A Tale of One Deviant (Book One)

Chapter 136: Listening to Sherfire...Again

She was doing it just to torture me, I was sure of it. Or torture herself. Either way, we were both obviously miserable and she wouldn't concede, likely due to her pride, and just find somewhere else to be. I mean, I understood that it was her mother's space and probably somewhere she was used to being, but I was no intruder. There was no need to treat me so harshly.

     "Oiiiiiii," I called out to her from the orange barrier she'd locked me inside of. It was essentially my "room" for the duration of my stay in that heaven, although very transparent and more like a cage of healing. "I finished this booooooook and I want another oneeeeeeee-"

     Her chair jerked back abruptly. It seemed as if she would finally be done with me, leaving the heaven to get some peace and quiet elsewhere, but her direction changed my mind. Instead of marching for the door, my aunt stubbornly decided to go towards a shelf and put her own book away, grabbing another one. Her robes were very loose and trailed in the air behind her, causing her every step to be important, while approaching the barrier where I lay on the bed inappropriately. Well, inappropriate to her at least. That's what she'd told me earlier in the week.

     I mean, come on. I have zero privacy here. Why would I sit up against the headboard all ladylike when I could just...not? Besides, it hurts to sit down constantly.

     And it did. It was painful to sit down for a long period of time. Something was healing exceptionally slowly in my spine, excruciatingly so. I was sure that it was because of that moment when I was impaled on that statue underwater, the force of my momentum jacking each bone out of place.

     When will I be able to leave behind this stupid state of being?

     I didn't know what else to call it. Semi-half-Dragon was too long for my taste. State of being was vaguer but more appropriate of a phrase for my condition.

     Better than "Patches" anyway.

     Katerine stood in front of me. My hair was hanging off the bed while my three limbs were off to the sides. The book I'd just finished, my third one so far, was laying on top of my chest, making it difficult to breathe.

     "Is that the next in the series or are you going to give it to me deliberately out of order again? You're killing me Katerine."

     "I wish."

     "How rude!"

     She placed the book on the ground, unlocking the barrier. It turned orange again, just long enough that I could move and grab the thing completely inside, before the literal pink space descended and it was locked again.

     "Does it make you happy to have such power over your niece?"

     "You're not family to me."

     "And the sky is green. That's funny, because I'm sure it's blue and we're related by blood."

     But our conversations still didn't last long. I held the large book up, struggling since my fingers weren't exactly the longest despite having the strength enough to carry it. Trying to get it up on the bed was fighting an uphill battle, picking the precious source of knowledge up with it balanced on my foot and under my hand, trying to fling it up. Of all the beds to place inside there, it had to be the one with the very high mattress, didn't it?

     "Oof!" I collapsed over it after jumping up. The thing was bigger than my torso, and heavier than me by a lot. It was a really interesting series, and I was genuinely grateful that I finally had some downtime to just chill and read, but out of all the interesting ones in the room...Katerine had to pick the books that were the most difficult to carry and decipher. The language was very old, very unfamiliar. I'd seen it very few times before, just in carvings in stone here and there around Fangre and Kera. It was some sort of Dragon language. To find it anywhere else in the world was like finding a lemon growing from a lime tree, so tackling it was mint just tackling it. It was learning a completely different language while trying to understand the content along the way.