The design for the explosive caltrops was simple. Probably the simplest thing Talia had ever made, in fact. Barely even a trinket.
The line between an artefact and a trinket was a technical one that boiled down to the complexity of the enchantment. In actuality, scholars and arcanists argued vehemently over factors like mana consumption, size, number of rune arrays and a host of other things.
None of them would argue that Talia’s design would ever qualify as an artefact. Though she had varied them in shape and size—to better be able to test which shape worked best— the principle was simple and relied solely on iron’s reaction to mana. There wasn’t even a single rune array in the whole thing, just a channel that curled its way around and into a capacitor rune in the center of the spikes.
The idea being that the metal that connected the spikes would explosively shatter once the mana sank into the capacitor rune, sending metal shrapnel and sharp iron spikes flying at breakneck speeds. A function that was distinctly hard to test—without causing extensive damage to the wagon—hence the variety of shapes.
Talia thought up half a dozen different prototypes to be tested in the field. From expanded caltrops with a ball to connect the metal prongs, to a shape that resembled a miniature spiked mace head, to an amorphous, segmented cube designed to—hopefully—fracture along designated fault lines.
Either way, each functioned the same way:
Step I: Inject mana.
Step II: Throw in the direction of things you didn’t like.
Step III: Take cover.
Repeat until satisfaction was achieved.
Satisfaction in this case being the eventual end of whatever grotesque beast the user—her—deemed so terrifying as to not want to be within a hundred metres of it.
When it became apparent that Osra would not be returning, Talia sighed and mentally earmarked the page for later review. It was too late to light the small forge and start shaping iron. If the girl refused to help, Talia would do it later.
The idea was on the page, which was the important part.
Torn between calling it for the night and drafting up another project, Talia took a look at the timepiece.
Damn, is it that late already? Alright, one more thing and then off to bed.
The arcanist reached down with her right hand to finger the activation rune on her bracer-shield. The metal retracted in on itself in that mind-bending way that ancient artefacts sometimes did. Talia watched in fascination as the bracer pooled back into the loop-bar-loop contraption that she’d originally received it as, what felt like a year ago.
That never gets old.
The artefact brought up so many questions that Talia couldn’t even begin to answer. How did it change shape? Was it the strange metal? How had the Ancients—no mortal hand had shaped this piece, that was for sure— gotten the runes so small? How did it connect to the user’s thoughts? Now that she thought about it, her sword did the same thing. Maybe she could compare the two and—
Quit it, Tals. Falling down the sinkhole again. You need rest. And food. Fix the damn thing and then move on. You’ll have plenty of time to examine it. Later.
Clearing her mind of all sorts of fascinating questions that begged to be answered, Talia plucked some precision tools and a magnifying glass from her tool belt and got to work.
Finding the fault in the rune inlay was painstaking work. From what she could tell, when the metal shrank back into the artefact’s inert form, the whole enchantment shifted it with it. Which made the fault in the runework that much harder to find. The phenomenon made sense when you thought about it. How else would it work? What Talia was puzzling over was how exactly it was casually accomplishing an effect that would have seen her bumped from journeyman all the way to master arcanist.
The responsible voice in her head hissed at her to focus.
With a sigh, Talia flicked the activation rune.
It should work, even though it’s not on my arm…
The arcanist was still surprised at what followed. The metal flowed like dark, liquid silver. For a few instants, a mass of shimmering runes twisted over itself on the workbench. Finally, the chaotic, undulating movement stopped, producing the bracer she was familiar with. Talia sucked in a breath.
The artefact was big. Somehow, she doubted its size was patterned off of her mother’s arm.
The bracer in its original form was set to fit a forearm the size of her thigh. Bigger even.
Scrambling at her mind for old, recollected texts, Talia remembered an obscure reference she’d consulted in her investigations into the Enigma. The unnamed author had claimed—without substantiating proof— that the Ancients were twice the size of a normal human. The anonymous researcher had then tied that into some nonsense about brain sizes and breeding pure bloodlines—the kind of drivel that got scholars and arcanists killed by angry mobs. Talia had written off their work as nonsense, and lamented the time wasted reading it. But what if, for all that the nameless scholar was—to put it mildly— deranged, they were right? On that one, seemingly useless, factoid.
After all, the Ancients were worshipped as gods. Were, by all accounts of their feats and works, godlike beings, at the very least. With that in mind, why wouldn’t they be four metres tall, with arms the size of Talia’s legs?
The young woman’s thoughts raced at the implications of it.
The rational, pragmatic part of her mind shut down the stray slips of thought with cruel logic.
Who cares if the Ancients were the size of Deepmount Gorad, for gods’ sake? That won’t save you from becoming some deep dweller’s dinner. The important part is that it’s easier to fix now.
Grumbling to herself, Talia begrudgingly admitted that the voice in her head was right. It cackled in her skull.
Dangerous conclusion to come to. Sure we’re not crazy?
The young woman rolled her eyes at the spike of anxiety given personality and voice.
“Nothing new about talking to myself,” she mumbled as she pored over the now enlarged bracer.
Arcanistry could be lonely work at times.
Talia settled into her chair and got to work.
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Parsing runes was tedious.
The language of arcanistry differed depending on the time period you were in, or the historian that you asked. To simplify it down to the bare minimum, enchantments could be made with three languages.
The first was Ancient Runic. Old, scrupulously precise, undeniably powerful and almost entirely forgotten, Ancient Runic was the written language of the Ancients. Hence the name. The runework was a dizzying array of whorls, swirls and flowing lines whose meaning changed at the slightest deviation. The other two were descendants of Ancient Runic—Old Dwarvish and Runic. Runic was, simply put, the tiny portion of Ancient Runic that modern arcanists still understood. Done properly, it was indistinguishable from Ancient Runic. Though the holes in knowledge made it hard to work with, when it worked it worked. Unlike the third language.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
Old Dwarvish was Ancient Runic adapted to the sharp lines of a chisel and hammer. It was forgiving—some would say crude— well-adapted to large-scale enchantments, and correspondingly basic—easier to hand out to a dedicated crew of masons and architects. It was also notoriously unreliable. Though no one knew why, the sinuous lines of Runic—and Ancient Runic— were integral to how the enchantment worked. As such, squaring them off and turning gentle curves into sharp edges was risky business. Luckily, more in the ‘this monumental enchantment that I commissioned doesn’t work’ kind of way rather than the ‘BOOM’ kind.
Old Dwarvish had fallen out of favour before Talia’s time, but Reggie had insisted that she learn it, as the holes in Runic often overlapped with Old Dwarvish runes.
After examining and cross-referencing her bracer with the knowledge in her journal, Talia was only certain of two things: the shield was the work of the Ancients—or at least someone fluent in Ancient Runic— and it had been modified with Runic.
By a blasted goblin! Whoever did this had no clue what they were doing!
Unfortunately, neither did Talia. She knew just enough to know that it was a miracle that the artefact had lasted as long as it had.
From what she could tell, the Ancient Runic parts were the most important. They controlled how the shield functioned, all the tiny minutiae that ensured that the kinetic force didn’t twist her arm into a decorative art piece.
Useful. Some might even say essential.
The expanding and retracting function was also governed by Ancient Runic. She thought. The reality-defying parts—such as where all the excess metal went— were very much crossing over into Enigma territory. A topic that would have and did fascinate her, if only it didn’t pertain to the family heirloom that had singlehandedly saved her life more than once.
Luckily, the most important function for the young woman’s use, the project rune, seemed relatively intact. The channels around it had overloaded and burnt into the arrays it connected to, damaging the runes. Even better, as she watched, the metal seemed to be repairing itself, which was utterly baffling. Little bits of the mysterious alloy bent themselves back into shape, tugging what must be a minute stream of mana from the most compact bank of capacitors she’d ever seen, inscribed in derivation along the bracer’s interior.
Fascinated with the process, Talia followed the lines as best she could, stifling mounting frustration at her inability to read the damn script.
Swirls of Ancient Runic seemed to extend all the way to the edge of the bracer. Almost as if…
It was meant to connect to a larger set!
Now that she looked, the evidence was everywhere. Inactive, orphaned, runic child arrays that referred to a parent that was nowhere in sight, that wouldn’t even fit on the bracer itself. What seemed like highly advanced modulator functions that modulated…nothing. The whole piece was meant to act in unison with other artefacts—a whole suit of armour if Talia were to hazard a guess.
Sighing dreamily as she imagined the wonders of an entire suit of armour like her mother’s bracer, Talia grumbled at her forebears, who had been such poor stewards of knowledge.
Legible or not, the shield function would repair itself, in time. The young woman shook off the giddiness that accompanied such a discovery.
A self-repairing enchantment! Oh, the things I could create if I got my hands on you…
It was torture, knowing that the secrets to her greatest ambitions lay nestled comfortably on her workbench, and there she was, without the ability to properly read them.
With another forlorn sigh, Talia turned to the work of the butcher—the absolute vandal—who had desecrated a priceless work of art.
The legible parts highjacked into the enchantment’s main channel, the straightest line on the whole artefact, from which all the mana flowed, akin to a mainline waterpipe. The mystery arcanist had inserted their runework into the gap between the shield and project arrays, completely cutting off a whole subset of runes that Talia could only begin the guess at the purpose of.
Talia growled at the sacrilege.
At the very least, whoever had done the work had been scrupulously precise. She wouldn’t have even known there’d been a modification, were it not for the obviously disconnected set of arrays whose channels had been diverged to feed the new function. Not to mention, Runic was discernable from Ancient Runic by its sheer bulk.
The lack of vocabulary forced modern arcanists to create overly ‘wordy’ enchantments for lack of a better term. If Ancient Runic was a dictionary that contained every word in existence, the Runic was a collection of pages ripped from that dictionary, the most common words and a handful of esoteric concepts. It forced the arcanists of Talia’s generation and the dozen or so before her to become more creative, leading to overcomplicated designs.
Reading along in her journal, Talia became more and more certain that the functions added by her mystery arcanist were modulating enchantments, allowing the user to change the shield’s shape, as well as setting a new ‘default’ shape. The cracked and burnt part of the enchantment supported her theory, though curiously, the addition didn’t seem to be repairing itself.
Does the bracer ‘know’ what enchantments it’s supposed to hold? No, it’d be eating away at the new addition, if that were the case… Must be an array hidden within the whole mess of other stuff I don’t understand, and mystery vandal couldn’t find a way to connect the two. Or just didn’t know it existed. No, wait—ugh. Stupid Enigma.
Taking down some quick notes on her thoughts about the problem, Talia moved on, bemoaning the loss of Ancient Runic.
Would it have killed them to preserve a fucking dictionary? Is that so much to ask?
The next problem was an elementary one, taught to new apprentices in their first month. Every enchantment needed either a triggering condition or a switch array. Otherwise, it was just a pretty engraving that sometimes glowed. Frustratingly, mystery arcanist’s Runic didn’t seem to connect to any array Talia knew of that would allow the user to actually use the artefact.
Unless…
Heart beating faster, Talia traced an errant channel as it gouged across purposefully disabled rune arrays to link up with a spiral formation ringed with dozens—no, hundreds of Ancient Runic glyphs.
Each pictogram, each rune, represented an action, thing, or qualifier—none of the runic languages had adjectives except for a few niche, incredibly debated cases. Then again, the Great Enigma might just be an entire collection of adjectives, along with the thousands of other things arcanists were missing from their repertoire.
Alright, maybe mystery vandal knew what they were doing… just a little. It’s still blatant sacrilege though. To modify something so…beautiful. I have to hand it to them. Whatever they did worked. For a while.
The array that the unknown arcanist had attached her add-on to was the most complex Talia had ever seen. And she was almost certain that it was what allowed the artefact to connect directly to her mind. Fumbling at her waist, Talia unsheathed her sword, laying it flat on the workbench next to the bracer.
The runes on the sword were almost entirely constrained to the hilt and pommel. The hilt was too narrow, and most of the runes there pertained to cutting or other related things. Pulling back the unfamiliar weave that wrapped it revealed a compact set of capacitors, almost identical to the ones on the bracer, only lesser in number.
Talia found what she was looking for by sweeping her magnifying glass over the pommel. Her grin grew to manic proportions as she pulled her journal closer and began copying down both versions of the array, taking care to note their differences.
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After a good half hour of copying, Talia slammed her trinket pen down angrily. She winced as the nape of her neck ached with manaburn.
Fucking pointless. It’s all useless.
The only thing she knew for sure was that the ‘mindmeld array’, as she’d pretentiously dubbed it, was much simpler on her sword than it was on the bracer. Which taught her exactly…nothing. While it would be easy to assume that the difference was due to the relative complexity of the two artefacts, that would be nothing more than supposition. And as Reggie liked to say, ‘A hunch isn’t a fact, it’s a guess, and guesses kill.’ Wordy and pedantic, but no less true for it.
With effort, Talia reigned in her frustration and disappointment. It was stupid to think that a few heirlooms would be all it took to give her a leg up on deciphering the fucking Great Enigma.
If it were that easy, it’d be the little enigma, in all lowercase.
Still, she’d made some good progress, and she deserved to be proud of it.
All it would take was another dozen examples of similar runes to cross-reference against known functions and she might be able to decipher a few unknown glyphs. Those glyphs might then be cross-referenced with other unknown rune arrays, starting a runoff effect.
Assuming, of course, that her hypothesis was correct.
Talia sighed and sheathed her sword, glancing at the timepiece.
Shit.
She’d gone on later than she’d ever intended. Setting out her toolbelt, the arcanist picked up the precision engraver and began repairing her bracer. The Runic parts, at least. She didn’t know enough about the auto-repair function to risk messing with the original enchantment. Talia would just have to content herself with knowing that as soon as the Ancient Runic had mended itself, she’d also be able to modulate the shape and size of her shield. In the meantime, she’d work on reproducing the effect with her magic.
The young mage had already displayed the invisible shield, after all, no need to hide a capability that she’d already been shown to possess.
Leaning forward with steady hands, Talia fought off her fatigue and got to work. Her hands pulsed numbly with manaburn.