Thousand Tongue Mage

Another week passed, and the campus was no smaller than it'd been.

Zora's boots clicked softly against the dormitory hallway as he walked towards Enki, walking at him from the other end of the hallway. Midnight was when the campus smelled of iron-rich soil, crushed moss, and rain that hadn't come. Midnight was when the air was quiet. The world was mostly asleep—and once again, they stopped in front of each other to stare mask to mask.

As usual, they'd separated this afternoon after their classes. Enki had vanished towards the campus' southern mechanical quarters, and Zora had meandered towards the archive buildings beneath the faculty tower. Both parts were fruitless. The walls gave no secrets. The ground no echo. The few students he discreetly talked to, still, knew nothing of a 'Vantari'.

They were searching an ocean with only a teacup, so Zora sighed softly through his nose as Enki just stared at him.

He didn't have to ask the little boy how it went today. Failure was, in its own way, a kind of routine.

As they both turned and travelled towards their dorm room, well intent on ending the investigations for tonight, they passed by the courtyard garden right outside their room—a quiet ring of soil and raised planters nestled between four dormitory wings—and that was when Zora heard the quiet shuffle of hands against earth, the soft patter of disturbed leaves, and the faint crunch of boots dragging through dirt.

He stopped just as they were about to reach their door, turning to listen.

Enki did too.

Just ahead, crouched low between rows of fungus-trees and hedge mushrooms, someone was crawling on all fours—digging, breathing fast, and whispering something to herself.

Zora frowned beneath his mask as he stepped out onto the soil, letting his boots crunch just enough to announce himself.

"Shouldn't you be asleep, little miss?" he said.

Eria jolted upright so fast she knocked her knee into a rock and let out a little yelp. Her hands flew behind her back like she'd been caught stealing, and she blinked rapidly as she stared in their direction.

"W-Wha—" she stammered, "you scared me!"

Zora sighed. The girl was kneeling awkwardly in a patch of soft soil, sleeves bunched up to her elbows and grime smeared across her uniform like she'd just crawled through a compost pit. Her hair was a little frizzy, and her gloves—once smooth and probably white like snow—were now wrinkled and probably somewhere between brown and gray.

"What are you looking for?" he asked.

Her face flushed with gentle heat instantly. "I was just… um…"

She glanced around, clearly looking for a believable lie, so Zora folded his arms.

"If you say 'gardening', I might just call the arbiter myself."

Eria stared down at her muddy fingers, and then she bit her lip, fidgeting in place.

"I was… looking for bugs," she admitted finally, voice tiny.

Both Zora and Enki blinked in unison.

"Bugs," Zora said, tilting his head. "You're looking for bugs… in the middle of the night?"

"Mhm." She nodded again, biting her thumbnail now as she glanced from one mushroom plant to another like they might scold her too. "I'm… hungry," she mumbled.

That made his brows twitch for just a moment.

Hungry for bugs?

"Didn't you eat at dinner?" he asked.

"I did!" she said quickly. "But… I didn't want to take too much. If I ask for more, the cafeteria auntie might give me a look, and then other students won't get as much, so I just…"

"You just started digging for bugs."

"Some of them are crunchy," she said defensively. "And I think… eating bugs helps, right? It gives you points or something. The 'bioarcanic essence' is good for… um, power."

Zora stared at her silently for a moment.

Then he rubbed his temple, sighing aloud.

"You do realise there are restaurants on campus, yes?" he said. "Some of them even open after curfew."

"I don't have money for that. My household doesn't give me a lot of allowance."

"Then ask Kita. She can buy you half the market if you told her you needed a snack."

But that only made Eria freeze. She didn't answer. She just curled her fingers tighter, stared down at her knees, and hunched her shoulders in that peculiar way children do when the question hits too close to something they're too proud to name.

And Zora immediately felt a little stupid.

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Well, of course she doesn't want to ask Kita for help.

Nothing worse than looking like a beggar in front of someone she clearly admired.

So he sighed softly again, brushing his coat off with a dry flick of his hand.

"Well," he muttered, "I'm starving, and this place smells like bugs, so I'm going to get something to eat. If someone happened to follow along, I suppose I wouldn't—"

But before he could take a full step away from the girl, he heard the air shift. A sound like cloth folding over itself. Then a dull thump onto the garden stones beside him.

He glanced to his side to see Enki standing right in front of Eria, holding out a woven basket of clean, fresh, and some even peeled fruits.

All looked very recently picked.

"Eat," Enki said plainly.

Eria stared at the basket being held out at her.

Then she looked up at Enki, shaking her head quickly.

"I… I can't," she said. "I can't accept this. I didn't pay for it."

"Eat," Enki said plainly.

"I don't like some of these. I mean—thank you—but really, it's okay—"

"Eat," he said again, cold and clear.

This time, the silence hung—and Eria had no choice but to slowly reach for the basket, or else the short, scary boy might hurt her.

She pulled a piece of what seemed like a citrusy food into both hands and took a small, hesitant bite.

Her eyes widened immediately.

Then she took a second bite. Then another. She began to devour the fruit like she hadn't eaten in days, and as juice ran down her fingers, she sniffled quietly—though she kept chewing with quick, rabbit-like determination.

As Enki turned and walked off without so much as a glance back, Zora lingered for a moment, watching Eria chew with her cheeks puffed out and her knees still sunk in the dirt like some half-dug turnip.

"... Sleep early, Miss Eria." He wagged a finger at her gently. "And do try to stop rummaging through the mud like a feral raccoon. You would be hard-pressed to find any Critter-Class bugs in these halls, so it would be much easier to pester us for midnight snacks instead."

She tried to mumble something grateful between bites, but he already turned away and half-jogged after Enki himself.

He caught up just as the boy was about to reach the dormitory door, and they walked side by side for a while, the walkway creaking beneath their steps.

After a pause, Zora asked, "Why?"

"Why what?" Enki said coolly.

"Helping her," Zora said. "You did it without being told. Why?"

Another pause.

Then, softly, Enki replied.

"Where I came from, there was someone who always gave me snacks even if I did not need to eat with my immortal body."

And that was that.

The boy said nothing more, and Zora didn't press him.

Zora only smiled, small and quiet behind his mask, and kept walking.

Before either one of them could reach for the doorknob, though, someone tapped on both of their shoulders.

"Wait!" Eria said, breathless, sweet, and disordered like a drawer pulled out too fast.

Once again, Zora couldn't help but furrow his brows beneath his mask. It was evident Eria had run from where she was kneeling to where they were now, but he hadn't heard her running at them.

Not a single step.

She's a student of this academy, isn't she?

What class does she have after all?

… He turned around and faced her properly, letting the silence settle a beat too long before asking, "Yes?"

"I… I want to repay the two of you," she said, shifting her empty basket between her hands. "I mean, I… I don't want to just take and take. You give me food, so I thought maybe…"

She trailed off, and her nervous breaths rattled for another good second before she finished her sentence.

"What if you follow me somewhere? Just for a minute?"

Zora heard the hitch in Enki's shoulders—the slight draw of the boy's sleeve fabric as he was about to refuse coldly—so Zora smiled in his stead, gentle and vague.

"Lead on, little miss."

To his surprise, she quickly stepped past them and opened the door.

Their room was quiet.

Kita was already fast asleep on the right bunk—her even, measured breaths of a trained noble was probably taught by etiquette tutors and governesses who valued posture even in slumber—and her heartbeat didn't spike. She didn't stir. The creak of the door didn't wake her, and neither did Eria's whisper.

"Shh," the little girl said, lifting a finger to her lips as she crept towards the girls' side of the room. "Follow."

While Enki slipped past in silence, Zora lingered by the door a moment longer, letting his fingers trace the grain of the wood as he whispered 'close' under his breath. The door sealed itself with a breath-soft click, the air in the room folding into hush.

Then he turned and followed the girl's faint shuffling steps towards her far corner of the cold room.

Eria's desk was tucked just right beside the window between the two sides of the room, and that was where they went. Zora heard her sleeves rustling as she crouched low beside it. She flicked a switch beneath the tabletop, and the gentle heat of a mushroom-lamp bloomed across the surface—and then she started tapping and pulling secret buttons and levers across her table.

Click.

Snick.

Tap-tap—whirr.

Zora tilted his head slightly. Three pressure locks tuned to her hand weight, a concealed lever in the inner frame, and a tension-release hinge.

And then the surface of the table lifted.

Wood folded away. Metal slots rotated outward. Hidden drawers slid open like petals under spring rain. The entire desk unfolded with the elegance of a ritual, and tools settled into place on the rising rack before him: used screwdrivers, needle-thin tongs, and all sizes of wrenches and hammers with oil still steeped in the hinge pins… and inside the desk-turned-workbench's storage compartment, there was a whole bunch of what seemed like scrap metal at first listen.

But quickly, he realised they weren't just scrap. They were layers of instruments and devices, messily packed and stuffed into the same compartment, each one humming faintly with the signature of repurposed life. They were legs twisted into grips. Wings lacquered into flexible plates. Antennae fashioned into wire-guides. There were goggles wrapped in compound eye lenses, carapace splinters fused to frame struts, and even a mask-like respirator fashioned from beetle jaws.

Not scrap.

Not junk.

Eria presented her workbench proudly to them—her little den of Swarmsteel.