Banished Divinity: Learning to be Human

“Eating.” I said.

“With a spoon?” Tangled Menace looked at me like i have grown another head.

I looked at the spoon. Looked at the noodles. Looked back at her. “Is that incorrect?”

“The noodles. The noodles, Sera. You eat them with chopsticks.”

“What are chopsticks?”

The silence that followed was profound.

Mum’s hand stopped halfway to her mouth. Dad’s chopsticks hovered above his own bowl. Tangled Menace looked at me like I had just announced that I planned to eat my soup with a hairbrush.

“You,” Tangled Menace said slowly, “have been using chopsticks since you were eight years old. You’re better at them than I am. You once gave a presentation on the history of chopsticks for a school project.”

“That sounds like something I would not do.”

“You got an A.”

“Still sounds like something I would not do.”

Mum set down her chopsticks. “Sera, sweetheart, do you remember how to use chopsticks?”

I stared at the two thin wooden sticks beside my bowl. I had seen other people using them. They seemed to involve a lot of precise finger movements and a certain amount of cultural knowledge that I, a celestial being who had only been mortal for approximately four hours, definitely did not possess.

“No,” I said.

Mum and Dad exchanged a look. Tangled Menace made a sound that might have been despair or might have been the beginning of another laughing fit.

“Okay,” Dad said, reaching for my bowl. “I’ll ask for a fork.”

“No.” The word came out sharper than I intended. I grabbed my bowl and pulled it back toward me. “I will use the sticks.”

“Sera—”

“The sticks. I will use the sticks.”

I picked them up.

They were awkward. Unbalanced. They slipped in my grip, crossing in the middle like two drunkards trying to dance. I tried to separate them, to arrange my fingers the way I had seen others do, but the moment I attempted to pick up a single noodle, both sticks clattered to the table.

I tried again.

The noodles slipped.

Again.

This time, one of the sticks flew out of my hand entirely and landed in Mum’s water glass.

“I did not intend that,” I said.

Mum was staring at the chopstick floating in her water. Dad was making that choking sound again. Tangled Menace had given up all pretence and was now laughing openly, her face buried in her arms on the table.

“I am a celestial being,” I said, trying again with the remaining chopstick, which was significantly harder to use now that I only had one. “I have wielded weapons forged in the fires of….”

The noodle I had been attempting to capture flicked out of the bowl and landed on the table with a wet slap.

“Maybe,” Dad said gently, “we should get that fork.”

“No.”

“Sera—”

“I said no.”

I abandoned the single chopstick and picked up the spoon. It was, I decided, an acceptable alternative. It had a curve. It could hold things. It was, in its way, elegant.

I plunged it into the bowl.

The noodles did not cooperate. They slid off the spoon. They wrapped around it. They formed a tangled, rebellious mass that seemed determined to thwart me at every turn.

The noodles did not cooperate. They slid off the spoon, wrapped themselves around it, and formed a tangled, rebellious mass that seemed determined to thwart me at every turn. I narrowed my eyes at the bowl as though sheer divine authority might compel it into obedience. It did not. One particularly insolent strand slapped wetly back into the broth and flicked a dot of sauce onto my wrist.

Across the table, Tangled Menace made a choking sound, then another, before lowering her chopsticks and leaning back in her chair with the expression of someone about to become deeply irritating.

“Your Majesty,” she said solemnly, “since you are apparently a celestial being… how do you eat where you come from?”

I looked up at her. It was, quite clearly, a mocking question. Unfortunately for her, it also had an answer.

“We do not eat like this,” I said, gesturing stiffly at the bowl with my spoon as another noodle slid off it in open defiance. “In the higher realms, sustenance is not… slippery.”

Tangled Menace’s eyes lit up with malicious delight. “Oh my God. Then how do you eat?”

“We conjure condensed spheres of celestial energy,” I said.

There was a brief silence.

Dad blinked. Mum stopped mid-bite. Tangled Menace slowly lowered her chopsticks as though she had just stumbled upon the greatest treasure of her life.

“I’m sorry,” she said, her voice trembling with suppressed laughter. “You do what?”

“We inhale them,” I said seriously.

Dad made a sound into his water glass.

Mum immediately pointed her chopsticks at Mina. “Do not encourage her.”

“I’m not encouraging!” Tangled Menace said, scandalized. “I’m learning.”

“You are absolutely encouraging.”

“No, no, wait,” Mina said, holding up a hand and turning back to me with alarming sincerity. “Walk me through this. You just… summon a glowing ball and inhale it?”

“Yes.”

“Like a vacuum?”

I stared at her. “No.”

“Then how?”

“Through divine respiratory intake.”

There was a beat of silence.

Then Mina slapped the table.

“That is so much worse.”

Dad folded in half laughing.

Mum closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose. “Mina. Stop talking.”

“She’s snorting holy air snacks!” Mina wheezed.

“They are not snacks,” I said coldly. “They are refined manifestations of ambient life force, concentrated into stable nourishment.”

Mina turned to Dad, tears already gathering in the corners of her eyes. “She eats glow-flavoured oxygen.”

Dad made a noise so violent he had to put his chopsticks down. Mum slowly set her spoon onto the table with the solemnity of a woman preparing to abandon civilization.

“If either of you say one more word,” she said quietly, “I am leaving.”

“You can’t leave,” Mina gasped. “She still hasn’t eaten.”

That was true.

I looked down at the bowl. Then at the spoon. Then back at the bowl. A strand of noodle slowly slid over the side like it was attempting escape. I sat back.

“This food is hostile,” I said.

Dad immediately bent forward and buried his face in one hand.

Mum pointed at Mina again. “This is your fault.”

“My fault?” Mina cried. “She just told me she inhales divine food pellets!”

“Energy spheres,” I corrected.

“That’s not helping.”

I tried the noodles again. The spoon slipped. The noodles slithered sideways like they had achieved sentience purely to spite me. A strand flung itself across the bowl and landed on the table.

Everyone watched it.

Then everyone looked at me.

I lifted my chin. “It attacked first.”

Mina lost whatever remained of her self-control. She leaned forward again, eyes gleaming with the kind of cruelty only sisters seemed capable of.

“Spoon is not correct either,” Tangled Menace gasped between laughs. “Sera, just use your hands at this point. It would be less embarrassing.”

I stared at her. Then at the bowl. Then back at her.

“…I am considering it,” I said.

Dad burst out laughing so hard he had to put his forehead on the table. Mum whispered, with all the calm fury of a woman standing at the edge of a cliff, “I am going to eat in silence if it kills me.”

“It might,” Mina said cheerfully. “At this rate, definitely.”

“Spoon is not correct either,” Tangled Menace gasped between laughs. “Sera, just use your hands at this point. It would be less embarrassing.”

“I will not use my hands. I am not an animal.”

“Animals have better table manners than you are right now.”

I finally managed to get a reasonable quantity of noodles onto the spoon—somehow—and lifted it to my mouth.

The taste hit me like a revelation.

The noodles were soft, the sauce was rich and savoury and just slightly sweet, the vegetables added texture and brightness. It was warm and comforting andgoodin a way that nothing I had ever consumed in the High Heavens had ever been. Celestial ambrosia was refined and perfect and utterly without character. This was messy and imperfect andalive.

I stopped chewing.

Mum’s face did something complicated.

“You’ve had jjajangmyeon a hundred times, Sera.”

“I don’t remember.”

“I know.”

She reached across the table and, very gently, tucked a strand of hair behind my ear.

I froze.

No one, not even my birth mother, had ever done something like that.

Something caught in my throat.

A strange pressure built behind my eyes.

And then. Warmth slid down my cheek.

I touched it, staring at my fingers.

“What… is this?” I whispered.

Mum, Dad, and Tangled Menace all went very still.

No one laughed. No one spoke. They simply let me eat. As if nothing had happened.

I continued with the spoon. It was not elegant. It was not correct. Noodles slid off, splattering sauce on the table and, once, on Tangled Menace’s sleeve, which earned me a yelp and a half-hearted shove. But I ate. And the more I ate, the less I thought about the Tribunal, about the fall, about the body that wasn’t mine and the memories I didn’t have.

I just ate.

And somewhere in the middle of it, without meaning to, I relaxed.

Just a little.

Just enough to notice that the woman who had struck me with a slipper that morning was now smiling at me with something that looked almost like hope. That the man who had suggested the doctor was smiling too, his hand resting lightly on Mum’s. That the sister who had laughed at me—who was still laughing at me, honestly—had slid her notebook across the table so I could see the page.

It was a drawing.

Of me. Standing in the waiting room. Arms outstretched. Face earnest. A man in a black hoodie which I now know, fleeing in the background, his expression one of pure terror.

Above my head, she had written:WHERE IS MY RAVEN??? Or insect????!!!

I looked at the drawing.

I looked at Tangled Menace.

She was grinning, but there was something careful in her eyes. Something waiting.

And for the first time since I woke up in this strange world, in this strange body, surrounded by strange people who thought they knew me.

I laughed.

It was a small sound. Rusty. Unfamiliar, like trying on a coat that didn’t quite fit. But it was real.

Tangled Menace’s grin widened. “There you are,” she said softly.

“What?”

“Nothing.” She pulled her notebook back and flipped to a fresh page. “Eat your noodles, weirdo.”

I ate my noodles.

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