Eli strode out of the dining hall, his mother leading the way in front of him, and Aria trailing an absentminded step behind. Her lips seemed to be reflexively forming the words ‘magic room,’ like they were a silent chant she could barely bring herself to believe.
He slowed his pace just enough for her to catch up and hooked his arm with hers. She startled but didn’t pull away. Instead, she darted her eyes to his, her delicate features flushed with an infectious excitement that Eli couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt towards magic fundamentals.
He looked at the easy delight radiating from her and the words his father probably hadn’t meant for him to hear replayed in Eli’s memory: It is good to not be alone.
Eli thought of the long road ahead of him and clenched his jaw. If nothing else, they could have each other.
~
The study chamber smelled faintly of chalk and parchment. The two side walls, and the space underneath the back window were taken up by shelves laden with neatly organized tomes, reagents, tools, and various magical and mundane equipment. Two long desks were placed in an ‘L’ shape.
Sela stood behind the first desk, arms crossed, eyes sharp.
“Layla,” she called. Seemingly appearing from nowhere a woman with the same bronzed skin as Sela, and much shorter cropped black hair bowed towards her lady and inclined her head towards the young lord. She smiled briefly at the dumbstruck look Aria was giving her before she turned back to Sela.
“How may I assist my lady?”
“We’ll need an extra chair, and some light refreshments for the room please,” she said, and just as suddenly as she appeared, Layla was gone once more.
While they waited both Mother and son watched in amusement as Aria took in the room. Once both children were finally seated, Sela brought up Eli’s promise once more, seemingly more for Aria’s sake than out of any doubt about her son’s commitment.
“Remember we will be doing a double lesson today, so you will be here until the midday meal,” she said, and continued at Eli’s nod. “Very good. With your friend joining us this is an excellent time to go over the basics again. I’ll still expect you to complete your advanced coursework afterward, but I trust you can manage a little self study?”
“Of course, mother.” Eli said, an easy smile on his face.
“I also trust you’ll be sure to keep your company entertained.” It wasn’t a question. More of a direct command with veiled implications, but that was alright. Eli was always planning to teach Aria himself. He just figured it would be a few months down the path, not days.
While most of the conversation went entirely over her head, not all of it did. Aria was frozen in her seat, hands tightening at her sides. “It’s okay,” she whispered quickly. “I don’t want to make more work for him.”
Sela’s mouth curved faintly. “He’d be doing extra work with or without you here. With you, he’ll get a chance to teach as well.” She turned to look at Eli. “And why is that beneficial, son.”
“Because teaching is a great way of learning.” He recited diligently. Then Eli grinned at Aria.
“It might be boring,” he admitted. “But if you want to learn, I’d be happy to teach you. I promise next time it will be even more fun.”
Aria’s eyes darted between him and Sela; a growing spark of wonder warmed her chest. He’d said Next time. She thought. There could be a next time.
“I’d like to learn,” her voice was whisper soft, but determination rang clearly in every syllable.
Sela clapped her hands once. “All right then. Let’s begin,” she began. She pulled a large leatherbound book out from the half height shelf to her back. Then she stood and made her way around her own desk to the one in front of her two students. When she placed the familiar tome on the desk in front of them Eli swore he could hear the wood groaning in protest.
Saying nothing yet, she then walked to the far wall and with a simple gesture, caused the stone floor to rise in a thin slab that obscured the far bookshelf from view. Sela pressed her finger to the slate she’d created and just like that, the once mottled grey rock became a uniform beige-white that contrasted brilliantly against the black of the hardened charcoal his mother floated into her hand. Finally she paused. “What is a rune?” Sela asked smiling kindly at the little girl who had just experienced her first true taste of magic.
Aria gaped at the display of power. Her eyes expanded comically like a rabbit caught in a light beam. Her mouth opened, closed, opened again, and finally her whole head turned to face Eli.
“I promised you magic, didn’t I?” he whispered, well aware that his mother could hear him perfectly well. Improved senses was one of her permanent enhancements. In reality what Sela had done was beyond impressive. While the actual manipulation of stone wasn’t particularly difficult, achieving such a smooth surface, and making it a uniform colour required incredibly fine control, and understanding of the element. All this was accomplished without any affinity for stone, metal or earth. The display reaffirmed Eli’s goal to learn more about elemental magic this go around.
Eli was dragged out of his thoughts with his mother’s repeated question.
“A rune. What is it?” She asked again, her tone still patient. The question had not been rhetorical.
Eli’s eyes dropped to the tome in front if him, briefly tracing the embossed title. ‘The Enchanter’s Guild Compendium of Runes – Volume 1.’ Eli could feel his mother’s expectant gaze on him. He nodded slightly to himself before turning to Aria with a gentle smile.
“A rune is a symbol which, when empowered, creates an effect.”
Sela tilted her head, eyes narrowing. It was a good, if highly oversimplified answer “At its most basic yes.” She smiled.
At the front of the room Sela paced slowly her movements drawing in her students’ gazes. “All runes are different, some runes are similar, in many cases, more then one rune can be used to represent and ‘script’ the same concept. Some runes, however, are more correct than others.”
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
Aria looked like she wanted to say something, as she fidgeted in her seat. Her hands clenched in her lap as she supressed the urge. Sela caught it though.
“Yes?” She asked. Aria’s eyes darted around before settling on the beautiful, imposing woman in front of her. “Go on,” Sela encouraged.
“Concept?” It was the only word Aria could squeak out. Both Sela and Eli smiled.
“How to explain,” Sela mused. “When you think of nature, what comes to mind?”
“A tree,” Aria whispered.
“A good answer, what else?”
“Um, the birds, and the flowers?”
“Good, keep going. Eli?”
“Wind, water, rain and snow. The grass, the sky and the earth below.” Eli recited a line from a famous poem by an even more famous nature mage. The powerful figure had helped her house climb from fourth to third step nobility around the time his parents would have just been entering the academy. She was also responsible for a considerable number of the foundational theories and texts on nature magic, and magic in general that were studied and taught even into the future.
His mother laughed and nodded. “You’ve been reading Little Star.” She smiled at him, then turned back to the slate in front of her. “For the concept of nature, let’s go with something simpler than ‘the sky’. A tree.”
The words made Aria feel giddy as she watched Sela draw two parallel concave lines for the trunk, and a scalloped line in a dome over the top to represent a simple tree.
“This is a symbol that represents a concept. In order for something to be considered a rune, three things are required. First, a symbol. Second, mana. Then third intent. Though not always in that order.”
Sela walked back to her desk and drew a simple design of a tree on a small plain sheet of paper. Then she unlocked a small box, withdrew a square of parchment that shimmered faintly in the light, and repeated the symbol before placing them in front of her son.
“Empower them both,” she instructed.
He inhaled slowly, made sure his mana channeling was going no faster than a crawl. Every thread of mana slipped like molasses through his body, out of his hands and pooled into each symbol with exaggerated care. The deliberate slowness served to hide his sudden proficiency from his mother, and as a control exercise. He thought of nature, of the outdoors. Of the cycles of life and death, and growth and decay.
After a short breath, both runes flared.
The plain paper glowed a dull, fuzzy green before crumpling to dust on the table. In contrast, the parchment shone with bright and verdant light, its glow holding steady even after Sela had cleared the remnants of the first paper away.
Aria gasped, her mouth tugging up into an open smile.
“This is why we practice on enchantment slates. Paper alone is costly. Rune-parchment?” She lifted the glowing square, scoffed, and shook her head. “The materials alone would have kept even the richest houses from making any progress in the field of script smithing, let alone the guild, or any potential unaffiliated awakened.” She sighed, shook her head again, then returned to the board before continuing.
“Now, runic symbols link together to form enchantments. Think of it like a sentence. Thing, connector, action. Rune, connector, instruction. The more complicated the sentence, the more complex the resulting enchantment. These sequences are called ‘scripts’.”
Sela drew a short list down the side of the board.
“Runes are being discovered all the time, but superior runes are very rare. Remember. Some runes are better than others.”
She wrote as she spoke:
- Substandard (Untiered): flawed, weak.
- Low Tier: simple, reliable.
- Mid Tier: practical, strong.
- High Tier: refined, powerful.
- Grand Runes: rare, fiercely guarded.
She turned to regard the children, then back to the board before her eyes settled on Aria.
“You can read, can’t you dear?” Primary education was mandatory for all children from the ages of three to five. It was imperial law as a new awakened could come from any caste, in any region. The practice was implemented in order to save time when they entered the academy, however a byproduct of this was that almost every citizen knew how to read, write, and do basic sums.
After age five, it was up to individual families on how they educated their children, however with mandatory testing at age 10, and the chance their children may qualify for the academy, most families that could afford to get their child additional education, did.
“I know my letters, my Lady. I do,” Aria insisted. Her whole face had flushed crimson so fast Eli feared she may end up lightheaded.
Sela simply nodded in acknowledgement. She knew better than most that something being law did not mean it was adhered to. Knowing what she did of the butcher Sela had not wanted to make any assumptions before she continued. However, her intent had never been to embarrass the girl. So, she moved on swiftly, giving the child some time to collect herself while she taught. Eli rubbed the girls back, lips pressed together as the lesson continued.
“Any rune from mid-grade and above is considered a superior rune. Many of them have been discovered and most of those above the high tier are held by the Families, guilds, or various noble houses. If you somehow discovered a superior rune, you could hold it for your House, sell it to a Guild, or barter with a noble family.”
Eli knew of more than one dispute that had escalated to violence over some house or guild that discovered, or re-discovered a rune or script that had previously been monopolized by some other faction. It was remarkable how much power a small symbol could hold.
“Eli, the slates?” Sela directed.
Eli reached into a compartment on the desk and pulled out two slates about the size of a serving tray and placed one in front of himself, and one in front of Aria, before he pulled out a pouch with visible silver enchantments glowing on the sides. From the bag he pulled two small waxy cylinders that glimmered with the same faint iridescence as the ‘nature’ paper that was slowly losing its glow.
“Rune sticks. When you empower a rune with them, the reagents – the magical stuff inside – burn up. That way the rune is powered, not the slate beneath.” he said to a curious Aria before they both refocused on the lesson.
“Thank you, Eli.” Sela said, returning to the board and tapping on the tree. “Start with this,” she said before returning to her desk and pulling out drafting paper and a leatherbound tome nearly as large, and much more lovingly bound than the tome that rested between Eli and Aria. As his mother settled into her own work the room went quiet. The only sounds were chalk on slate and the practiced swish of Sela’s steady hand.
~
Eli had been fiddling with his connecting script when a sudden weight wrenched him out of his flow. Battle honed instincts nearly had him lashing out. Nearly.
Instead, he took a deep breath and settled himself before he pulled back and caught Aria. She had been falling and had ended up slumped into him. Had she… She had. The exhausted and overwhelmed little girl had fallen asleep.
Eli looked down at her, then up at his mom. Sela just raised an eyebrow before continuing on with whatever work she’d been completing while the two children practiced runes.
Aria groaned faintly, her eyes fluttering open with absolutely no recognition in them before she shuffled to resettle with her head on his thighs. Eli looked down and couldn’t stop his lips from twitching. Then he exhaled and let it go. She must have been beyond tired to fall asleep here and now, he thought, pressing his fingers against her brow before stroking her head.
He stared down at her, a knot tightening in his chest. He was honestly flattered. It meant that on some level she trusted him. Eli knew from fitful nights, and restless breaks spent on battlefields and in bunkers. Sometimes sheer exhaustion just wasn’t enough for your body to let you rest. Though her conscious brain might be wary, the rest of her was both relaxed enough, and felt safe enough to let down her guard and fall asleep right beside him.
A bond. They needed the bond. He knew it was too soon now, but it wouldn’t always be, and he needed to be ready. But where, how? There was no privacy in the keep. Not while he was in this child’s body. Perhaps his mother’s Sela’s private practice chamber, but he doubted she’d just give him unsupervised free reign any time soon. If she refused, his only real option would be the wilds. In the region between the pacified woods, and untamed Wilds was the borderland.
He'd need to make preparations. But what else was new. His jaw clenched. One step at a time, he reminded himself as Aria shifted against him.
Whatever it takes.