably startled him for a second, but then he recognized what was going on. Knowing that he is more responsive while surprised, you snuggled under his arm and proceeded to the next step of your plan before he fully recovered to his melancholia.

"You... do gut?" you gibbered unconfidently, salvaging the words you heard from lady Rosaline (or, at least, how you remembered them) during today lesson in hopes that he would perceive your curiosity about his well-being correctly.

The curves of his mouth began to slowly elevate synchronically with the brows. In response, he spoke something in an inquiring tone. Something you failed to recognize.

You tried to ask him again after poking him in the chest with the finger and repeating the question with minor changes: "You Ul-ren... you gut do?"

He proved to be unable to contain a grin anymore and answered to you in a phrase from which you managed to dissect something like "I'm doing good". He supplemented his answer with the question addressed to you - the question containing the word "speak". Rosaline asked you to "speak" when you were learning the symbols and their pronunciations, so... was he asking you to speak those out for him?

"Spek? Uhh... A, be, ce, de, e, ef..." you began to speak those out loud with the smug face and apparently got the man snorting with laughter from your attempts at language. By the time you reached "N," he was too busy having fun, so you had nothing left to do but to let him calm down. Once he did so, you already prepared another question concerning something you wanted him to do days ago.

"You read... can?" you asked and flapped your eyelashes at him. Predictably, he wasn't exactly sure what did you want him to read, so instead of torturing him with your gibberish, you took him by the hand and led to the library. He followed you, albeit not that enthusiastically, and on a halfway there, you could say he understood what did you want from him. Perhaps, he felt like spending more time with you, or maybe he felt guilty for turning down your previous request to read. Regardless, soon enough you settled yourself down at one of the tables while he took a lamp and began to search for a fitting book midst this vault full of various print.

It took him quite some time to find something he deemed appropriate for you, and the lantern he held burned half of its liquid fuel by the time he sat close to you. What he found was a relatively small book with the worn green cover and a lot of pictures inside. In fact, wherever he opened it, the book contained a few lines of text on its left pages and pictures on those to the right. As it turned out later, his choice was very appropriate, given your limited ability to perceive text without any visual mediators. For the next hour, he patiently taught you the meaning of words by the pictures, knowingly or not putting your newly retrieved knowledge of letters to meaningful use, gluing and systematizing the pieces of knowledge Rosaline taught you today.

The best part of all was the fact that he was very patient with you, providing you with the needed "puzzle pieces" of this tale and giving you enough time to compose them to understand the plotline, which, in fact, turned out to be a parable about four sibling ravens who flew in different sides of the world after they grew old enough to leave the nest, with each one of them meeting their fate depending on the actions taken at a certain point. The one that flew to the East had to endure the drought, saving itself from the death by dehydration by using pebbles to raise the level of water in the almost empty pitcher. The one that flew Westward was enjoying its easy and satiated life on the plains until it decided to prey on a sleeping serpent and died of the poisonous bite of the startled sake. The one that flew to the South eventually established a nest of its own on a tree that also sheltered a beetle with its nest. The truce lasted until the beetle eggs began to hatch and the raven decided to feed on the larvas. In the act of vengeance, the beetle snuck into raven's nest and rolled the bird's eggs out from it. The last of the avian siblings that Flew to the North fell sick and hungry but was rescued and nursed by a kind farmer. In return, the raven repaid by settling near and fooling other birds to not eat farmer's crops because they were poisoned and allegedly became the reason of its sickness.

Despite the story being very short, it took you quite some time to decipher and learn all the new words so they would provide with the context, and somewhere along the process, the lantern ran out of fuel, causing you to conjure a gently glowing spark to substitute. It was not only the process of intermediated "reading" that contributed to your enjoyment - the quiet atmosphere of you and your friendly giant sitting in a library at night and reading to fables under the arcane light felt fabulous on itself. You enjoyed this endeavor so much that when the story ended, you made a pleading face in the attempt to go for another one but, unfortunately, your ill-timed yawn sabotaged the attempt and persuaded Ulren to send you back to your bed instead of sitting with you until midnight and beyond.

Still thinking about all the new word you've learned from the story and about the parable itself, you crawled under your blanket. You had a hard time believing in the reality of the tale (why would there be a half-empty pitcher amidst a dry place and why haven't you seen any birds that were able to talk to people or other animals?), you could recognize the lessons it tried to convey: don't prey for seemingly easy fortune but be ingenious; don't turn on others but seek for mutual gains. Did Ulren pick this fable in particular so you could deduce these lessons? Was this choice of his an aimed method of reaching you past the language barrier and ignorance of such complex concepts as moral? Did he try to ingrain those lessons even though they seemed contradicting to what you saw in this realm until now? Maybe. Maybe, while being introduced to the language spoken by these people, you'd have a chance to ask him soon enough.

Tired of all the learning and thinking, but also satisfied by the progress and all the attention you were given today, you snugged under the blanket and dozed off.