The Short Demon King

Chapter 26

I blinked a couple times at the sudden loud noise, and Kevin took that as a yes to his question.

"Alright, so I know you want to learn more general things about my realm to find any connections to yours. I wasn't a hundred percent sure the best ones to start with, so I grabbed a few of my favorite nonfiction books about nature since it'll be interesting and you seemed to like those animal books. Do you have a preference on which one we start with?"

Kevin held up the books he grabbed from the library, struggling slightly to showcase all of them at once with only two hands. I scanned the covers; a lot of them had illustrations of different plants and animals. One instantly caught my attention. It had a large, striped animal baring its fangs with bold text over its head.

"How about we start with this one?" I asked while grabbing the book to check its back too.

I ignored the text, examining the smaller illustrations of animals on it. Each looked completely different, some resembling cats and others big birds. The only similarities between them were glaring eyes and sharp teeth. Well the birds didn't have teeth, but they had very sharp talons.

I flipped the book around and handed it back to Kevin. He read the cover, "Predators, huh? This'll certainly teach you a lot about animals."

I scooted over to be able to peer over his shoulder as he opened it to the first page. The whole thing was full of words without a single picture. Thankfully there was a lot of space around each word to separate them, but I still had no clue what each one meant.

Kevin suggested, "How about I slowly read some of this to you so you can get a better understanding of how words are spelled out. And then maybe you can try to read some of it aloud on your own after? This'll hopefully be a little easier since you already know how to speak English."

I traced the large word on the page while nodding, excited to start learning more about their written language. This certainly felt like a step towards finding a way home.

I'd finally make some progress.

"This book is organized by animal, so that word you just traced is the name of an animal. This one is a tiger."

"Tiger," I sounded it out slowly, retracing the letters.

"Yep, and some of these words can be spelled kinda weirdly, so I'll specifically point those out to you. Let's look at this first sentence here..."

And so began the long process of trying to learn how to read. I understood some of the basics fairly quickly, like what each vowel was, but the rules were bent and changed so many times that I got lost easily. Kevin stayed patient and helpful the entire time, but I started losing hope as it all still confused me.

By the time Maya walked through the front door, we'd barely even gotten halfway through the book—and this one was thin. She left her bag on the counter and stood behind us to see the book.

"Whatcha readin'?" she asked.

"One of the many books we grabbed from the library today. This one's about animals," Kevin explained.

"Are you teaching him how to read or something?"

"Yep, we're workin' on it."

"I can't even imagine trying to learn how to read when you're not a little kid. How's it going for you, Jaye?"

"Eh, not great," I admitted. "It's just so hard to visualize words like that. But I'm sure I'll figure it out eventually. Kevin's certainly using those teacher skills of his!"

"Yeah, I'm sure you've got this!" She encouraged me. "Well I'll leave you to it. I've got a little homework left to finish, so I'll see you in a bit for dinner."