Chapter 124: Long Awaited Destiny pt. 7

The final split boulder was a large thing. He recognised it, a perfect duplicate of another further across the base of the slope. The same one Father had used to teach him runes.

The shifting glyph on the boulder’s face made Father’s master runework look like a child’s drawing. It was jagged and aggressive, impossibly crisp lines cutting through stone, before they cracked into hard points and ran back through themselves.

He found it almost impossible to focus on a single aspect of the shifting rune, his eyes tugged from point to point. Every time he roved back over a spot, its entire geometry had shifted, rolling back over itself to present him with a new face.

And yet, he did not ever see the thing actually move. It was simply different every time he focused. Still, he could work out some aspects of its construction, even if in the broadest of senses. It was similar to his own glyph, in the way a barn cat was similar to a lion. A central nexus of violent shards, or crackling spokes, or twisting knots. A controller, shifting faster than he could focus on it. Swooping lines that wove themselves into a binding, before shattering like glass.

He swallowed thickly, a vein on his temple throbbing as the mutable design made his head start to ache. It didn’t take long for him to give up studying much more of the formation.

Taking a deep breath, he stepped forwards, revealing the description of his final potential skill.

Latent Glyph of Drakthar:

Class Skill- Tier I

Affinity: Arcane, Martial

Type: Glyph-binding, Runic, Spellcasting

Selection Available!

Heroic

The ‘Glyph of Scouring,’ Drakthar is etched for aggression and dominance in battle. Its hymns unleash raw, directed energy in bursts of screaming magic. Of all Vesryn glyphs, it is the most warlike, as such Initiates have its latent form inscribed on their hands and wrists to make it easier to direct – and less likely to bite something important.

This skill allows the user to inscribe Vesryn evocation spell-hymns to be activated at will, limited only by the availability of mana to reserve into the working, and sufficient space on the body. Creates a hymnbook on the user’s status if one is not already present. Paired on both hands, each glyph can cast hymns inscribed on their counterpart.

Each level moderately increases the power, range, afflictions, and area of effect of spell-hymns cast through the glyph.

Each level slightly decreases the physical size of inscribed spell-hymns.

Every 100 levels the user may learn another runic hymn of the relevant tier to add to their hymnbook.

Spell-hymns Known:

Tier I-

Selection Available!

Air hissed between Kaius’s clenched teeth as he took in the nature of what would be the first skill of his class. There was no doubt in his mind.

Drakthar. He rolled the word across his tongue, feeling its hard points and sharp edges. It was a good name. A fitting one. Something that a warrior-king would name his weapon.

It was perfect. A source of new spells, his charged hymns limited only by his mana pool, and an increase of power that scaled with his level. He could think of nothing better. Plus, to his core he burned to grasp as much of glyph-binding as he could.

While he wanted to make use of his blade just as much, he had had a lifetime of training with the weapon, and he did not need a class skill to cleave in someone’s skull. Not so with glyph-binding.

He still had his original glyph, sure, but the system itself had said it was not much better than a poor imitator. The creation of a genius no doubt, but it was a sling to his class’s trebuchet. He wanted, needed, to see the difference in their power. He would just need to get rid of his old one first.

Dismissing the description of the skill, Kaius looked down to his hand. Clean runework sprawled over the back of his hand, wrapping around the sides to creep over the edges of his palm, butted up on the base of his fingers – including the two missing ones – and sprawling up his wrist.

The work of a genius, but still a jury-rigged connection of five highly disparate scripts, all working in concert to force a result far outside of their intended use cases. Body formations might have already been a thing, but they were simplistic compared to his glyph. Simple passive effects of reinforcement, made to bind to flesh through runic advancements.

Yet still, at its core it was a proof of concept. Nothing made that more clear than the shifting lines of the glyph behind him. It would still be invaluable. All mystic arts started from humble beginnings, and if he could find himself an ally in a scholar it would serve as an excellent starting point for plumbing the fundamentals of the Third Pillar. It was often far easier to start from humble basics than it was to work back from the creation of potentially millennia of development.

It still had to go. Nothing of true value would be lost. He still had his notebook, containing every scrap of knowledge his father could impart on his development of the glyph, and Kaius’s own personal notes on his experiences during its construction.

He reached for the glyph with his mana, feeling his internal control react with far more depth, power, and grace than ever before. Resonance Amplification at work.

Mana thrummed through the glyph, forging a tightly bound connection with his deepest centre. He could see it, how it connected to him. Kept itself stable. Dozens of threads of the circulating resource invigorated the working like blood vessels, pumping it through the clean lines of the glyph before returning it to him untouched.

It would be simple to rip the threads apart. It would also likely blow his hand off. Enhanced with his latest skills, and the acuity of capped True Sight, he could see why it had failed so violently during his failed inscribings. Breaking the thin and delicate connections that held the glyph stable would send the mana into a discordant rampage. Amplified by the sacred geometry and linguistic power of runes, it would roil. Boiling over until it overwhelmed the glyph’s natural stability in a violent detonation.

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Thankfully, with the new depth of his internal mana control, he could feel which threads fed the glyph mana, and which ones syphoned it away. Every scrap of theory he had learned said that cutting the threads that fed the working would allow it to safely drain off its energy, eventually collapsing when it no longer had the throughput to bind itself to him.

He started to cut.