Chapter 3: An Unexpected First Lesson

Once again, Suria found herself in front of the locked and warded entrance. Shuguja had demanded that the guard – apparently the only other staff member in the building – join them, and Maut-mai was hovering nearby as well, her elegance eroding into near-panic. The statue was there as well, if it was person enough to count.

“Nothing.” Shuguja stepped back from the door, scowling even more deeply than before. “The locks are completely inert. You, blow it out.”

“The doors will be warded against gauntlets,” the guard protested.

“That’s an order!”

Grumbling under his breath, the guard raised his gauntlet directly to the door handle. Mana coursed through the glyph inscribed there and a burst of light impacted the lock, but it faded without effect. Suria thought that he’d made a reasonable point: anyone with the slightest trace of mana could purchase a gauntlet, so of course doors had to be protected against them.

“Then we need a bigger spell.” Shuguja frowned down at her runebook and began flipping the stone plates. “My job isn’t brute force. Do you have a destructive inscription?”

“Shouldn’t you use an unlocking glyph?” the guard asked.

“The standard key phrases didn’t work. I have locking spells for security, but breaking wards is for thieves and criminals. Now show me what you have! They wouldn’t let you work here if you didn’t have at least some competence, right?”

After a long pause, the guard reached into a belt pouch to reveal a small stone talisman. Suria instinctively moved forward, curious to see what it contained. She couldn’t fully grasp the looping inscription, but the rune marks weren’t that much more complex than those she understood, just a square with a triangular extension on each side. Each triangle contained its own inscription, smaller squiggles that looked identical.

That formation would require twelve rune-marks, so it was completely impossible for Suria to create or cast. Still, Shuguja seemed to be taking a long time staring at it, so Suria crept closer and tried to memorize the exact configuration of the inscriptions. She probably couldn’t internalize them immediately, but it would be better than nothing.

“Adequate.” Shuguja opened to a blank page of her runebook and began pressing her stylus into it, intending to copy the spell. She seemed to be doing it rather slowly, but perhaps professionals took more care than amateurs. A mage could only cast a glyph they had created personally, so the creation was an essential moment.

Suria watched the process, determined to learn whatever she could. She knew from her instructors that a basic spell glyph could be improved with attached formations, but because her strength could only create four runes, she had no personal experience with it. The central inscription looked like fire and the four triangles each had an identical inscription, so they were probably enhancements of some kind. That might be the most powerful form the spell could take, at least before a more complex structure that required even more runes.

It seemed to be taking Shuguja a long time to finish making the marks. Suria had no ground to judge, with her feeble skills, but the runes didn’t seem to be aligned very carefully. By the time Shuguja formed the twelfth and final rune, her stylus was shaking so much that the last triangle was slanted to the side. As far as Suria knew, that wouldn’t ruin the spell, but it would be terribly inefficient.

Unless this was some secret advanced technique… but Suria was beginning to doubt it. Shuguja spun her stylus around her fingers in a practiced gesture in order to use the brush to paint the inscriptions. And yet her actual painting was clumsy, spilling ink into the grooves of the runes. If Suria had tried to form a glyph like that, it would have exploded on her.

As she watched, Suria realized the truth: Shuguja was no archmage. She had a ranked seal, yes, but likely only one. Based on how clumsy her skills were, she wasn’t regularly inscribing spells… Shuguja was just a proctor, not a practicing mage.

That revelation made Suria’s mind spin. The first time, she had been so certain that Shuguja was far above her, scorning her for her inadequate skills. But now, seeing the other woman fumble with the inscriptions, Suria realized that she might have been angry. Embarrassed by a provincial healer.

Of course, Suria wasn’t about to get a big head and overestimate herself: she realized how little she knew. Shuguja had at least three times her runic capacity and plenty of knowledge besides. The proctor copied two of the original triangular inscriptions, but replaced the top and bottom ones with a different symbol Suria had never seen before. Those were inscribed much faster, so Suria barely got a chance to look at them before it was done.

“Alright, stand back.” Shuguja gestured irritably at them, then raised her runebook. She extended her other hand to the door and took a sharp breath.

The burst of fire that exploded against the door was shockingly blue, and even from a distance Suria felt the wave of heat rush over her. It was far more powerful than anything she could cast, even if she learned the fire inscription… and it left the door completely untouched. A few glyphs glowed in the wake of the flames, then faded out like dying embers.

Shuguja stared furiously. The guard uttered a low curse. Maut-mai let out a wail of distress. The statue told them all not to worry about the minor incident.

“I don’t think we can break through with brute force,” the guard said. “Wards are easier to trick than to break down, right? Isn’t that basic wardcraft?”

“Shut up,” Shuguja snapped. “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

And yet, in the silence, Suria suspected that wasn’t true: Shuguja was as out of her depth as any of them. Suria let out a long breath as she accepted that she wasn’t going to be saved by a higher authority. If she didn’t find a way out on her own, the attack would probably happen again, and whatever random chance had saved her before, this time she might die for real.

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“Could we make it even stronger?” Maut-mai asked. She had been crying, but dried her eyes and now held out a glass vial that contained a blue liquid. “I have this runic potion, it should enhance your capacity by at l-“

“You think anyone on staff hasn’t already taken those potions?” Shuguja sneered at her, desperately clinging to authority. “No, all of you shut up and let me think.”

Suria was fascinated by the potion, because she’d only seen a handful of them in larger cities, so the idea of a noblewoman carrying one in her bags was astonishing. As far as she knew, there were various methods of strengthening a person’s abilities, though she didn’t understand on a technical level, she just knew that most were temporary. Shuguja had implied there were permanent methods, somehow overlapping with temporary means, which was just another subject Suria had wanted to learn one day.

The group drifted into uncomfortable silence. As it stretched on, Suria realized that she hadn’t seen or heard from Lirngelf since the beginning… had he found a way out, or had something happened to him? Part of her wanted to go look, but she doubted she would find anything new: all her opportunities to figure out anything were in the room with her.

Since it didn’t seem likely that Shuguja was going to come up with a solution, Suria shifted closer to the guard. As rude as he had been, he also seemed the most level-headed.