“To all students of the Magister Incendium: always remember to remove flammable clothing before starting the practice. If you happen to be standing in the vicinity of extremely strong alcoholic spirits, make sure to move a proper, safe distance."

Octavian raised an eyebrow and lowered it again. He was really amazed that in a world where magic was so common, there was a need to reiterate a concept so obvious and easy to understand.

Aemilia kept reading aloud.

“The first step is to conceive the flame as an entity. Imagine handling a Focus Solidus root and feel your fingers burning while holding it in your hands. Less gifted students are advised to materially perform this action and get burns that are not too severe and heal them with a potion, so that they can experience the most real pain sensations and replicate them during subsequent exercises."

Who knows how many beginning practitioners had actually burned their fingers before being able to light an insignificant fire with magic?

“Once the destructive power of fire is understood, it will be necessary to meditate for at least three days; this will serve to intimately know the danger of the element closest to us."

Aemilia shuddered and Octavian thought she might be cold, but there was not even a trickle of wind to cross the cave.

She kept on reading:

“Once you have meditated on the extreme nature of fire, it will be necessary to bring to mind the memories of a source of heat. Cosy winter flames that crackle in a fireplace, or a hot food that removes fatigue after a day of work and study. The heat of the skin, which is not so unlike the flames that will be generated by this spell."

"Aemilia, please stop."

Octavian raised his gaze towards the cave's wall. He needed to think, and to think aloud to let Aemilia know everything that was going through his mind.

“Magic in this world is empathetic. It is generated through connections with the images that come to the mind. It is not purely mathematical, despite the fact that many of these books are full of numbers and diagrams. If there is a reason for the difference between this book and the others I have read, it must be that, at some point, the two approaches took different paths. A magic that requires numbers and formulas could be different from a magic linked to images, to stories."

Having said that, still sitting next to Aemilia, he closed his eyes. He had already spent all the energy he had to speak. He needed to remain silent and think.

If there are so many diagrams and geometric indications, at some point anyone who has lived here must have been able to enhance their knowledge with mathematics. At the same time, sticking to just numbers could have destroyed the entire magic that had developed earlier.

After all, I have experienced this myself: classes work intuitively. Do something, fight a problem and acquire a class. Easy. It is not a difficult mechanism. (Note to self: I have to ask Aemilia what class she has in order to see if she can help us get out of here; another note: ask her more about her own life, unless it makes her feel uncomfortable.)

There are requirements, of course. It is not enough to just think to be a magician to become one, otherwise I would have done it already. And I guess the more powerful classes have very difficult requirements to meet.

But if obtaining classes is that simple, in a sense, they too must have an obvious mathematical aspect. Like all video game players, most people focus on the mechanics of the game, not the game itself.

Now, let's assume that those who wrote these books were not complete idiots.

Octavian began tapping his cheekbone rhythmically.

If they're not idiots, they must have realized the importance of the empathetic bond. Still, I'm pretty sure what comes next in the book will no longer be about feelings, but will be based on the purest mathematics, on standardized methods of perceiving magic.

And the players ...

Octavian contracted several muscles of his face several times in grimaces that Aemilia did not know whether to find frightening or amusing.

Video game players are focused on stats and a min-max approach. What happens, though, if there are so many variables that it makes the game too complicated to manipulate? What if in this world classes are not a certainty, but only an indication?

There are some games that don't work like normal MMORPGs. If in this world even a person at level 50 can die with a knife stuck in their stomach, it means that the classes do not grant an absolute advantage, but only a relative one.

Octavian got up and began pacing back and forth in front of the moss bed.

If the world is a complex system in which it is not possible to max ... But it may still be possible to group some aspects inside a set to be maxed, even if they are not single statistics! When maxed, a trait like IQ becomes a huge predictor of success in life.

Yet, it also follows that those with too high an IQ may not accomplish anything good, without a balanced personality.

“Mh…”

Aemilia looked at the man emitting a moan of concern.

Octavian awoke from his excited reflection. He felt that the answer was very close, but he decided not to continue his ruminations any further. His head was starting to ache.

"I need to get some sleep," Octavian said laconically.

As he walked he remembered that he hadn't eaten, not even once since Aemilia had appeared.

“If you're hungry, help yourself and eat. I hid a pot full of edible moss and roots under the stone desk. There are also nuts and seeds. I don't know how edible they are and how I haven't poisoned myself yet, maybe my [Survivor] class helps me. If you already have your own food supply, or if you don't need to eat at all, don't worry. You don't need to eat just out of courtesy."

The man stretched out on his comfortable moss. What an arse he had been. He hadn't thought of offering Aemilia anything before she had proved useful.

…

Waking up an hour later - or two, he couldn't have been sure - Octavian felt a new clarity of mind. The fog that had clouded his thoughts had cleared, but he would wait before going to examine the problem.

Over time he had discovered that obsessing about something didn't do him any good; the more he thought of something, the more the answer tended to elude him.

Because of this, this time he had decided to trust his instincts.

First, he decided to take a reconnaissance tour around the cave, to make sure the rotten-looking trees continued to bear fruit.

Octavian had never watered them since he arrived, and yet the branches were rottenly lush, overgrown, and loaded with gnarled fruit. Not that he was particularly impressed, since the trees thrived with their roots planted in the dark stone.

Then he glanced at the moss and roots carefully stored under the desk. The pot was still full, a sign that Aemilia hadn't touched it in the least.

Octavian turned to look at the bunny-eared woman. She was curled up in the moss, her eyes still closed, next to the bed on which Octavian had rested.

Octavian had to be honest. No matter how hard he tried to empathize with the poor woman, who had no doubt suffered terrible abuse, he could not. Even worse: at the moment he found her a nuisance. If she hadn't helped him decipher the contents of the spell book, perhaps Octavian would have begun to feel real hate towards her.

How many times had he hoped to be alone for whole months? And now that his wish had come true, it had been soon broken by the woman who had obviously come from the depths of the cave.

Wanting to be alone, however, was not a whim: Octavian had a goal to achieve, something to which he should have devoted all his energy. On Earth the distractions were numerous, and many were the people who had stolen his precious time. At times, he had imagined what it would be like to be arrested just to stay in the company of his own thoughts. However, the presence of other inmates had to be taken into consideration. Who knew if it was possible to expressly request to be locked up in a solitary confinement cell? Or choose house arrest without the right to visits?

Obviously this fantasy had remained just a fantasy and had never been shared with anyone, to avoid being locked up in a psychiatric institution.

Anyway, it was time to get down to real problems.

Aemilia wasn't such a terrible company, thinking about it. He had to make an effort to socialize more with her, think about what to ask her, show his humanity. Luckily, the woman in front of him didn't like talking and Octavian was fine with that.

All the people Octavian had known had soon shown to be eager for attention. It was so hard to be around them and to show interest. And if he didn't, he was accused of being egoist and heartless.

Of thinking only about himself.

Octavian would have argued that he simply couldn't think about the needs of others, because he barely thought about his own.

Thankfully, Aemilia was far from the standard of human beings. Otherwise, Octavian would have already been inundated with complaints after completely forgetting to offer her something to eat for hours. And with questions, too.

Aemilia seemed as dangerous as a lost puppy and as needy as a stray cat: she hadn’t disturbed him in the least, on the contrary, she seemed an excellent addition to the team...

Octavian was really unfair to consider any human being a nuisance.

He scratched the back of his head and kept thinking. He had just realized that he had created a non-existent scenario in his head even before getting to know her: an Aemilia who disturbed him, who had stopped the flow of his life in his cave.

How hard it was for him to always try and control with rationality his own awkward instincts.

Trying to be a decent person was really difficult.

A sound of steps brought him back to the present. He realized that Aemilia had not only woken up while he had remained motionless under a tree imagining non-existent scenarios, but had also moved away from the main room of the cave: she was returning from the dark corridor, once again, and carrying a large tome with her.

Its cover was bound in scaly leather, with an excessively saturated colour, but faded in many places. It was like looking at a pixelated screen, due to the ultra-vivid nature of those colours, yet dull at the same time.

Aemilia slowly and warily approached him.

"This book is more..."

She didn't finish the sentence. Instead, she handed him the book, and he took it carefully. Then he motioned for her to go to the desk with him. He put the tome on the table and begged her to sit on the stone stool. He stood by her.

"Can you read to me the part you think is most important?"

She nodded slowly.

“… It's more difficult”, she finally finished the sentence.

"Take all the time you need."

She nodded and began flipping through the first few pages.

"The title is The Disciple of Aethereum, Delusum."

This time, however, she did not have to go much further, unlike before.

Aemilia cleared her throat and began to recite the words in a language that sounded exactly like Latin to Octavian's ears. The reason for this strange translation must lie in a linguistic explanation, he supposed.

“The chronicles of the latest clashes suggest that the war is changing direction. There are brothers and sisters who try to harness with numbers and lines what is not definable by any creature. Their magic has been changed, just as their classes and levels; they acquire what they need more quickly. But, instead of mastering the myriad of forms that our masters have used for centuries, we are looking for something that allows us to fly without using our mighty wings ... "

Wings...

Octavian looked at the hole in the ceiling of the cave, so large that it could not have been made for human beings. Only a creature extremely versed in magic or who feared no enemies could dare to open a hole in the earth and be convinced that no one would attack it. An animal - no, not an animal - a creature that leaves the entrance to its possession in plain sight is always at the top of the food pyramid.

Could it be ... dragons?

The man cleared his throat and pushed away this strange intuition. After all, he wasn't sure whether the creatures of this world respected the rules of his own.

“Sorry Aemilia, can you reread the last few lines? I don't think I understand correctly."

Aemilia pointed to a line and asked: "Here ...?"

Octavian nodded and the woman resumed reading.

“The princes have been appropriately advised. They have been told that we must not be in a hurry, that even if the ancient enemies have won some battles, what can preserve our race are the practices that have made it superior to others. If we start treating magic as humans do, we risk corrupting it forever."

"Wait a minute," Octavian motioned for Aemilia to stop.

The implications of what had just been read to him were astounding: magic was more than just a few numbers, much more than trying to make the most of everything. The empathetic component hypothesized a little earlier by Octavian really existed. This Delusum seemed to speak of his master as the greatest magician of their race. This meant that the way he had imagined not only existed, but it was the right one.

Another interesting, albeit minor, implication was that Aemilia had understood what Octavian had told her shortly before, when he had explained his theories to her. And not only did she understand, she also got him a book about it.

At this point, he could use the moment to verify what he had been thinking about.

"Aemilia, do dragons exist in this world?"

The woman froze, as if she had just received an electric shock. Tears formed in the corners of her eyes.

The answer had to be yes. And that Aemilia must not have had a great relationship with dragons.

Whether this world was real or not, whether Octavian was in a coma in a hospital or alert and awake in another universe, at that moment nothing mattered more than the fact that dragons existed.

How many times had he dreamed of being able to live in a fantasy world, to hunt down those magnificent creatures.

To exterminate them.

Octavian saw the woman begin to tremble and sob and, despite how excited he was, decided to calm the situation before it worsened.

“Don't worry, we're alone here. Calm down. If you want, let's go back to reading."

Giving upset people something to do could help calm them. He had learned this when he was an emergency responder, intervening following natural disasters.

Octavian might have asked why dragons frightened her. He could have asked about the abuses she had received. He could have said many other things, more reassuring, more personal, but he didn't. He decided to leave alone the terrible memories that seemed to afflict the woman.

She took a couple of quick breaths and, with her big ears now folded in sadness, looked back at the pages and began to read again.

“Aethereum, my master, forced me to meditate on the nature of the world for a hundred years. Another hundred would be devoted to perceiving mana within my body, then another hundred to perceiving it outside myself. Once these steps were completed, the actual training would begin. In addition, it took my master several centuries to teach me everything he knew about art, literature and logic, all those things that allow us to distinguish ourselves from creatures of lower intellect.”

“He used to tell me: In magic, there is a dignity and a humility that most people lack. Whoever claims the right to control the infinity of the world without understanding it will forever be mocked by nature. As of today, no one is ready to hear such words of wisdom. When I explained to the new royal court that, if we stop walking the path of our ancestors, the ancient war with the enemy makes no sense, I was hunted down and wounded. Nobody wants to remember the great deeds of Aethereum and by now they despise history, as if they were free from it, and not its slaves.”

“So, reader, remember not to fall into the same trap as my contemporaries. The injuries I have received will prevent me from obtaining the favour of mana. Not because I wouldn't be able to learn what was necessary to heal myself; but because, if I did, I would betray all the teachings of my master.”

“My training has never been completed. And so it happened so that I could pass what I learned on to someone else, so that nobody forgets what our greatness was and what our dire future condition will be forever.”

“In the following chapters I will explain in detail what the training process of my master consists of, but I will first give a summary for the hastiest of my readers. My master had to do the same with me, so that I didn't lose my patience too much. He had learned without ever asking what the next stage was, one day finding himself master of magic, but this was not the case for the generations after him, greedy for their time.”

“The goal of the three steps that everyone will have to take, after having studied the arts and beauties of the world for a long time, is the same, but on different levels. Remember, reader, the part that comes before mana is more important than mana itself. No dr..."

Aemilia stopped reading and looked at Octavian. The man gave her an encouraging nod and smiled at her. Then Aemilia swallowed and resumed reading aloud: “No dragon will be able to freeze an ocean if he has never seen, even from a distance, an enormous glacier. There are things, as my master said, that can only be imagined after having seen them."

Octavian, at this point, was about to jump on the table and dance. The fact that Aemilia had brought him such a thing made him believe he had ended up in a story full of clichés. How was it possible that in such a big world he ended up in possession of such precious knowledge?

“It is best to keep in mind, said the Wise Master, that once this training has been completed, you are only at the first step of an interminable journey. And he suggested reflecting precisely on this passage, on the importance of understanding deeper concepts, before moving into the endless world of magic. A puddle in the middle of a storm loses its identity in a moment. An ocean, even when facing the greatest of storms, remains an indomitable mass of water."

"Bollocks."

Aemilia looked at him, clearly not understanding the expression.

"Nothing, nothing. My roots come out every now and then. Do go on, please."

“The goal of meditating on the nature of the world is to understand the infinity of forms that mana can take. My master had promised that one day he would explain to me what our reality is made of, what are the fundamental units that make it up.”

“Once this first objective has been achieved, it is necessary to reflect on the energies that our body possesses, on the physiological functions that are also - but not exclusively - guided by mana.”

“The last part, on the other hand, is to immerse yourself in the flow of energy of the world and of everything that makes it up. My master always recommended exposing oneself to different sensations during this period, so that the multifaceted nature of magical energy would be better understood. After understanding the substances that mana guides in the world, comes the real training.”

“The goal of this book is to find someone who, one day, will possess at least one thousandth of the wisdom of the Quiet Sage, the slayer of Oceanogr, my Master. If anyone could bring our civilization back at the feet of the wisdom that Aethereum had reached, perhaps there will be a chance for our race to exist and in the war against our enemy."

Octavian spent the next hour listening to Aemilia, bewitched. He had never been so captivated by anyone's words. Everything he'd heard made sense, it made so much fucking sense. And a part of him wanted nothing more than to start meditating, to follow the directions in the book, to understand what was behind the universe and behind magic. For Octavian it made much more sense to try to dialogue with a supreme existence, above all.

Aethereum had established an astral connection with the fundamental energy of the universe, not limited to his world, as he had believed. The earth could be used as a model to understand all the rest of existence, because all the elements were a derivation of something far simpler.

Aemilia was beginning to have a dry throat and Octavian begged her to stop. He really needed to lie down again and look at the sky outside the cave. He thanked every god in his and this world for not having been transported there with his smartphone: if he had, he would have been distracted by the evil technology and would not have explored one of the most important questions that ever existed.

So, if indeed Aethereum had achieved such a communion with the origin of all things, he must also have found a way to change all things. If there was one thing that Octavian wanted with all his heart, it was to change everything, or even just to change himself.

How many times had he wished to be different? How many times had he prayed not to find other people irritating, to have more genuine thoughts?

Although at first glance it was difficult to grasp the significance of what Aethereum had suggested, Octavian was thinking of nothing else.

It was possible to manipulate magic in a way that allowed its user to get out of the complex world of mathematical variables. It was enough to work in an even more complex way, in a way so complex it became simple.

An intuition was enough to change the world.

But the intuition should have been as big as the world itself.

It was a very ethereal concept.

Octavian smiled. It had been a long time since he had experienced joy and hope, since a smile had been drawn on his face, so long.

Lying on the moss, Octavian saw the woman come to his side and lie down without saying anything. Without any malice, he moved a few inches farther, until their backs touched. If he hadn't liked Aemilia very much before her reading that day, he now felt an intimate bond with her. He remembered what to do in these situations.

“You were fantastic today, your help has allowed me to understand things that I would never have understood on my own. Thank you, Aemilia."

He felt the woman fidget slightly and curl tightly.

Back to back, they fell asleep.

…

Thus several days passed.

Octavian got help from Aemilia to read and learn that strange language he had found in books, turning more and more runes into simple Latin in his mind. And not only that: the woman had also provided him with several tomes of history, found in the deepest recesses of the cave, where Octavian did not dare to go.

He was learning the history of dragons, of some of their empires, of their falls and ascents, of their histories of love and betrayal. There was so much humanity in those legendary creatures, and at the same time Octavian felt that everything they did was almost multiplied to the extreme.

Whether it was historical accounts or tales of draconic myths, a dragon's wrath was complex, a set of destructive and prideful emotions difficult for a human to understand. Equally complex was their feelings of unbridled love, affectionate relationships, alliances and rivalries.

Most of their feelings had led them to wage cruel wars against anyone who threatened their status. Octavian was not impressed by this, on the contrary, the more he read about their conquest, the deaths they had caused to the mysterious enemy that was constantly talked about in their chronicles, the more he despised them.

"Disgusting creatures."

He had always hated arrogant and presumptuous behaviours such as those that dragons had displayed. He could have said without a doubt that, now, he hated dragons as much as he hated cats.

Whenever Octavian spoke openly about dragons, Aemilia froze for a few seconds, looked around in terror and waited for a nod from the man who was with her, before taking a deep breath and calming down.

"We must not speak of them lightly", Octavian repeated to himself, trying to hold back the urge to share his thoughts on those winged creatures with the woman.

In addition to cats, one thing that could really upset Octavian was the primordial terror that some (for example, Aemilia) felt for the authority or for the hierarchies due to the abuse they had suffered.

"All creatures that can die are alike, Aemilia," Octavian said one afternoon.

The woman turned cautiously to him and stared at the rags she wore. She shook her head. "They are..."

Octavian waited for a few seconds for words that did not come. “To you they are indestructible. You fear them, you hate them. I get it."

Although he had never had anything to do with dragons, he had seen the scars that those beings had left in Aemilia's soul, and who knew how many other living beings had suffered the same. This was enough to despise the entire dragon race, so proud of their superiority, based on their subjective perception of greatness. He wanted to kill them all. Leave none of them alive.

Anger was about to take over, but he managed to control himself. He dug his nails into his palm with all the strength he had, finding comfort in the pain.

"Are you... hungry?"

Aemilia's question came unexpectedly to Octavian's ears. With each passing day the woman's sentences were more and more complete, more and more focused on his well-being.

Octavian nodded and Aemilia headed for the dark passage at the bottom of the cave. This time she remained in there only for a few minutes, just long enough to get something to eat other than roots and moss; but there were days when she stayed in there for hours on end doing who knew what.

On the other hand, Octavian had no desire to investigate what was inside. When he turned his gaze towards the corridor, he activated a skill he had acquired when a large cast iron pot had nearly fallen on his head, [Sense of Danger]. Only an almost supernatural reaction had allowed him to avoid it and soon after he had gained a new level and a new skill, which kept telling him that something in the recesses of those tunnels had to be avoided.

Aemilia emerged from the darkness with two fish in her hands. She began to clean and fillet them with a certain skill.

Sometimes Octavian forgot that the woman in front of him was taller, stronger and more experienced than him in matters of survival. Aemilia's submissive character often misled him about the true qualities she possessed.

"With magic ... have you decided?"

"Still not the time. After reading the book, I'll think about it. Since the cave is safe, there is no reason to get out before we have the means to defend ourselves. I don't really want to go back to civilization, if I have to be sincere”, Octavian's words were followed by a moment of silence.

"Don't you want to ... run away from ...?"

"Run away? From what?" he interrupted her. “Down here we have lots of food, and these books seem to have been written especially for me to study. Sometimes I feel like I'm the protagonist of a novel, because of how lucky I have been. The difficulty of getting out of this place makes me think that it could be a test, but having no other information, it's just an idea. My guess is that I ended up here by chance, otherwise you wouldn't be there to help me and I would have to do it all by myself. I'm pretty sure, besides, that other people have been transported here; who knows what happened to them."

It was a reasoning on which Octavian had spent a good amount of time. He had been inside that cave for forty-three days and had found no better explanation after Aemilia's appearance. Before, to be honest, he hadn't even paid attention to it. The calm that permeated that place allowed him to properly relax and study everything he could lay his hands on, without worrying about anything else.

If it weren't for sleeping on moss, eating barely edible foods and a lack of clean water, he would have thought he could live there forever.

"Don't ... you miss ... the ... other people?"

"No. My world is far from here and there aren't many people I care about. Maybe I'll be luckier here, who knows."

"Tell me," suggested Aemilia, who seemed increasingly curious about the strange world from which he came.

Octavian sat up while the woman fumbled to light a small fire with some dry wood twigs and, again, he had no idea where they came from.

“The most peculiar thing is the absolute lack of magic - not that there is much of it in here,” he pointed to the cave, moving his hands, “but where I come from no one is able to use magic. The Earth is a kind of ball, a round thing, on which human beings live, billions of them. Seven billion and a half; almost eight, to be precise. This ball is so big that it gives the impression of being flat."

Aemilia did not seem impressed by the opening of the arms that Octavian had already used twice to make her understand the size of the planet from which he came. To tell the truth, he was not an example of an excellent storyteller.

“All right, what else?”

"Mmmh… There are… cars. We have ... metal boxes? Metal boxes with wheels made of… do you know what rubber is? No? Bollocks. It isn’t easy to explain. There are metal boxes with wheels, like wagons, which, however, don't need to be pulled and… and they work by pressing pedals - do you know what a pedal is?"

Octavian was not usually interested in praising mankind and its inventions, but he hoped to impress Aemilia with what his planet had been able to produce, even without magic. When at the umpteenth attempt he failed, he decided to keep quiet.

"Master, can you really ... fly without ... without magic?" Aemilia asked, articulating a meaningful sentence of a certain length. Not without effort, unfortunately.

"Master?" Octavian felt uncomfortable at being called master.

"We call ... this way... those who ... deserve respect ..."

And here she was, back to normal.

“Aemilia, I believe you know more about this world than I do. Maybe I could teach you something about mine that could be useful here, too."

Now that he thought about it, philosophy and literature had spoken about many universal concepts.

Ah-ha! What a wonderful idea he just had!

"Have you ever heard of maieutics?" he asked.

Aemilia shook her head, confused. She knew many words, Octavian had discovered, but some words created in his world seemed to escape her.

“In my world there was a man, a philosopher - do you know what a philosopher is? No? Take him as a kind of [Sage], very famous in every land and in every age. He developed this theory according to which it was enough to ask the right questions to get knowledge out of people, as if every person already possessed it within himself."

Aemilia looked rather confused.

“It's not that complicated, trust me. It is nothing more than asking precise questions and trying to get the person to the solution, without providing a clear explanation."

"Do you think you ... are ... intelligent?" Aemilia suddenly asked.

Octavian was taken aback.

“Me? Of course."

"And you think you are ..." Aemilia made a great effort to complete the sentence, "intelligent... even when you can't explain ... an easy thing?"

Aemilia's eyebrows rose as the corners of her mouth twitched in the first smile Octavian had seen since he had met her.

"Maybe you're not completely wrong."

Octavian looked down at the book in front of him, leaving the woman to do the cooking. After a minute, he glanced at Aemilia, who was still looking at him with a big smile on her face. He narrowed his eyes.

"Not bad. Not bad."

Octavian smiled too.

They both went back to what they were doing.

…

After two weeks of study, the book written by Aethereum's disciple was driving Octavian out of his mind. He would have sworn he had never found such a verbose writer.

Delusum loved to digress so much that an entire chapter of the huge tome was the story of how he had met his master. At the end of the chapter, as if the damage had not been enough, he had added a mocking May the reader forgive me for this chapter, which is of little use in the perspective of our studies; however, melancholy sometimes gets the better of us.

The matter that Octavian was trying to explore was highly metaphysical. Several times he had had the impression that he had been close to discovering something very deep through reading, but it was as if his mind encountered a wall that did not allow him to go further in understanding Delusum's words.

"Aren't you tired?"

Aemilia's way of speaking became more spontaneous day by day. Occasionally she even dared to make jokes. Octavian recalled that a psychiatrist colleague of his had told him that humour is one of the most desirable signs of recovery in a depressed or psychiatric patient.

“About our diet, a little. The lack of variety is starting to be stoning,” Octavian replied.

"Stoning?" the woman asked.

“Like being hit with stones. You know, in the most barbaric countries of my world it is a practice that is used for women who cheat on their husbands or something like that."

One of his greatest problems was not being able to control himself when it came to talking about gory stuff. And this certainly did not help Aemilia's already shaky psyche.

“It doesn't look like the worst of punishments,” the woman commented instead.

Octavian heaved a sigh of relief, though part of his mind wondered what torture the woman had ever had to endure to so easily dismiss a practice as cruel as stoning.

Well, maybe it would have been better to change the subject.

“It would be nice to find, inside these books, a way to climb the wall that leads to the entrance of the cave,” Octavian said as he rubbed his neck. All the hours he spent reading and lying down started to hurt him. He definitely needed some exercise.

"The wall around us is pretty easy."

Octavian heard the woman's words, said as if by accident. He immediately sensed that he had taken something for granted.

"Aemilia. You can climb that wall?"

The woman looked at him with her reddish-purple eye and nodded as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

It was then that Octavian took a closer look at the woman's defined muscles, her movements always sure and precise.

She's a fucking monkey.

Octavian mentally retraced the conversations with her and realized that he had never mentioned that he really wanted to get out of that cave by climbing the wall.

"Can you teach me?"

Aemilia frowned and walked over to him.

For the first time since he had known her, something about her stance made him uncomfortable.

Aemilia first touched his belly with an index finger, then his arms and thighs, with a critical expression on her face.

Octavian felt betrayed by his lack of fitness and his laziness. While Aemilia looked at him as if it were a bad ham hanging in the butcher's shop, he asked: "So?"

“Yes, but you have to put on… some muscles. You are too podgy."

The [Scholar] nodded. He didn't like being called podgy, but Aemilia wasn't lying.

"So, tomorrow we start training," he said as he began to head to the expanse of moss to take a nap.

“Tomorrow?”

The question froze the blood in Octavian's veins, who by now had come to know the woman. If there was one thing in which Aemilia was clearly better than him, it was the discipline with which she carried out her tasks. While Octavian often stopped in the middle of his work and always left a mess wherever he passed, making the cave even dirtier than it had been before his arrival, she tidied everything up, never started something without finishing it, and every day did a workout routine.

“Ok, in the evening”, it was still early afternoon. Octavian had gotten another one of his headaches and was eager to lie down and doze off.

"Evening?"

The woman was more amused than Octavian had ever seen her before. He wasn't sure, though, that she was joking. So, weighing the pros and cons, he turned back to her.

“All right. Let's start now, but something easy."

It was then that Octavian's greatest pains began. Aemilia was not too severe with him, but she felt a particular enthusiasm for physical exercise and kept prodding and urging him.

The first thing she made him do was run in circles following the walls of the cave. And at first Octavian had also thought it wouldn't be so bad to jog; he had thought that until Aemilia had started chasing him with a stick covered with excrement.

"OI!"

Octavian no longer had the breath to scream anything else after what shouldn't have been more than ten minutes.

Aemilia jumped behind him with fluidity and lightness.

"Ten more laps", the woman ordered him without decelerating in the least, the stick closer and closer to Octavian's face.

After those ten infernal laps, during which Aemilia had put the stick several times a few centimetres from his face, Octavian could finally catch his breath. He was on the ground, drenched in sweat from head to toe, panting. No, gasping. He tasted blood in his mouth, along with a series of curses he couldn't even get out of his throat; he felt as if he had been stabbed by someone directly in the carotid artery. Everything ached, from lungs to liver, from spleen to heart. His legs weren't even able to hold him upright without shaking.

Aemilia, who had chased him from the beginning to the end of the training, was not even out of breath.

"Ready to train your arms?" the woman said, still brandishing the infamous stick.

Octavian wondered how it had occurred to her to dip that branch - also coming from the hidden caverns of the unexplored tunnel - in the disgusting amalgam of their latrine (which was nothing more than a deep hole dug in the corner farthest from the centre of the cave, under a tree particularly rich in foliage).

Having been to Africa, South America and, in general, places where there was not always free access to sanitation, Octavian had a pretty strong stomach. Still, the thought that the woman would smear shit on his face caused him a rare surge of disgust.

Moved by the fear of getting a Hitler-style brown moustache, he began trying to get up, without much success.

Aemilia, seeing him struggle, reached out to him.

Octavian grabbed her forearm without thinking about it. But when he put his hand into the woman's fur, much softer than he would ever have imagined, he found himself blushing. Fortunately for him, the fact that he was already red from the previous run hid his obvious embarrassment.

Octavian walked to the rock wall and put his hands on it to start to understand how the rock felt under his skin. Aemilia followed him step by step, pushing her body against his to show him where to put his hands and what path to take. For starters, Octavian would go no higher than two meters, to avoid hurting himself if he lost his grip.

Their bodies were now so close that Octavian realized that the woman did not have that typical animal smell, that warm pungent smell of fur. She was absolutely odourless.

Aemilia had changed a lot. Now she moved freely in the cave, came and went alone from the darkest tunnels and instigated Octavian with a stick covered with excrement. She was alive.

"Push harder with your legs, use your arms less."

Aemilia's advice made sense from an anatomical and physiological point of view. It would have made sense, indeed, if Octavian hadn't felt his legs turn to jelly whenever he tried to climb half a metre up the wall.

Never had he regretted his lack of fitness so much in his life.

He had hated gyms and their culture dedicated to the exterior appearance only, but never more than now he had regretted his harsh and hasty judgments.

At one point, his legs simply decided to give out. Octavian fell backwards. For a moment he hoped he would hit his head and have to lie still for at least a couple of weeks.

But that didn't happen. Unfortunately for him, or fortunately, Aemilia took him in her arms as a prince does with his princess.

Few things put Octavian in such a bad mood as physical contact with people. But this time, his annoyance was accompanied by a new, different sensation: Aemilia's touch responded to the needs of a more hidden part of his being, more infantile and less hardened.

And that scared him.

The few relationships he had experienced had been destructive. His charm had attracted many women, who had been sucked into the black hole of his lack of feelings, and ran away as soon as they could.

With none of them, however, he had experienced the same sensations that Aemilia caused inside him.

Octavian was an Earthling who had landed in a cave, on an unknown planet, in a universe different from the one he was used to. Aemilia was a creature, half monkey and half rabbit, who had almost certainly suffered abuse that had traumatized her for life. They were literally the definition of everything that could go wrong in life.

And finding comfort in each other was just an animal instinct, usually suppressed in modern society of the first, bourgeois world.

The last thing Octavian wanted was for his reasoning to be influenced by his animal side. He feared his unconscious, because the few times he had come in contact with it he had seen some sort of monster inside him, an unaltered version of what social conventions and ethics had made him.

In the woman's arms, he thought of everything that was wrong with them.