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"So... If I learn this thing, you can talk to me?"

Torren nodded eagerly. Reya gave him an odd look before staring at the book incredulously. How could this thing let the mute talk to her? She had no idea. She gave it a sniff, wrinkling her nose at its musty odor. It didn't smell very good.

"How does it work?" She looked up at the male.

He glanced at her curiously, as if it were obvious. He opened the cover with his paw and then flipped several pages in. He pointed at some symbols, Reya staring back at him with an curious expression.

"So... this book is filled with the symbols you used at the stump? Is this how we're going to talk? It seems kind of slow. You know, I don't know if I like them; Gither always said that they were connected to dark magic." She was worried, but excited. The characters were new and interesting - she wanted to follow Torren's lead and dive straight into this strange system of communication, but she had no idea how he wanted her to start.

The spotted otter nodded in response. His expression turned pensive. Reya assumed that he was probably puzzling over the same thing. She wasn't surprised; the symbols were very complex. Lines weaved in and out of the shapes. Blunt and soft edges intermixed to form incomprehensible characters. She stared for several seconds, trying to make sense of the lines. Did the shapes represent objects? One looked like a pine tree, but none of the others stood out to her. There wasn't a lot of variation either; some were bigger, but for the most part the shapes repeated themselves a lot.

"What does it say?" she asked. Reya giggled at her own question. "I know you can't answer that. How are you going to teach me, though? You can't exactly tell me what this says."

Torren must have figured something out because, after tapping Reya to catch her attention, he started searching the floor of the forest.

"What are you looking for?"

Torren ignored her. He shuffled around the mix of leaves, needles, and twigs that blanketed the area. He finally found what he was looking for. He picked up a small stick, thin enough to hold but not thin enough to break under light pressure. He gave her a toothy grin and motioned her over to him.

The large otter began to dig at the ground, sweeping away the forest's natural residue. In no time at all, the male had cleared out a nicely sized circle of dirt. He began to write.

The first symbol looked like a one-legged table with a platform on the bottom as well as the top. When he finished, Torren, making sure that Reya was paying attention, pointed to the symbol and then to himself. He motioned for her to say something.

"Um... Is that your name? Its awfully short -" Torren cut her off, shaking his head. He, with some hesitation, preformed the same action again.

"You?"

The large otter seemed excited, but Reya could tell that she wasn't correct.

"Me?"

He shook his head. Reya tried to say something else, but he cut her off with a wave of his hand. He was thinking again. He suddenly grinned. The male had obviously figured something out. He gestured for her to say something.

"Umm... what do you want me to say?"

He thought for a second and then pointed to himself and started to walk in place.

"You're walking somewhere?"

He put one paw over the other as if he were holding something really small.

"You want me to make it shorter?"

He grinned and nodded enthusiastically.

"You're walking?"

He shook his head. He walked in place and gave a thumbs up, and then pointed at himself and gave a thumbs down.

"So I have the walking right, but it's not you?"

The male shook his head again. He pointed at himself again and then pretended to talk.

"Oh!" Reya exclaimed, "you're talking about a different word for yourself, one that you would say."

He clapped his paws and gave her a thumbs up in approval.

"I?"

He clapped and nodded. He then pointed to himself and then pointed to the symbol.

"Ok. So that symbol is 'I.'"

The spotted otter grinned. She had it.

Reya turned out to be a fast learner. Over five days Torren successfully taught her the alphabet. They were a long five days. Each day Reya would wander off to practice the characters that Torren had taught her the previous day almost immediately after waking up. Torren, in this time, would go fishing or berry-picking. Afterwards, he would feed the very hungry and grateful female before working with her on a new set of letters.

Reya enjoyed learning from the large otter. Admittedly, a lot of the time was spent with her making fun of the male - whose face was beet red more often than not. She couldn't help it! He looked so silly acting out the different words that he was trying to use that they could rarely go for an hour without the small otter doubling over in laughter.

The work was arduous and she spent most of her days studying the mystifying characters, but her dedication began to pay off as Torren's previously impenetrable writing began to make sense to her. She was exhilarated the first time that Torren was actually able to express something to her through a sentence - a simple inquiry as to whether she was ready to eat. The small otter was hungry; they had some wonderful fresh-water trout that Torren had caught earlier and preserved in the salt that Gither had arduously prepared and maintained.

"Are we done?" Reya asked, looking at the letters scrawled across the dirt surface. Torren had told her in writing that there were 26 letters. She had learned 26 letters under Torren's tutelage. It didn't seem like many looking back on them, but the memorization was tough, learning the ways that they formed different pronunciations was even tougher. The large otter shook his head and quickly scrawled some words in the dirt with his claw. 'No, this is where we start!'

Reya sighed exasperatedly. The massive otter loved to be quizzical with her, which she thought was funny considering his somewhat gruff appearance. She had asked him to be direct when they first started to truly communicate through text. 'what's the fun in that?' Torren wrote in response, grinning. Reya stifled her own smile; she couldn't let herself encourage the stubborn otter.

She definitely wasn't finished. Her face paled as Torren dragged the massive musty tome out from its safe storage within the den. She had thought that it was big before, but as she thought back on how small the letters on the pages were and how awfully thin each page was she couldn't help but shudder at the amount of time and effort she'd be spending.

"I thought you taught me everything already!" She protested, a sour look plastered on her face. She stared down the old book like an old rival back to fight over territory. Torren just smiled innocently.

Reya opened the book delicately. It was fragile, worn with age. The cover looked as if it may just fall off at any point in time. The type in the tome was small and static. It was unnaturally even and perfectly shaped. Reya read slowly, her strong voice audible throughout the nearby area. Her pronunciation errors were corrected with subtle nudges from Torren who was reading over her shoulder.

"Universal Sign Language for Apes, edition 13," she began. She shot the larger otter a suspicious glance at the mention of apes. She didn't trust monkeys, they tended to be tricky beyond even her playful nature.

Reya continued to read the introduction aloud. She skimmed over the first segment which thanked many creatures that must have been long dead. She read about the remarkable ability for nonverbal communication to cross the species barrier.

"What does it mean? All creatures can talk to each other," Reya questioned. She was perplexed.

'They haven't always been able to.' Torren responded.

"What do you mean?"

'Just keep reading. I'll tell you all about it when we can talk more easily.'

"You mean when I've finished reading this in, oh, I don't know, twenty years? Does that sound about right?" Reya stuck her tongue out at the male. Torren just grinned in response and pointed back at the book.

"... However, this book is not about the amazing people who have helped me with my journey of inter-species linguistics. It is about the communication itself. I choose to begin not with basic sentence structure, as taught regularly, but with certain specific objects and feelings in order to enable the instructed creature to display the extent of their cognitive ability before basic and more complex grammatical structures are considered."

Reya made a face. "This guy is pretty condescending." Torren chuckled.

She kept reading. "What does he mean by sign language anyway? Sign, like a marker? Is this a special way of writing?"

'Sign like a symbol. Gestures make words,' he wrote back.

Reya was beginning to understand. "That's why you were so eager to get me into here! This's got to be faster than the weeks it takes you to write responses!" she giggled at the big otter's indignant expression.

"This thing'll shave years off our conversations. Do you already know this stuff? I mean, I know you brought it out here, but have you already read it?"

He responded with a quick flash of his hands. The nimble otter fingers ran through the gestures with deliberate precision yet in rapid succession. The female watched in admiration.

"That's so cool!" she squeaked, "I never thought I'd be learning a new language! I mean, I know that there's really only really one, its just, like, a different, but just learning that seems so awesome! I mean, when I was a kid, I made up a language with my friend Sylvia, and -"

Torren shut her off. He got the point. He gave the book a brisk point, reminding her of the current task. Reya grinned sheepishly and returned to her careful scanning and reading of the text.

Despite the overwhelmingly prissy and condescending tone, Reya found that it was far easier to learn sign than it was for her to learn letters. The gestures made sense too! For example, the word for 'hungry' was a paw running down your belly - like food getting eaten.

Despite that, it wasn't a terribly fast process. She was studious, working at the book every day and beginning to experiment with small conversations with her larger friend using her new knowledge. He was often difficult to understand, but his explanations served to help her learn even more.

Additionally, the book often referred objects that she didn't know the regular word for, let alone how to use it in sign. Torren had to explain to her what a pineapple was, but even he couldn't make sense of the word 'elephant.'

In a week, she could communicate with the mute in a basic, albeit effective manner. In three they could actually manage a conversation. After a month and a half Reya understood most of what Torren was able to say with some confidence. He, in turn, didn't feel restricted in talking to her. Anything he could sign the small otter could understand or he could explain.

She ate up the material like her favorite freshwater salmon, cooked exactly how she liked it. In the time that she wasn't talking to Torren or reading through the demystified book on sign language she stitched herself together a roughly made sack to hold the book and make it a bit more portable.

Reya loved to lug the book out to the riverside, a much easier task with her handiwork, and study along to the serene calmness of the flowing water. Torren would join her occasionally and more often than not, his arrival would spark a rapid degradation of her focus until they were splashing each other and making sloppy signs as they tried to rapidly communicate in the water.

She was making her way to the lake with her book nestled snugly in the pack at her side. She had an air of eagerness around her, Torren was going to be ecstatic! He had been commenting on her weaving skills and she had herself done a bit of boasting about how she could make anything that Torren could think of with nothing but reeds and a bit of sap to hold the shapes together. He, of course had challenged her on it, and she had been secretly working on her pet project ever since.

She glanced down at the small wooden sculpture almost for affirmation. 'Yes,' Reya imagined it replying, 'Torren's gonna love me!' She had a hard time keeping a secret like that. Every time that Torren almost caught her working on it, she had wanted to shout out what she was doing so that he could see! She wasn't good at waiting! But still she persisted! She finally finished, and wasted absolutely no time in carting it out to the river where she suspected she'd find the spotted otter.

He'd been very pensive lately. She didn't know what was going on, but she suspected that he was just experiencing life as it was in the forest. Not much happened. She'd often dealt with it by chatting up a storm with Gither or whatever hapless local critter she happened to encounter nearby.

She stopped for a moment and sniffed the air. It seemed a bit too hot. Winter was closing in fast and she could have sworn that the days were supposed to be colder than this. She grinned to herself. She should count her fortunes instead of worrying about them.

Then she smelled the ash.

The unmistakable smell of fire. Her face blanched. Reya had heard stories of forest fires, but had never experienced one in her lifetime.

And it was getting hotter fast.

What direction was it coming from? She darted forwards and sniffed again. It was definitely behind her.

She picked up her pace and moved towards the river. It wasn't too far away! She'd be there in a minute! It was getting hotter and hotter. Half a minute!

The fire roared in front of her.