“Power this glyph.”

That was all the androgynous figure at the center of the ring of androgynous figures said. They had not introduced themselves, to Nathan’s mild surprise, nor had they given any overall explanations or rubrics, and they had asked no questions. There were no prefatory remarks, and no statements of intent.

Simply a directive: power the glyph that stretched twenty feet across the floor.

The room was a circle with a radius slightly longer than forty feet and a ceiling that rose tens of feet in the air. This was, of course, ridiculous—the room he had walked into when he’d slid the door to the side had been, for a tiny moment, a perfectly normal eight-foot-by-eight-foot room with a ten-foot ceiling. Then the doorway had rippled and vanished, and without even the courtesy of a jarring transition sequence he had been elsewhere.

At this point, whether it was all of the absurdity he’d been subject to in the scant few hours of his personal elapsed time between so briefly meeting Natasha and his personal present or whether it was the retroactive anti-trauma enhancements he’d picked up in the Intralife, he was taking that kind of thing completely in stride. So instead of obsessing over it or fretting about it, he simply began the task of analyzing the glyph in question.

It was a… moderately complex mandala. It was a three-layer out-in ring-ring single-dimensionality planar diagram, he knew that much; he’d picked up a few things glancing through a reference book that he’d been carrying. On The Basis Of Magic, it had been called, and it was a slime little tome as tomes went; and while it was complex and pretty full of itself in a lot of ways, full of passages like “the thing is only the thing in the season of its own knowing” or “balance as a static principle adheres only to its own occlusion in the time of its connection with a differential” none of that was particularly hard to work through. Nathan had made his way through Joyce on a lark in order to be able to dunk on his insufferable English major cousin as a young adult of the early twenties, and while he’d had to really work at it to get more than a couple of layers deep into Ulysses, this was more along the approachability level of Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man; pretty comprehensible, frankly, as long as you were willing to meet the author nine-tenths of the way to his probably well-earned smug sense of self-superiority.

And so—diagrammic, planar, single-dimensional, and three-layer.

It was diagrammic: it was represented as a static diagram, drawn in a single style and performing one discrete function. The diagram itself was the full representation of the glyph, rather than it dynamically generating additional glyphs at runtime, and by implication of it not being an arcane diagram, it was deterministic and didn’t rely on bleed-over or other undirected, pseudo-accidental, or incidental effects to function.

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It was planar: formed or drawn or otherwise represented on a level, even surface. Thickness of the lines did not matter, angle did not matter, and there were no components of relative elevation or curvature or anything else which required more than an X and a Y. This included a lack of such elevations, to a certain extent; it was not a strictly planar diagram, which would have some specified but necessarily unusual and striking degree to which it needed to be perfectly flat and level, often with micron-measure precision and where instead of painted lines it would be carvings in stone, filled in with copper, all created and maintained by a set of simpler glyphs.

It was single-dimensional: the layers of the glyph formed a set of nodes, one node per layer by implication of not being variably accessive. Those logic nodes could all be presented by a line going from one node to the next and then the next, until the spell crested and executed.

It was an out-in ring-ring glyph: each layer of the glyphic spell was represented by a ring of script or runes, and the glyph’s power flowed from the outermost ring to the innermost ring. Between each ring of script, there was—technically could be, but in practice there always would be—a ring of connective runework, not a layer of the glyph in its own right but some sort of boundary and buffer, a way to control the flow from the previous layer to the next layer. Even if none of that was needed, there would still be something; there were three different symbols in the main lexicon of the modern Jejunao runic script which indicated that it was a non-operational connective layer—broken chains, some sort of odd looping art that was looked down upon as being too abstract, and a sort of bones-and-joints motif.

And it was three-layer: there were three layers of functional scripts, regardless of how many or how few connective layers there were between them.

This all made for a glyph of moderate complexity. But he did not need to understand the diagram, even if he made sure that he understood well enough what its expected power draw range was and how much it would take to fully charge; the fact that he more or less did understand it was only a bonus.

It… didn’t do much. He’d been concerned about that being a test in its own right, or a trap. But the glyph, he was fairly confident, would simply collect whatever he sent into it and then after a few moments release it into the ley-collection systems of the town, adding it to the available mana stores for civic purposes.

Squatting down to put his hand on the palmprint, he released a steady, moderate stream of power into the input rune, which was conveniently placed right in front of him. He was fairly confident that he could have hooked up a leyline feed directly to the input rune, and possibly bypassed the input rune directly—and he was very confident in two other workarounds—but there was no need to do that. The palmprint was there, after all, and they hadn’t given him any instructions not to use it.

“You pass,” the androgynous figure said after Nathan finished filling it up to about thirty percent of the way and then stepped back. And then Nathan was standing in the lobby.