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Reya half expected to find her brother sternly waiting for her as she walked into her den. She wasn't quite sure how to feel when she didn't see him. An ache in her heart told her that she missed him, but she couldn't even think of talking to him again without her stomach clenching.

She noticed Torren sizing up her den. The entryway wasn't very big. It was only slightly taller than the bigger otterand just wide enough to fit in four small cloth doorways. Cedar planks lined the room with several stout support beams keeping the overhead planks suspended above them.

Reya loved the smell of cedar. Gither wanted to use oak because it was so easy to come by, but she had insisted that they use cedar instead.

She pushed through the portal to her room.

"My brother's room's on the far right. Actually, on second thought, you probably shouldn't. If he comes back to you sleeping there he'll angry as a wet cat! C'mon, you'll stay in my room with me."

Her small spherical room was a mess of bedding, toys from when she was a pup, and crude wooden sculptures that she had carved in hours on hours of boredom. The larger otter followed her in.

"You can sleep on that side. Okay?"

He nodded. Reya collapsed on her bedding with a sigh. "What a day," she muttered. Torren lay down opposite from her.

The next day she woke up to an empty room. Torren was outside, vigorously carving symbols into the ground with a lump of charcoal. Reya stumbled back. Was he marking her den with runes? Was it some sort of witchery?

"What are you doing?" she stuttered in shock. Torren jerked up and stared at her like caught prey. He gestured with his paws, but Reya didn't understand what he was trying to say. However, she clearly understood the expression on his face. It was as if he was screaming, 'it's not what it looks like! You don't understand!'

Reya took a deep breath and then decided to give the spotted otter the benefit of the doubt. Witchery was only the stuff of legends. Besides, even Gither could read the old runes; surely there was no real danger.

"What are you doing?" she repeated slowly. He stood still and then dropped back to all fours and beckoned the otter girl closer. Reya took a single step forward.

"What's all this for?" she rephrased. Torren suddenly perked up. Careful not to make any sudden moves, he shuffled past Reya and back into the den. She cringed as he brushed against her stiff body, but she didn't stop him.

He grabbed the package he had collected the day before. It was still sitting in the middle of the entryway. The wrapping that had seemed so careful was torn away in moments. Inside was a musty old tome.

"You went through all this for a book?" Reya asked suspiciously.

Torren opened it with the care of a mother pulling burrs from her kit's pelt. Reya, despite her hesitancy, couldn't help but inch forward to see the pages better in the dimly lit room. The male continued to turn the pages until finally his face lit up with satisfaction. He pointed at a set of illustrations in the midst of runic text. One side depicted a maple leaf. Next to it was a diagram showing two paws gesturing in an odd manner. Torren stood on his hind paws and repeated the gesture himself.

A wide smile spread across Reya's face as she had an epiphany. "You're saying maple right now, aren't you?"

Torren grinned. He closed his paw into a fist and made a tapping motion.

"Is that a yes?"

The spotted otter nodded eagerly.

"Wow, that's amazing! You can speak without even talking! I used to make up secret words with my friends when I was a pup, but I never thought of anything like this! I mean, it didn't take long for Gither to figure out that whenever I told Castor, my badger friend, we were going to play in the thicket by farmer's hill that we were really exploring across the river. Gither never would've been able to chew us out if we'd known how to speak like this!"

At first Reya had found Torren's quiet laughter disconcerting, but this time she couldn't help but to join him with her own chuckle.

"So what's with the runes outside?"

Torren pointed at her and then dropped back down to his paws and pointed at the book.

"Oh! You want me to be able to read this!" She eagerly exclaimed.

He nodded happily.

"Well, I don't know about that," she said, the enthusiasm draining from her voice, "I don't even know how to read Script."

Torren still led her outside. However, he didn't stop at the runes carved into the ground outside of her doorway. Instead, he led her up to a maple tree. Reya waited expectantly as he carved characters into the dirt.

"Does that also mean maple?" She impatiently asked before he finished.

Torren smiled and nodded. He swiped the stick under the first character in the word and wrote a bigger version of it underneath. The stick tapped against the word and then lightly against Reya.

"Wait, so you can break up these runes?" The small clawed otter asked in confusion. She was used to Script where each drawn character represented something on its own. It was a hard language to master. How well a person could write was decided by how small they could draw each picture and still have it be perfectly recognizable. In fact, very few non-rodents bothered to learn how to use Script.

Torren nodded again vigorously. He pointed at the large character again and then pointed back at Reya.

"Huh? Does that character have something to do with me?"

He shook his head and mouthed a silent word.

"I don't get it," she muttered.

In response, Torren once again pointed at the character, mouthed a silent sound, and then gestured towards Reya.

"Mmeh?" She guessed. The mute looked excited, so she figured she was right.

She had a harder time with the other letters in the word 'maple.' She struggled trying to separate the first two and last two letters. It wasn't until the sun was past its zenith that she finally figured out all five of the symbols under Torren's increasingly frustrated tutelage.

The two otters only managed to work their way through the sounds in 'table' before stopping for lunch. Reya was happy to jump back into the warm late-summer water. She darted around Torren, playfully tugging at his tail and whiskers. He responded in turn, trying to bat back at the lithe female with his heavy paws.

Eventually, they each got around to hunting down fish and crayfish for their meal. Reya built up a fire in the small fire-pit next to the den, while Torren skewered the catch on polished oak fire spits. Reya often ate her meals raw, but she didn't want to make Torren uncomfortable if his family of otters only ate their meals cooked.

"I really expected Gither to come back today," Reya said through a mouthful of trout. She surprised herself with how indifferent her voice sounded. There wasn't a hint of a lump in her throat as she spoke.

"I guess he -" Reya stopped, surprised, as Torren rolled onto his side and began to gesture with his paws. In slow deliberate motions, he pointed off into the woods and then brought his paw back to his head only to cut down with it in a straight line. He then held his paw out to the side, fingers straight up, and then brought it to his chest where he curled all but two digits into his palm.

Reya laughed. "You're trying to talk to me, aren't you! I don't think that's going to cut it though." She sternly mimicked Torren's cutting motion, setting him off on a bout of silent laughter. "You just give it a week and I'll be waving right back at you!"

Her second day of learning was the most difficult. It seemed as if there were an endless amount of written characters to learn. Furthermore, the more she concentrated on Torren's paw gestures, the more she realized that she couldn't understand what he was saying at all. It all felt hopeless.

The work was arduous and she spent most of her waking hours 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 question about whether she was ready to eat. She was ready for anything that didn't involve scratching runes into the dirt with a stick while muttering their pronunciation to herself.

By the end of the third day she realized that she had seen all but one or two characters in each word that Torren was writing for her. By noon the day after, there were no symbols left for her to learn.

'Thats it' Reya slowly pieced together the sounds of the two words written on the ground in front of her. Torren was smiling like a baboon gone mad.

"I'm done?"

He held his paw out, with his thumb and two fore fingers extended, and then clamped the three digits together. He had responded this way often enough that Reya understood that he was saying, 'no.'

"Oh! You're going to teach me those hand movements now?" Reya asked, excited. She had looked forward to learning his paw motions ever since he had started teaching her the old runes. She was amazed at the speed and fluidity with which his paws moved whenever he began to talk, and she wanted desperately to be able to respond in kind. Besides, the old runes left an uneasy feeling in her gut when she stared at them for too long. She much preferred communicating with Torren using gestures.

Reya had barely noticed the musty old book since Torren unwrapped it, but it still lay on the floor of the den in the same spot where they had set it down.

She opened the book delicately. It was fragile and worn with age. The cover looked as if it could fall off at any point in time. The symbols in the tome were small and hard to decipher. Reya guessed that a rodent had been tasked with writing them.

"Sign Language for Thumbed Mammals, Third Edition, written with the collected efforts of the conclave," she slowly read. Torren, leaning over her shoulder, corrected her many pronunciation errors with gentle nudges.

Torren reached a paw to the side, and began to gently thumb through the frail pages until he found the first page with an illustration. He pointed to the start of page's text. After squinting at the small writing, Reya slowly began to read again.

The first paragraph was the slowest for the small otter. There were lots of words that she had difficulty piecing together from their sounds. However, much to her relief, the sections of text were not very long. They each contained a word, a definition, several example sentences, and an illustration of the corresponding paw gestures. She enjoyed the illustrations immensely. The author had drawn a different animal's paw for each word, so Reya kept herself entertained by trying to guess the species for each.

After a week, her brother still hadn't come back. Every morning she woke up expecting to see her older brother mulling around the various herbs and poultices in the den. Instead, she usually found the big mute otter proudly carrying a large basket of fish back to the fire-spit.

Reya tried not to let his absence phase herself. He'll be back tomorrow, she kept telling herself, he'll be back next week. However, as weeks passed, there was still no sign of his return.

The little otter distracted herself with studying as much as she could. She worked through the chapters like she worked through fresh trout every morning. Her only breaks were for meals and her ever-important fishing time. Reya joked with Torren that if her friend Sylvia the rabbit showed up, she wouldn't even recognize the studious otter.

However, Reya struggled to convince herself that nothing was wrong. She struggled to convince herself that her brother was out on some important quest, like one of the heroes in the stories he always told her as a kid. She struggled to convince herself that she didn't care that Gither was gone.

But she still woke up crying in the middle of the night.

'Where are you from?' Reya signed, looking down at the example sentence from the end of the book's second chapter.

'Good job!' The spotted necked otter congratulated her.

"C'mon Torren! Tell me!"

'Sign it!'

She sighed in exasperation and rolled her eyes. 'Please say, Torren!' She signed.

'I'm from the west,' he answered.

"That's not an answer! Everywhere's west of here!" The mute was infuriatingly oblique when she asked him questions about himself. He always either redirected the conversation or replied with annoyingly cryptic answers.

'Sign it!'

"I can't sign that! I don't even know half those words!"

'That's not an answer! Everywhere's west of here!' Torren signed with a toothy grin, 'Now sign it back to me.'

Reya groaned and did as he asked. After her first two weeks of learning sign language Torren made her speak with it as much as possible. He said it was the best way for her to learn. Reya didn't mind. She was excited to learn the mysterious language, and was eager to use it. However, she quickly grew frustrated and resorted to spoken word when she couldn't think of how to express a thought.

Reya's sign language improved faster than a rabbit in a forest fire. She made sure, however, not to tell that joke when Sylvia came to visit. The rabbit girl showed up unexpectedly one day, checking in to see if Reya was alright.

"Reya! I haven't seen you and your brother for weeks! What've you been up to?"

"I," she hesitated nervously, "I've been helping out another otter who had this really bad injury in his mouth! He showed up a few weeks ago with that and a hurt paw and his paw's all better and everything, but his mouth is still really bad and -"

"It's okay! Don't worry!" Sylvia laughed. She hopped up close to the otter's ear. "So, is he hot?" she whispered.

Reya flushed under her fur and recoiled from the rabbit, who seemed to be in hysterics. "Shut up Sylvia! Doesn't even matter! I mean, it's not like you'd care," she grumbled, "he's an otter, not a rabbit!"

The two friends talked for some time before Torren peeked out of the den. Sylvia immediately invited him over. For all that Reya had said about how much fun she would have had knowing sign language as a child, she didn't want to tell her childhood friend about how she communicated with Torren. However, it didn't end up mattering because Torren began signing to her as soon as he joined the conversation.

Sylvia looked impressed between her fits of giggling about how ridiculous Reya and Torren looked when they stood on their hind paws and signed to each-other. Torren seemed embarrassed by her laughter, but Reya took it in stride. Sylvia's sense of humor was very easy to set off.

From then on, Sylvia visited the pair of otters every week. However, over the course of four months, the bright green leaves of summer began to transform into the brilliant fiery colors of autumn.

With every passing day she could understand Torren more and more. With every passing week, she asked him to explain what he was saying less. With each of the four months that seemed to blur together like a cheetah pack on the hunt, she thought of her brother less.

And yet, when she found herself alone, sitting in the forest with no Torren nearby, no book nearby, and no river nearby to occupy herself, she couldn't help but think about the adventures that he had told her of when she was just a pup. Back when she admired him.

She looked at the maple leaves above her, blowing in the gentle autumn wind. She was sure that they would begin to fall by the end of the month. But for now, she could admire their beauty in the dazzling morning light. Reya found that it was always best to distract herself with the positives.

Although it was becoming colder, she had been feeling warmer and warmer as she sat in the small grove. However, she prided herself on her optimism. She trusted that everything would work out in the end. Gither would come back. He'd see that Torren wasn't a bad otter and that he was actually a good friend.

Then she smelled the ash.

The unmistakable smell of fire. Her face blanched. Reya had heard stories of great forest fires of the past, 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 between her and the den.

There was only one way to go. She had to make it towards the river, or she'd be stuck with nothing but woodland on all sides. She twisted and turned, branches scraping against her fur as she raced for her life

The river was close. It couldn't be farther than three minutes away!

But the fire roared in front of her.