Chapter 61: Runes pt. 1

Kaius crouched behind the massive desk that dominated the manors office. It was a little awkward to get at the cabinets beneath, as it had clearly been designed for non-humans. The seat was a little too broad, and everything was a good stride closer to the ground than was comfortable.

Yanking open another draw, Kaius let out a whoop of success as he found an inkwell and a massive stack of loose paper. It was good stuff. Most paper he had used was rough pressed. Thick and grainy, made by one of the craftsmen in the villages that bordered his forest home. These sheets were as smooth as silk, perfectly square, and had a bizarrely even texture. They must have cost a fortune.

He was glad he found them. Rune mastery skills were almost entirely knowledge based, but application of that knowledge would drastically speed up his rate of levelling. With his stylus hecouldhave spent hours on inscribing things properly, but that would slow him down. Gating his rate of advancement to his pitifulManapool. He would end up doing that eventually anyway. It was far more effective than simple drawings on paper, and would be a great help for the inevitable slog as his skills approached their cap.

Besides, he doubted the paper was alchemically treated. Even if he used inscriptions without mana gathering arrays, the magical weight would be far too much for the mundane material. He would quite literally be burning through his supplies. Using incomplete formations would stop that from happening, but that would slow his skill gain even further.

Kaius looked up from the cupboard, staring at the veritable archive of books that lined the walls. Somehow he doubted that he would run out any time soon. This house hadn’t been anything special, and if there wasthismuch paper, he had no doubt that he would be able to find more with a little bit of scavenging.

Grabbing the stack, he rose to his feet and slapped it down on the top of the desk. Porkchop looked over from his spot on the daybed, disturbed by the sound.

“I can't believe you are really just planning on sitting here for a month and drawing. Won’t you get bored?”Porkchop asked.

He’d been grumbling about their planned stay since late last night, after Kaius had told him more about the skills he was planning on levelling.

“Oh shush, it’s not like I’m going to stay in here completely, only leaving to eat and sleep.” It wasn’t a lie…mostly. Well, if he was entirely honest that would beexactlywhat he would do if he thought he could get away with it. Kaius knew he couldn’t though. He was pretty sure Porkchop would riot after the fourth day. The meles was many things, butpatientwas not one of them.

“I’ll need plenty of this stuff here.” Kaius tapped the stack of white paper he had placed on the desk. “Which means we’ll need to do plenty of scavenging. Probably every second or third day. We can explore the district and clear out any nearby groups of goblins while we do so. Is that enough to stop you gnawing your own leg off in boredom?” He asked, giving Porkchop a pointed look.

His friend rolled his eyes, yet another human expression he had picked up.“I’m not that impatient! But yes. That would help.”

“Good. Now, I need to focus. If you manage to keep quiet I might even make some more stew tonight. There's a lot more variations than just beef and potatoes you know.”

Porkchop’s eyes widened. With exacting precision he lowered himself back down onto the daybed without making a single sound. Laying there, perfectly still.

Kaius laughed at his friend's antics. The stew he had made last night was a rustic affair, but tasty. Despite the manor having every ingredient he had ever seen in his life, and a good hundred more, he’d stuck to the basics. Something he had gotten Illendra, the barmaid of the Stout Oak and his closest friend, to teach him.Explorer’s Toolkithad put inwork, letting him refine simple techniques and ingredients into something he would have been proud to serve to the one who taught him the recipe- though he was still nowhere close to her skill.

It was also the first time he had had the resources, space, and mental energy to actually cookrealfood since he had arrived in the Depths. Porkchop had taken to it like a house on fire, ignoring the food’s scalding heat to shove his whole snout into his still steaming portion.

Kaius knew he had had him then. The perfect bribe. Porkchop had always been a glutton, but even a simple mention of stew was enough to get him to settle down now.

Turning back to the desk, Kaius sat in its strangle proportioned chair, leaning over. He frowned. Barely covering his knees, the short height of the desk meant that he had to hunch over. He could already feel the strain on his back, and the odd angle was going to make drawing an absolute nightmare. That wasn’t going to work.

Standing up, Kaius started to pull thick hardcover tombs from the bookshelves, arranging them into a dozen even piles about a handspan or two high.

“Help me with this.” He called to Porkchop, tilting the desk onto two feet after he placed his scavenged paper on the floor. Porkchop leapt forwards, still eager to secure his promised meal. He shoved the stacks of books under the desk, propping it back higher.

“Thanks.” Kaius said.

“I want goat this time. And that strange powder that smelled so good.”Porkchop demanded, returning to his seat.

“You got it, chief.” Kaius saluted. Though inwardly he was a little worried. That ‘powder’ was some sort of spice he had never seen before, so he had no idea what would go well with it.

Returning to the desk, Kaius put a sheet of paper in front of him, tapping its corner with a dry quill. Time to get to work.Runic Lexicon,here we come.

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It was an interesting skill. Belonging to an obscure branch of mastery skills with a distinctly academic flavour. Strangely, it could be formed with any five runic mastery skills, providing general boosts to all runes and more powerful ones to the scripts you used to form it.

The knowledge that the skill could be made withanyscript was also something of a new development. Some scion generations back had been something of a cocky moron from the story Father had told him. Insistent that he could find a variant skill with enough theory crafting. Apparently he had nearly been exiled when the family head at the time had found out that he had thrown away half of the Unterstern legacy on a hunch. He’d been elevated to an inheritor when he merged the same skill.

Though ‘new’ was relative in this case. His father had said it took a dozen generations of scions offering to risk their legacy to explore the boundaries of the skill. Kaius still remembered staring in slack jawed amazement. He’d been young then, and he knew their dynasty wasold, but millennia was something else. He’d tried to ask more, but his father had clammed up as he always did. Waving away his questions by saying the origins of their founding had been lost to time.

Though Fatherhadshared that it was one of his family's oldest skills, one that had made many in his dynasty focus on the runic arts. Most scripts had clear advantages over others for specific use cases, so being able to tailor the skill had provided them with a breadth of capabilities. His father had told him that, while it was nowhere near ubiquitous, many in the family had focused their classes on runesmithing, grand formations, disposable artefacts, and a dozen other specialities. Father himself had apparently been a runesmith of some renown.

Kaius couldn’t wait to add to that history. When he had told Father about his plans for his class, it had lit a fire in his eyes. The passion, intensity, and sheer intellectual curiosity about the possibility had filled his father with energy formonths. Those were some of his favourite memories. He had helped him theory craft the whole thing. Honestly, he doubted without Father’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the runic arts that he wouldeverhave gotten further than an idle idea. Body formations and runic spell hymns were monstrously complex specialities in their own right.

Combining them would require utilising all five of his empowered scripts to their fullest extent. A skill of accomplished journeymen, linking the scripts would be its own challenge. For now, he had to start from the basics. Keystone, linking array, runic hymns, controller, and stabilisation. Five components, five scripts.

He was starting with the keystone. The thing that would bind the runes to his flesh, holding the core of the array stable even when compartmentalised runic hymns were burnt in a cast. It was the lynch pin ofeverything, and had to bear the weight of a monstrously complex working. Generalist enough that it could handle a dozen different spells, stable enough that it would hold the overall formation in place -withouthim having to reinscribe the whole thing every time he cast a spell- and flexible enough to hold a wealth of meaning in a single, central, sigil.

Ykkardian was the script he and his father had settled on. It suited his needsperfectly. A sigil style of script, where others focused on geometric mandalas or sentence based syntax. It was the same style of runes that adorned his sword, well renowned for its stability, depth of meaning, and simple power when leveraged correctly.

It was also rather inflexible, ill suited for complex workings that required variable activation triggers and things of a similar nature.

Like all of his five scripts, he already knew it like the back of his hand. Perhaps not to the extent of a master, but as much as anyone could expect from someone who hadhada master tutor them with dedication on its use for years.

Kaius dipped his quill in his inkpot, leaving it there as he took a moment to decide on the sigil he would draw. He choseStrength.

He started to draw. Sweeping curves biting into sharp angled lines as the rune started to take shape on the page. His hand was perfectly steady, leaning on hisDexterityto keep his lines even. Making sure that each angle was perfect, each line the right thickness.

The sigil was large, taking up the whole page as his hand gradually moved from edge to edge, swooping as he drew in a single continuous moment. He reinked his pen, careful to make sure not to mar the rune.

Ykkardian sigils were almost self contained formations in their own right, only requiring bare little flourishes and simple lines to link them into a greater working. Similarly, it was simplicity itself to ensure the rune wouldn’t draw mana from the atmosphere. Only requiring that he change a few accents. A variation that would require him to manually channel his pool to ignite the glyph.

It was that stable, self contained nature that would make it so good for use as his keystone. It was also what would make it an absolutenightmareto link to his controller, something that would be made with averydifferent style of runic language.

His focus totally honed, the rune ofStrengthslowly came together on the page. A few minutes later and it was done.

Kaius grinned at the rune, admiring his handy work. It was a beautiful thing, a whorl of clean lines and sweeping angles, interposed with jagged slashes. It was rather beautiful in his opinion. He’d always loved how Ykkardian was drawn in a single continuous stroke. A line that bent and wove through itself.

Now it was time for the moment of truth.

Giving the ink a moment to dry, Kaius picked up the page and reached for the rune. Focusing for a moment to connect his pool to the working. Tugging at his mana, the paper went ridgid. Stiff.

Then arcane force tore the mundane material to shreds. A CRACK echoed through the room, quickly followed by a flash of light. Kaius cursed, blinking rapidly to clear the after image of the flash hung in his vision.

Then he laughed as Porkchop let out a yelp of alarm, quickly followed by a crashing sound as something hit the floor. Shaking his hand, he nursed his slightly singed fingers. Kaius didn’t get to see it, but it was obvious that the paper must have detonated.Hehad expected that, but Porkchop clearly hadn’t. Maybe he’d forgotten to mention that. Oops.

**Ding! True Sight has reached level 2!**

The afterimage faded, revealing a shower of ash and embers that floated through the air. Across the room Porkchop lay sprawled on the floor, the day bed knocked prone. His friend was staring at him with indignation.

“What the fuck was that, Kaius?”

“That, my friend, was a success.” Kaius replied with a wide grin, staring at the second notification that hung in his vision.

**Ding! General Skill Available! Would you like to learn: Rune Mastery - Ykkardian (Rare)?**