The Unmaker

Journal entry #2955

Year 80 since the Swarm descended and our ancestors retreated into the Alshifa undertown.

Today was yet another unremarkable day. I tended to my house on the northernmost hill, watered the fields, planted a bunch of eggplants, and went to the General School where I stayed for over half the day. Then I stopped by the bazaar on my way back to pick up some food. Before I knew it, the firefly posts were dim and the town was asleep. Nothing unusual happened today.

… Or so I would like to say.

Early this morning, the moment I opened the front door with a loud yawn, my feet accidentally kicked something sitting in my way. At first I thought it might have been a stray cat from the orphanage below, but on closer inspection I saw it was a girl. Curled in a little ball, sleeping on my doorstep. Her tattered clothes were nothing like the ones I wore. They weren’t bug-slayer clothes, either, from the Bug-Slaying School. Hers were… hm. Poorly made? Her tunic barely covered her stomach, her skirt hardly covered her thighs, her little black and gold capelets were riddled with messy stitches. It was almost like the uniforms bug-slayers from other undertowns wore, but she was also too young to be a bug-slayer graduate.

She had to be my age, though. Around fourteen. Maybe a bit older? It was hard to tell.

She didn’t wake up even when I accidentally kicked her, though, so I had to wake her up. I shook her many many times on the shoulder, and it took me about three minutes before I got annoyed and doused her with a bucket full of water. She sprang up like a stray then. The first thing she did after that was barge into my house and ask for food, which was… ugh. I didn’t have much to spare for her, but she looked really, really hungry, and her stomach was growling too, so I told her to just eat some of the bread next to the basin and stay there. I told her I’d sneak out of school during lunch and come back to visit her.

Then I went to school. I was anxious the entire time. Maybe I should’ve just reported her to the orphanage, or maybe even to the guards. I don’t recognise her from anywhere. I thought she might’ve snuck in from another undertown at first, but then why would she have shown up on my doorstep? The only tunnels leading out of Alshifa are in the southern and eastern part of the town, and I live in the furthest north. How could she have stumbled through the entire town without anyone noticing her?

As promised, I snuck out during lunch and rushed back home to visit her. It was a disaster. She’d turned my cabinets and medical equipment upside-down while I was gone, and if I hadn’t come back when I did she would’ve one hundred percent hurt herself with the scalpel I’d been practicing with on the table. She acted like a toddler who’d never seen normal household items before. I spent an entire hour trying to get her to calm down and just eat her bread for lunch, but she was so easily excited and wanted to talk between every single breath—not that I understood a single word she said, anyways. She didn’t speak Old Alshifan.

I knew for sure, right there and then, that she wasn’t from Alshifa.

It has now been thirteen hours since I met her. Two hours before midnight. The town outside my window is dark, but the firefly cage in my living room is still burning bright. The girl is refusing to sleep on my couch, so I don’t… really know what to do here.

Do I report her to the guards after all?

What if they send her away?

I mean, it’s not everyday someone comes to visit me, so I can’t exactly say I don’t like the company, but…

…

… Maybe I should just keep her around for a few more days and try to learn her name?

Journal Entry #2965

It has been one whole week since the girl arrived on my doorstep. She still doesn’t speak Old Alshifan, and I have no idea what tongue she’s speaking in. I tried looking for old language tomes in the school library to see if maybe she’s speaking another undertown’s tongue, but… nothing. I can’t match a single sound she’s making to any recorded tongue.

I think she’s from up there.

The ‘surface’.

Of course, I tried probing her many, many times with lots of different hand gestures. I don’t think she gets most of them. She just smiles and nods and laughs and then tries to bend my fingers, and—oh, that’s right, she can bend her fingers really far back. I don’t know what’s up with that. It’s like she has no bones in her hands. Her fingers are also scarred and bruised all over, and I’ve no idea why none of my ointments are working on them. It might be some sort of insect venom. I don’t think I’d be able to cure her of the bruises unless I actually go out and look for a doctor.

… Honestly, I’ve thought about just reporting her to the guards more than a few times this past week. She eats a lot. She makes a lot of sounds at night, she’s very active and very dance-y at night. When Miss Lea from the orphanage came up here two nights ago to ask what was going on with my firefly cage, I couldn’t just tell her some girl was trying to eat the firefly inside.

How much longer can I keep her a secret from the rest of the town?

Maybe I should just report her tomorrow morning.

Journal Entry #2982

I think I’ve made a little breakthrough today.

While we were eating dinner at the table today, I was just going through a lot of different hand gestures in the gesture book I borrowed from the library—as usual—when suddenly she responded to one of my gestures with a happy click of a tongue. She never clicks her tongue. She makes all sorts of strange and whiny sounds, and clapping in the middle of the night is just something she does for fun, but the sound she made with her tongue was a two-part thing. Like tick, tock. Tick, tock.

The gesture she responded to was me making this symbol with my hands pressed together, this… well, it’s not so obvious if you look at my hands, but when you look at the shadow my hands cast on the table, it looks like a butterfly.

Or maybe it’s more like a moth?

I don’t really know what it’s supposed to be. The explanation for what the symbol means is scratched out on the gesture book, but one thing’s for sure—the girl knows more than she lets on.

I’m going to go through all the gestures in this book.

Journal Entry #3018

… I found a phonology table at the end of one of my language tomes today, so, since I’ve been doing so well recently figuring out the types of gestures the girl responds to—and by now I’ve figured out she only responds to gestures relating to insects in some way, shape, or form—I decided to sit her down after breakfast this morning to try to actually establish a path of communication.

I’m still not really sure what the phonetic language in the moth-cover tome is called, but imagine my surprise when the girl started clicking her tongue, tick tock, the moment she saw the table.

After that, well…

…

… I think it was twelve hours?

I skipped school today.

But she kept pointing at the same letters over and over again, in this very specific order, so I dismissed her after dinner to see if I could decipher what those letters correlate to in the Old Alshifan letter table.

Right now, she’s sleeping soundly on my bed behind me, not a care in the world.

And I think… I’ve got her first word.

Since she kept pointing to the letters and then to herself, I’m assuming, very tentatively, that this might be her name.

…

So.

If I’m not wrong.

And I could very well be.

Her name is–

- Excerpt from ‘Secret Sina Household Journal’, Written by Sanyon Sina