And this place, she breathes magic in it. Every breeze seems to be charged with energy she does not understand, but she knows by instinct that she’s in another world now. The Land of Titania is all around them, yet the Academy doesn’t seem to be anything like the planet it’s in. It’s almost as if it exists in a bubble far away, populated by all sorts of creatures and powerful mages, and she does remember stepping in and all of her hair standing on end from how unfamiliar everything is. 

 

A few days passed, and she could almost say she got used to weird quirky events, to seeing mages conjuring magic and meeting people she never could have imagined. 

The teachers and the Director, she's found herself staring at them with so much awe before she saw them practicing any of their magic - their power in potential oozes from the air surrounding them, almost as if she could feel in her veins the sheer power in the space they occupy. It's unsettling, and she tries not to be in their way. Or anyone else's, for that matter. Some strange boy seems to have put his eyes on her, but other than that she seems to go unnoticed in the entire building. And for the first time in a very long while, her heart clenches as she looks at them, people who could be welcoming toward her, but she never learnt how to talk to them.

She's used to being called or being looked at as if she was a monster, but now knowing there are students she could talk to while being confident they would understand her, she doesn't seem to be able to step forward and talk to them. 

Sitting in the library with a big heavy book flipped open in front of her, she thinks she's never felt more like a monster than now. A ghost, who can only look at them from the outside, unable to touch them. 

She looks down at her hands, for the umpteenth time, wondering. All those other students have nothing in common with humans. They are all something else, and they are all fully that something else. Zira? She's half something, and half something else. Her beastfolk traits are not even coherent with each other - horns, claws, teeth, fur, slits in her eyes. She read a book about the creatures of the Polyverse - one of those defined her as a chimera. A lot of different creatures, heritages clashing together in a way that doesn't make sense. No wonder the humans thought her too weird to look at in any way but wary. She's nothing they've ever seen, after all. Maybe they would have seen her differently had she been something. Something complete, something whole they could put a name on. 

Once again, she finds herself curling up on her chair, pulling her hood over her head, clawing softly at her own arms, the words before her blurring without any meaning and a silence that seems to press against her ears. 

 

And yet she should not feel like this. At her lessons, nobody seemed to be bothered by her, by her looks and the space she occupies. It's surprising, how much she wishes they would sit by her right now, talk to her. But on the other hand, she tells herself, she's not here for this. She's here to learn, to train, to gain new abilities she could not learn anywhere else - and she knows full well this is the case, one page off these books has more to teach her than anything she's learnt out there, in all the other Lands. She's here to learn as much as possible, and once she saw magic and what it can do she knows something in her moved. She does have a grasp of some kind of magic, but nothing like what she saw in just a few days here. Maybe she could learn more. Maybe she could learn other ways to fight, feel her own body move, see the world around her. 

 

Silence echoes around her, with only some muttering coming from other students, the sound of old pages being flipped, pens scratching against paper, yawns. She takes a deep breath, and lets the quiet soothe her. That's when she notices the scent inside here - it's not just smell of old paper and the leather these books are bound in, or wood. It's almost sweet. There are flowers in here, of course, but that is not the smell she senses. It comes from every bit of space in the library, like it seeped into every nook and cranny, or like the library is made off that scent. Maybe it's the scent of magic, and that is how she knows the Academy must be the most magical place she's ever been in - when she uses magic to jump between Lands, she never senses this smell. But maybe, the magic is so powerful here that it even gains a smell, a taste, and nobody seems to notice or be surprised by it. It's a pleasant scent, though. It almost reminds her of the Old Man's meals, in some way. It makes her remember even more how weak her magic is. She's all claws and teeth and growling, and none of them are like that. 

And right now, she finds herself wanting to stop thinking. How amazing would it be if she could just walk up to one of them, and just talk to them, ask them to train with her? And yet the stares she received her whole life seem to be reflected in their eyes and manners as well, somehow. She thought she would immediately want to talk to someone if they were not humans, but all she does the rest of the evening is just sit there, looking around, trying to read the book and failing. 

Finally, she gets up, quietly sneaking out of the library with half a mind to look for that boy. He's the only one who talked to her, he's the only one who seemed to notice her at all. Maybe next time she'll become able to talk to him the way all those other people are. The Old Man kept telling her to learn things a little bit at a time. One step after the other. She nods to herself, with a sigh. One step after the other.