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She wasn’t sure when Master Ivan decided that they would add this to their curriculum. It has been about a year since she met him and she wasn’t apart of Raven Tail (not yet) but she did live at the Guild with Master Ivan and had her own room and everything. Still, she was not sure at what point did he think to add reading and writing to their training regimen. Not that she did a lot with magic, not yet.
(There was a lot to untap there and they both were aware of it. She now knew her affinity from one of those toys they sold that they sold for children. She had a Dark Affinity. That scared her, up until Master Ivan explained that affinities did not come with some moral sentences. That comforted her a little.)
But now, she was in the Guild’s library and staring down at the book. It was supposed to be easy enough by now. She had learned the alphabet, learned how to pronounce correctly. She learned many more definitions of words and sentence structure. But. She hated this part of training. She wanted to study magic, not read some books about fake people and their fake problems. Fictional, she corrected. These are fictional stories.
Still boring, though.
Zilla put her head on the book, the cool papers warmed her face as she sighed out. She didn’t really get why Master Ivan wanted her to learn to read. She could fight just as well without knowing words and letters. She could learn magic that way.
That very first lesson happened in his office a few weeks ago, when he made her repeat the alphabet after him, taught her important words and then he made her learn to spell her own name. Zilla. Different than what she imagined it would look like. It was a name that apparently was a Boscan mix of a Fiorean name, something she did not know before. She supposed that was interesting, but it did make some sense. She wondered why her Mama didn’t give her a name from her own culture. Zilla frowned. She could never ask her Mama why, though.
Zilla sighed and lifted her head to rest her chin on her hand and looked down at the book again. Master Ivan had expressed that he wanted her to take this training as seriously as her more physical training. But. It was so boring. She flipped the page. Maybe if she could get a more itneresting book to read, it wouldn’t be so hard to do this.
As this idea popped in her head, she sat up straight. Zilla closed the book and got out of her chair. She moved through the library and browsed through various books. They were all so big, too intimidating for her. She scrunched her face and looked at other bookshelves. Surley, there could be an easier book around.
After what seemed like hours (but was probably just a handful of minutes) she found a skinner book and took it out. It looked like a children’s book, but Zilla figured, she was a child. The Velveteen Rabbit, it was called. She wondered why this was in the Guild’s library but that seemed important for now.
Zilla abandoned her seat at the desk and instead sat in the window still, where there was a cushioned seat. She made herself comfortable and opened the book, finally! One with pictures, too. It was bound to be good.
For the first time in her life, Zilla found herself warped up in the book. As it followed the Rabbit's life and his journey. She read slowly, as she tended to do, and focused on each word. They wrapped around her head and lodged themselves into her heart. She felt connected to this Rabbit, this rabbit’s journey into becoming...real. She didn’t understand why her eyes felt like they were burning, or why her heart seemed to rise in her throat. A toy can’t become real, she thought, it’s just a toy.
But the Rabbit does become real at the end of the story. And as the Skin Horse said, no one and nothing can take that away from you. The Rabbit had become Real because the Child loved it, even after the Child had thrown it away. The Rabbit was real. The Fairy had made him Real even after the Boy had made him real. They lost each other, but the Rabbit was...right there. She wondered and wondered, if that was what made you a person. Made you real.
Her hands shook as she closed the book and looked outside the window. The Guild was not near any town, but instead around a bustling landscape filled with hills and trees. It was beautiful and looked so peaceful, a stark contrast to the Guild itself which was made of stone and dark wood.
Zilla sighed out slowly and rubbed at her eyes. She opened the book once more. She had to examine this feeling. She wanted to watch the Rabbit become real again. She missed something the first time, how exactly had he become real before the Fairy made him real?
So she read it again. And then again. By the time the sun came down and there was a knock on the door, she was still in the middle of reading the book. She didn’t event notice Master Ivan until he coughed and her attention was torn from the book.
He had gone out that morning, but he was always back in time for dinner. He had an eyebrow raised at her and she blinked up at him. “Have you finished the other book, then, Zilla?”
“No.” She looked back down at the Velveteen Rabbit. “I am trying to understand how the Boy made the Rabbit real without magic.”
“Ah,” Master Ivan pulled up a chair from one of the tables and sat next to her. “Magic does not solve everything and I think this story shows that well.”
“How do I become real?” Zilla asked. That was the crux of her obsession with the book, after all. Master Ivan always held the answers.
“Well, Zilla, you already are.” Master Ivan answered and she frowned at the book on her lap. “You do not seem satisfied with that answer.”
“I’m not.” Zilla confessed. “I don’t...I don’t feel real. Not like the Rabbit does at the end of the story.” She had been something of a toy, she supposed. A toy for her father and the Hessians. Did she become real when she escaped, is that what Master Ivan was saying? Was she real before she met him? Her Mama wasn’t a magic user, but she loved her as the Boy loved the Rabbit. Enough to cost her Mama her own life.
“Well,” Master Ivan began and Zilla looked over at him finally. He seemed to be considering her thoughtfully. “You breathe, right? You feel hunger, you feel pain. You feel frustration and you feel pride whenever you successfully complete a task. You sleep, you eat and you form your own opinions. You enjoy some stories more than others, it seems. These are all things that make you real.”
Zilla hummed and looked away from his gaze. She was not sure if she believed that. Not yet. “In the story, the Boy loves the Rabbit to realness.”
“That is apart of the story, yes.” Master Ivan agreed. “I don’t think you need other people to make you Real. After all, the Rabbit did not need the boy in the end, did he?”
Zilla thought on this. She closed the book again and looked at Master Ivan. “Can I keep this book?”
“If you are finally going to take reading and writing seriously, yes.” Master Ivan clapped his knees and stood up. “You can write a report on that book as well, I will give you four days to complete it. For now, we will eat dinner.”
Zilla almost groaned. He turned everything into some lesson. But, at least this book was not as dry as the others.