Slither

Fate rubbed his eyes as he stepped out of the time-dilation room. The clock in the hallway informed him that it was one in the morning. As such, the wooden hallway was barren of anyone else, although Fate knew that one of the five other doors in this hallway held the Mage that powered the chamber.

He had spent seven hours in the time dilation room, which was seven weeks inside. Alessandra was shocked by his progress, but that was only because she didn't know the whole story.

Since Fate was a toddler, he could read and write "English," a language he had made up in a sudden burst of inspiration. Since his mother passed before she could teach him how to read Ziob, he'd had to make do with English, writing notes and reminders and even his personal thoughts in this language.

Now, years later, Fate finally had the opportunity to learn Ziob. And to his surprise, Ziob was extraordinarily similar to English.

Ziob had twenty-six letters in the alphabet and both capital and lowercase letters, just like in English. But what really shocked him, something he discovered a week into his lessons, was that each Ziob letter had an English counterpart. Even more shocking, the Ziob letters were remarkably similar to their English counterparts, with one twist.

Take, for example, the letter "M." In Ziob, the letter mardram was just English's "M," sliced down the middle and flipped upside down. Kakak, the Ziob letter for "K," worked the same. This pattern is repeated for every letter in the Ziob language, including both uppercase and lowercase.

Fate was embarrassed that it took him an entire week to realize this, but once he did the rest of the lessons were a breeze. The pronunciations of each letter were even the same, so he just had to memorize these new letters. Once he did that, it was a simple matter of pronouncing the words on paper in his head. Then he could match it with the Ziob words he knew, and he'd be able to read.

That was how reading worked anyway, but the whole process was slower for Fate, who was still learning some of the bigger words in the Ziob language. Not just for reading, but in general. He wasn't lying when he said "stereotype" was one of the few big words he knew.

But now he had access to the Academy's digital library and the dictionaries within. While he could have used the text-to-speech function he used earlier on them, doing so for every title to find what was contained within, along with every book, just felt tedious. Plus, Fate was more of a visual learner.

It was safe to say that his next few months would be spent devouring the knowledge within those books. He didn't know how a language he came up with out of thin air was almost one-for-one with another, nor did he care. It was about time some luck came his way.

One might wonder how Fate hadn't found this out years ago. After all, if the languages were so similar, shouldn't it be obvious? But it had to be remembered that Fate quite literally hadn't even held a book for nine years, a streak that broke barely a few days ago when he held his class textbooks in his hands.

After his mother passed, his dad couldn't be bothered even to feed Fate half of the time. Where would Fate get books?

And while Old Man Travis was a kind man, even the forty percent raise Fate earned only left him with enough Lights to get a new shirt or pair of pants once a month. And considering his clothes were often rendered irreparable from the many fights he got into, he didn't have change to spare on books if he didn't want to walk around nude.

Plus, even if he had the money to spare, why would he spend it on useless books he couldn't even read instead of something useful, like a new bed? Brergan had a big rodent problem, and Fate often woke up in the middle of the night to rats nibbling on his toes. And the rats loved burrowing into his bed and sleeping in there.

When he didn't need a new bed, he definitely needed a cure for whatever disease the rats gave him. Fate quite literally had no money to spend on frivolous things back then, and even less to spend on things with no use to him whatsoever.

But now things were different. Not only did books have a use for him, but they also had the most essential use of all: expanding his knowledge.

In an Empire like this, where one's knowledge often determined how far one could go and how high one could climb up the social ladder, books were invaluable. Fate was tired of being an ignorant country boy, frowned upon by the uptight nobles for being illiterate. And now, he had the means to change that.

The door to the time dilation chamber opened behind him, Alessandra exiting into the brown-colored hallway, the signature color of the Academy's interior. She shut the door behind her with a click, smiling at Fate before she went on her way.

Fate noticed this before, but Alessandra was as tall as he was, maybe even taller. He never had the chance to process this fact as most interactions he had with her involved her sitting behind a desk, but now he could process the fact. And the perfume she wore…

A man didn't spend forty-nine days with a woman without developing feelings, especially when it's with a woman as kind and beautiful as Alessandra.

He shook his head violently, tearing his eyes away from the swaying hips on her departing figure. 'She's a professor, Fate. She's also the principal. It isn't worth ruining her career and getting expelled.

'Besides,' he thought with a dash of chagrin, 'she's way out of my league.'

He tossed Alessandra out of his mind with surprising ease. Unbeknownst to Fate, this ease wasn't due to willpower. The small bundle of affection within him unraveled at the slightest touch from an undetectable source of Mana he had no idea of.

This Mana, with its job done, slithered away, back into the foggy wall that existed within Fate's mind without his knowledge, and disappeared into the ethereal mist.