Page 62 of Until the End of Ever
“Are you ready?” Kleos asked a beaming Elias as we settled inside Ronan’s carriage.
I made a mental note to look into getting my own. When it was just me, it was convenient to borrow Ronan’s or my parents’, but Kleos deserved her own carriage. She clearly liked horses. I’d have to get started on a stable. There was enough room in the ground garden for one. I made a mental note to ask Ronan how he handled his.
“Excited. We didn’t have schools back home. We learned by watching. Once of age, we could earn…” He looked up, his finger on his chin as he considered the word. “Apprenticeships.”
That was the only term he returned to his native language for.
I whistled. “You’ve learned to speak English so fast.”
Elias grinned. “Languages are easy. There are many in our world. Each tribe has their own. There is a ritual performed on children. We all understand each other.”
So it was a skill one could acquire through magic, not a gift inherent to dragons. “Do you know the ritual?” I leaned in eagerly.
“I’ve seen it done to many three-year-olds. Chants, and a potion so full of honey we can barely taste the blood. But I don’t know it precisely.”
I sighed. The likelihood of a ritual from his world making it here was low. But understanding every language—learning them overnight, being understood across worlds? That might just be worth a trip to Terra.
“Can you learn to write as well as speak?”
Elias grimaced. “With time. Writing is harder. It depends on the differences in script.”
I palmed my breast pocket for the miniature journal and resized it before handing it to him. “Is your alphabet different?”
“Much,” he replied, frowning.
I handed him a pen, that ever-curious part of me always eager for knowledge. “Write something. I’ll write it in English underneath.”
He started to scribble along a blank page. Next to him, Kleos gasped. “That’s Runic!”
“What?” I slid to their bench on Elias’s other side—I didn’t trust myself to think about anything except touching her if I sat closer to Kleos.
Indeed, the boy was scribbling runes, mixed up, inside out, added together to form words and sentences.
Kleos and I exchanged a knowing look over his head.
“I wrote, my name is Elias, son of Elunia. I am sixteen winters and have found my beast. Could you write it for me?”
I absentmindedly did as I was told, and then added the alphabet underneath. “These are our letters. If your runes are like ours, do they work phonetically? And then some runes are words in themselves.”
He dipped his head. “Yes, this is the soundba, but alsoberkana, for nourishment and fertility. They use it to calm the anxious, and ease the births.”
“Ourberkana’sthe same!” Kleos gasped.
Soon, we were comparing all his runes, finding them similar, equivalent, or in some cases identical. With that knowledge, Elias assimilated the alphabet with ease, and started to practice writing his name, along with a few words. His letters were oddly sharp, yet elegant, and he made several mistakes, relying on sounds, but for someone who had not even known the existence of English yesterday, he was still downright prodigious.
By the time we’d rolled up to the entrance of Night Academy, I intended to tell Ronan he’d be an idiot not to enroll the kid straight to college, no matter his current level in written studies. He’d catch up,fast.
The carriage wasn’t even checked at the gate, given the fact that the doors bore Ronan’s sigil of a moth with wings shaped like crescent moons, and a body reminiscent of a pen, with two crescents on top and at the bottom. The official Nachtigall sigil was two crowned nightingales in flight with the same crescents; they looked alike at first glance, but he hadn’t kept many of the original symbols.
That made me think about the Regis sigil, chosen by Cassius and improved upon by my mother: a full moon with aspiral within, flanked by two crescents, and intertwined snakes fighting over a skull underneath, representing both Hypnos and Thanatos, our patriarch. Mother added the moons, believing the snakes were a bit too dramatic.
I never made use of it; I was the spare after all. Damian owned the signet ring with the full sigil. Mine was a simple ouroboros. I wondered if it was time to pull a Ronan, so to speak, and design my own. Unlike my friend, I didn’t have any issue with my family; it wouldn’t be an attempt to put distance between us. But Kleos wasn’t represented in my sigil. I didn’t like it.
It occurred to me that I was treating the matter like the woman was already bound to me, when she’d only agreed to let me regularly shove my cock inside her less than a day ago. And after three seconds of deliberation, I decided I was just fine with my approach.
At the end of the long alley flanked by the oldest light trees in the entire underside, the carriage stopped by the gate of the main facility.
Elias hopped out first, followed by Kleos. I could see the same look of speechless wonder on both of their faces, and I remembered it was Kleos’s first time on Malice, too.
