Manifesting | kotlc

- chapter - twenty - eight -

Eamon and I spent months after that day working together, him sitting in on my English lessons from time to time. A new school year had started after a few months, where we both moved up to Level Six. Despite only being Level Six, I was given access to the Level Eight Linguistics class so that I would have a more formal way of learning my languages. Everyone else on our team had the same, although Atlas and Juno were most likely going to be in the course anyways. 

Despite having my formal lessons and my informal lessons, the informal ones being the ones Eamon would sit in on to be an extra help if needed, it was like I was getting nowhere. I could tell my teammates were getting slightly frustrated with me. They had all already been able to excel in at least holding a common conversation, basically meaning they could go to their areas and order food if needed. I was able to grasp vocabulary and was starting to understand when people would speak to me, but speaking myself was extremely hard. It was like I was unable to release the sounds despite my mind knowing what needed to be said. 

Despite my struggles, as planned we went to visit Eamon's extended human family and met with everyone. He explained to everyone that I could mostly understand what they were saying, but I had difficulties talking myself. The easiest lie was to say I was a friend from Greenland who spoke Greenlandic, as he figured his cousins would have no idea what Greenlandic would sound like. They were a bit surprised to find that he spoke Greenlandic, so he mentioned that it had been over two years since they saw him and he had actually done an exchange program there where he was forced to learn. They bought the story, and it allowed him to translate for me when needed, and give me a voice when I had things to express I couldn't do in English. 

No matter though, I was getting frustrated with myself. Despite my improvement, I knew I would never be as good as they wanted me to be in a time constraint. With each passing day I was worried that would be the day Eamon would tell me to not bother and just go home, and to tell me that the council decided my lack of progress meant that I would no longer be welcome on the team. 

That never happened, though. I started to slightly improve a big quicker once my mentor from the previous team valiant, Haelyn, reached out to me and started to join in on my lessons, as she didn't know English either and figured it would make me feel better if there was another person in the room as clueless as me. It turned out she was just as bad at learning languages as I was, and we bonded as we took turns helping each other improve. 

One day, though, it was particularly hard. I woke up late and almost missed school, I got lunch detention for entering my morning class late, and my last class that day was my linguistics class where my teacher gave a long, agonizing rant on how difficult I was to teach--complaining that normally she'd be working through multiple languages with her students, but I was having trouble picking up even one. She made a snide remark about my age, and I recognized that she believed the class was meant for Level Eights for a reason. 

When I got home both my parents were at their restaurant, and when I opened my homework to begin I made the realization I had left behind all my notes by accident. With each new thing that happened that day, I felt like all the past months were coming crashing on me. It had been almost a year since I manifested, and while I felt confident in those abilities, it was like those were my only talents. Fire. 

I was to a point where I wanted to ignore Marella's warnings and summon everblaze in hopes of it backfiring and burning myself alive. At least it would mean I would no longer be forced to learn English. Grammatically the worst language to ever exist. 

All my pent up emotions started to release and I found myself sobbing into my pillow, hoping it would swallow me and all my misery. I tried to assure myself it was just a bad day, but considering the past few months had been a series of bad days with the occasional happy day sprinkled in, it felt like a lost cause.