Chapter 63: Runes pt. 3

Kaius held the piece of paper between ink stained fingers, his hands shaking slightly as he stared at the complex mess of a runic sigil that had taken him the better part of an hour to write. It had to work this time. It had to.

He felt like he was going insane, pouring over the grain sized characters that built up into massive words, in turn whorling into curving lines of script. It wasn’t his hand writing. That was perfect. His first attempt, the one that failed to connect to his mana, had been due to faulty substitutions. Mixing up the seventeenth and eighty-ninth Vhaxanish characters. Easy to do. One was an upside down equilateral triangle, the other an upside down equilateral triangle with a slight flick on its left point.

Failures two through five had been grammar issues. Basic things, but each one had caused the formation to burst into a shower of sparks the second he pushed mana through it.

He’d fixed those.

It had to be right, now. Syntax was fine. Spelling was fine. He’d used the correct characters. The angles and cross over points on the lines of text were perfect.

Kaius took a shaky breath. Reaching out to the sigil. Mana connected.

A soft glow lit from the central point of the Vhaxanish formation, a ball of white light emerging to hover over its centre.

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

“Thank the fucking GODS!” Kaius cried, throwing his hands up in triumph and letting the formation flutter to the ground. Half way it burst into flames, scattering ash across the floor.

He accepted the skill in a rush, pulling up its description. Unwilling to let a freak accident force him to spend any more time than was necessary on the utterly miserable script. Being forced to regain it would mean doing at least twice as many successful formations.

Rune Mastery – Vhaxanish:

Level 1

Rare

Lesser minds do not understand the value of precision.

This skill improves the users ability to create Vhaxanish formations, and increases the stability of the formations themselves.

Each level slightly increases speed and accuracy when inscribing Vhaxanish runes.

Each level slightly increases stability of Vhaxanish runes.

Each level slightly increases memory and learning capacity of Vhaxanish runes.

“Oh fuck off.” Kaius mumbled, reading the epigraph of the skill. That was ridiculous. Vhaxanish was not precise, it was cumbersome, unwieldy, and other scripts outshone it in almost every single use case imaginable. Thank you very fucking much.

A noise from the doorway tore him away from his frustration. He looked up, finding Porkchop poking his head into the office.

“You give up yet?” His friend asked. “I’m hungry.”

“Nope!” Kaius said, his voice a little more biting than he intended, still pissed off at his failures.

“So no food?” Porkchop asked, his whole body drooping. He sounded devastated.

Kaius immediately felt bad. “No! I got it.” He said, pushing himself up and away from the desk.

Porkchop perked up immediately, bounding away from the door. “Race you to the kitchen!”

Laughing, Kaius jumped into a sprint, tearing through the halls after his friend.

…

Kaus leaned against one of the massive benches that lined the manor’s kitchen. He assumed it must have been staffed by a good handful of cooks, tucked away as it was at the back of the ground floor. Though smaller than the barrack kitchen, it was still large enough to prepare food for several dozen people, and had a larder stocked to match.

He worked his way through the bowl of piping hot stew in his hands, wondering about the strange numbing sensation that had spread through his mouth. He had to assume it came from the strange spice that Porkchop had insisted he use. It was… Nice enough, he supposed. A little citrusy. He wasn’t sure how he felt about the numbing though, he’d half thought that he’d been poisoned at first, or was having an allergic reaction.

Porkchop loved it though. Kaius watched his friend momentarily come up for air before shoving his head back into the mixing bowl of food he had given him. It had taken a lot to convince him to wait long enough for it to not burn him.

“Sho Ghood” Porkchop moaned.

“I don’t even know why you do that. It’s not like you’re actually using your mouth to talk.” Kaius cocked his eye at his friends antics

“You do it!”

“I do have to use my mouth to talk,” he said with a grin.

Porkchop pulled his head out of his bowl long enough to huff in Kaius’s direction, before diving right back in.

“I hope we can visit some place like this one day. Not filled with goblins I mean.”

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

“We probably could,” Kaius responded. “Maybe not exactly like this, I’m pretty sure this is modelled after a dwarven deepholm. More of a dwarf-only fortress than a proper city. But the Stoneholds themselves accept travellers!”

“It was weird at first, seeing a city. So different from the forest. I can’t even imagine how many people there must have been.”