Chapter 38: Inscription

Kaius crouched over a wide wooden board outside of the church. He’d broken down one of the splintered pews and made a small pile of the flattest and smoothest sections of wood.He had a need for them. The next two skills he planned to acquire, Sense Illusion and Sense Mana, were both tricky things.

Father had had plans for how they could work on them. Kaius remembered their last trip to Elmhollow, another of the villages they visited on occasion. A caravan had been passing through, and his father had spotted that they had a minor artefact. A trinket really, more of a children’s toy than anything. The small metal orb would cover itself in an illusion of shifting colours. His father had snapped it up, and had kept it buried at the bottom of his bag for the last several months.

Unfortunately, the orb had been left at their camp when he had been forced to flee, so he would have to make do with what he could himself. Thankfully, he’d more than progressed far enough in his lessons on runes to set up a simple formation that would fuel itself with a mana gathering array. Hence the boards.

Tracing the sigils in the dirt would be nowhere near precise enough for his needs, and while stone would have held up to the rigours of magic better than scrap wood he had no chisels, nor the time, to engrave any of the headstones.

A snort drew his attention. Kaius looked up and smiled. Porkchop was lying next to the outer wall of the church, twitching slightly in his sleep. It had taken them hours to work their way out of the maze, and on their journey back they’d been ambushed by a pair of direboars. Thankfully, between his growth, and his friends prodigious strength, they’d had them handled. One of them was currently roasting over the hearth inside now, the delicious scent of roasting meat and rendered fat wafting out of the churches open windows.

As soon as they had returned, Porkchop had started mumbling about a nap and passed out in seconds. Bloody adorable. He might know that the meles was a terror when he wanted to be, and a nigh mythical creature besides, but he was so damn fluffy.

Kaius shook his head, returning to his task at hand. He grabbed one of the pieces of charcoal he had scavenged from the hearth before he had started cooking, drawing out smooth swooping lines on one of the boards.

He was going to use Gretchen’s Standard. One of the simpler scripts, more something used to train apprentices than something true practitioners employed in their craft. That was important. He had no doubt that without a full skill list he would be offered a mastery skill for the work. That meant he had to avoid using any of his five favoured scripts.

They were the ones he had narrowed down with Father. Each offering a potential use for his plans for his class. They were also the scripts that he planned to use to forge his next legacy skill after True Sight. According to his father, many of his ancestors had gone the route of using runes. Their sixth skill was to thank for that.

It was unique amongst legacy skills, at least those he had heard of, in that it could be merged from any five runic Mastery’s. Instead, the process of merging required a specific mental intent and image to be held in the mind, making it a far harder process than normal. It would be the lynch pin of his spellcasting formation, and had been for the classes of his father and many others in his dynasty.

Among other benefits, it drastically eased the enmeshment of multiple differing runic scripts. Something that was normally hellishly difficult. The realm of masters, not the unclassed.

Getting offered a mastery skill for one of the scripts he planned to use in that merge could be disastrous. It had the potential to make it too difficult for him to reacquire with the limited tools he had at his disposal. He’d have to pick another script, one he was far less familiar with, and one that was far less suited to his eventual intent.

So he used Gretchen’s Standard.

Kaius began to visualise the central sigil that he wanted in his mind, hoving over the board with charcoal in hand. While the script might have been designed for use by novices, it was by no means simple in isolation. The central binding rune would be a whorling knot of intersecting lines and angles. He traced the image in his mind, leaning heavily on mental visualisation. He double and triple checked the image that floated in his mind’s eye, making corrections as he saw an angle out of place, or a line slightly too thick.

**Ding! Mental Visualisation has reached level 7!**

A headache set in, Kaius struggling to hold the image stable. It snapped into place, finished.

**Ding! Mental Visualisation has reached level 8!**

With a steady hand borne from a lifetime of practice, he traced his charcoal over the wood, setting down the sigil into the centre of the plank.

Next he moved to the emission arrays, three concentric circles connecting to equidistant lines that exited the central knot.

**Ding! Mental Visualisation has reached level 9!**

Inside the circles he inscribed lines of balance and unity. Linking chains came next. Jagged, angled things that would connect the emission arrays to the locus of the inscription, an equilateral triangle lined in a hymn of deceit and lies. Each rune of the hymn was dense, tight. Forcing him to shave his charcoal down to a point with every few lines. The minutes ticked by, stamina draining as it forced back strain induced tremors.

**Ding! Mental Visualisation has reached level 10!**

**Ding! Mental Visualisation has reached level 11!**

More than once he smudged a line, wooden refuse and charcoal making poor materials for the deft work of runic inscription. Biting down frustration he simply reached for a rag, wetting the cloth and wiping away the whole rune. Restarting a line would have left minute discrepancies in thickness, something that would reduce the lifespan of the array.

It was already a hack job. He’d be lucky if it lasted long enough for him to get his skill. It had to be as perfect as he could make it.

**Ding! Mental Visualisation has reached level 12!**

Kaius moved to the final set of runes he needed for the glyph. A shaping array to influence what his sigil actually did. He scribed another line of hymns, this time on the interior of the triangle that surrounded the formation. These would serve to hold the illusion mana in stasis. If he did it well enough, it should project an illusory orb a handspan above the binding rune.

**Ding! Mental Visualisation has reached level 13!**

Biting his lip, he traced the last line. He was done. Now he only had to see if it worked. The array should, if he had inscribed it with enough accuracy, pull mana from the air to charge the effect. With the density in the Depths, it should only take fifteen minutes.

Kaius fell back onto the grass behind him, his hand aching and his head throbbing. It had been a nerve wracking experience. Without his father yelling at him every time he made a mistake, there had been a few times he had second guessed himself. But he was done, and he’d know if he was successful soon enough.

**Ding! General Skill Available! Would you like to learn: Rune Mastery – Gretchen’s Standard (Uncommon)?**

**Ding! General Skill Available! Would you like to learn: Steady Hand (Common)?**

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He dismissed the notification, rejecting the skills.

While he waited for the sigil to activate, Kaius rested, recovering his mental focus for when he would have to once again suffuse his eyes with mana. As he watched his jury rigged illusion generator, the charcoal lines he had drawn seemed to flare. Black dust sank into the wood, leaving what looked closer to a series of ink lines on paper than a rough sketch.

He sighed in relief. The mana was flowing through, binding the formation to the material of the board. To save on complexity, something his chosen script was notoriously bad at, he hadn’t put in any control or contingency runes. Once it started generating the illusion, it would keep running until it burned itself out. Random wood was bound to be a poor conductor of mana, and as more flowed through his written circuits it would accumulate damage.

Eventually the array would collapse, and if he hadn’t gained his skill by then he would need to repeat the process.

A haze in the air started to rise from his array. Kaius narrowed his eyes. It was a sign of poor efficiency. He’d done a truly shit job if it was bad enough that the rising mana levels were contained poorly enough to be visible to the naked eye. It couldn’t be helped.

Even at the best of times, with suitable materials and inscription tools, his actual execution of runes was middling. At least, that is what Father was so fond of telling him. Kaius had a sneaking suspicion he did very well for an unclassed with no relevant skills. The fact that the rune held together at all when it was simple rough charcoal on wood was nothing short of a miracle.

It did, however, mean that the inscription was close to having pulled enough mana to activate. He needed to infuse his eyes now. No way was he wasting whatever precious time he would have with the illusion generator.

He threaded the mana out from his soul quickly, the task coming easier after having done it so often in the last day. The energy saturated his eyes, held in pace with a firm mental grip. His eyes teared up, caustic mana sending needle fine points spearing into his delicate orbits. Yet the mental strain of holding the volatile resource under pressure had lessened. There was no headache.

**Ding! Intelligence has reached level 14!*

A subtle pop echoed out from his inscription. Above it a cream coloured orb snapped into existence, roughly the size of his fist. It seemed as solid and substantial as the wood it floated over. The soft blue light of the cavern washed over it, shading its underside and washing its top in a cerulean hue.