The last book ended on a damp morning in what it estimated was its second winter.
Not dramatically. Just the last page and then the back cover and nothing after it. It closed the book and set it on the stack and lay beside them and looked at the canopy above and thought about the plateau the language had been sitting on for the past month, the same words turning over and over with nothing new coming in from the road or the occasional traveler passing through.
The circuit ran underneath everything the way it always did now, steady and automatic, the current in it stronger than it had been at completion but still far from what it had watched move through the dense loud creatures in the clearing. The venom read differently each week, the trace of current in it growing incrementally, and the scales were denser than they had been before the first evolution though nothing about its appearance announced this to anything looking from outside.
It had read everything it had multiple times.
It needed more.
The road was not enough anymore. Travelers passing through gave it words it already had and the occasional group of dense loud creatures moving through the Sunken Green gave it observation but not language. What it needed was concentration. Many loud creatures in one place talking about many different things for extended periods, the kind of density that had pushed the language forward fast in the weeks the person with the pages had been in the forest.
A settlement.
It had known this was coming for a while and had been not thinking about it the way it did not think about things it had not decided yet. Now it had decided.
It spent three days preparing without knowing exactly what preparing meant for this specific situation. It read the road more carefully than usual, tracking which direction the most traffic came from and which direction it went toward, building a rough picture of what was where based on how long travelers had been walking when they passed and how tired they looked and what they were carrying. Something sizeable was half a day's travel south based on the patterns. Big enough that merchants came from it regularly and tired enough when they arrived at the road near the Sunken Green that they had been walking since early morning.
Half a day's travel for a loud creature on a road.
Longer for something moving through undergrowth alongside the road rather than on it.
It left before dawn on the fourth day.
Moving alongside the road was slower than the road itself but safer. It kept the road in tongue range, reading the traffic as it went, staying in the undergrowth where the grass was tall or the tree line came close enough to the road's edge to provide cover. The circuit ran steadily underneath the movement, the current cycling through its path without interruption, and it read the surrounding terrain as it went, cataloguing the differences between the land near the Sunken Green and the land further south.
The trees thinned as it went. The undergrowth changed, less dense, less old, the soil lighter and more disturbed. More roads joining the one it was following, smaller ones coming in from the sides, the traffic on the main road picking up as the morning went on.
The smell changed too.
It had no words for most of what came in through the tongue as it got closer. Things burning that were not wood exactly. Animals in large numbers close together. Food being prepared in quantities that made the smells stack on top of each other into something overwhelming and specific. The warm signatures of loud creatures multiplying beyond what the tongue could count individually, becoming a general dense warmth sitting ahead like a weather front.
It stopped at the edge of where the tree line ended completely.
Ahead the road widened and buildings began, the same kind of structures it had seen from the road occasionally but many of them, packed together with narrow spaces between, the road running through the middle of them and branching off in multiple directions. Loud creatures everywhere, moving between the buildings, sitting outside them, calling to each other across the spaces between.
Sound everywhere.
It lay at the tree line and let the tongue read what it could from this distance and sorted through the noise for language. Fragments came through clearly, short exchanges between people close to the edge of the settlement, longer conversations further in that the distance blurred into shapes without clear words.
More language in this one view than in two months on the road.
It read the space between the tree line and the nearest buildings. Open ground, maybe thirty body lengths, no cover. Midday light, nothing moving through that space currently but the road traffic using the main entrance further along.
Thirty body lengths of open ground in daylight.
It looked at the buildings and the people moving between them and the narrow spaces running between the structures where the light did not reach well and calculated what it needed against what the open ground cost.
Then it waited for a cart to pass on the road, large and slow, pulled by two animals, the driver looking forward, and when the cart was between it and the nearest building's line of sight it crossed the open ground low and fast and went into the shadow between the first two buildings without stopping.
It pressed flat against the base of the wall and let the circuit settle from the exertion and read the immediate area.
Nobody had seen it.
The sounds were everywhere now, close and layered, conversations overlapping, someone calling from above, animals somewhere behind the buildings, children making sounds at a pitch that cut through everything else. It sorted through all of it and found words it knew and words it did not and held the ones it did not carefully for matching later.
It moved deeper into the narrow space between the buildings and found where two walls met in a corner that left a dark gap at ground level just wide enough and went in and stayed there.
It had made it into the settlement.
Now it just needed to not be found for long enough to make the trip worth it.
It settled in and opened the tongue fully and started listening.