Pirin set the dagger down on the floor of the Featherflight’s crew quarters. It had been a half-hour after they raided the company destroyer, and they resumed a southward course. It was up to Alyus and Brealtod to find the facility using the map, now—they were the navigators, not Pirin, Myraden, or Nomad.
Pirin had bandaged his cuts and cleaned his scrapes while Myraden had been catching her breath in the cargo hold. He took off his coat and left it on the bed, leaving only a tattered tunic. But the further south they travelled, the less he wanted a coat at all.
He didn’t know how Nomad was still alive under the chainmail and heavy leather coat, but it was probably a powerful, experienced wizard thing. The stronger you got, the more you could wear whatever you wanted.
Once Pirin put the dagger down, he took a few steps back and settled down on the bottom of the cot. Myraden now sat beside him, and she looked at him expectantly.
“Right, yeah,” he whispered. “I’ll help you with your bandages.”
“Thanks, healer,” she whispered back.
“Also, sorry about the bird ride. Didn’t mean to, uh, spook you. But I promise, when this is all over, we can go on a nice, slow, flight. Just you and me…and, alright, Gray would be there too.” He tied a strip of fabric around her gut, and fastened the knot behind her back as tight as he could—as tight as Mr. Regos had taught him.
“Thank you for getting me out of there,” she said. “But yes…I would appreciate less birdback flights.”
Nomad cleared his throat exaggeratedly, then tilted his head down at the dagger. “Who’s carrying it, then?”
Pirin wasn’t exactly looking forward to carrying it, but his foundation could handle the strain. It would just be a bit taxing. But if a mortal could use it, then so could he.
Sure, it might have been near-impossible for a mortal to carry it for long, and it would exhaust them, but unlike other spiritual strains, it wouldn’t kill them.
“How does it work?” he asked Nomad.
Nomad picked the dagger up and pressed down on the gemstone on the hilt. It glowed green, and it expelled Essence out into the runes along the blade. The runes vibrated and resonated with a complex, high-pitched tune. It didn’t sound like any specific musical instrument—just a pitch that had a bunch of slightly off harmonics.
Pirin was only on the verge of covering his ears, but he didn’t. He couldn’t imagine what sort of pain it would cause, though, if he had a runestone embedded right inside his head designed specifically to resonate and amplify the sound.
“The gemstone is made of manifested Essence,” Nomad said. “Force triggers it and makes it leak a little, almost like with the Smokes. I reckon you understand the rest.”
Pirin nodded. “I’ll carry it.”
“There were two wizards on our tail,” Myraden stated. “They were Blazes.”
Pirin, of course, had told her about his skirmish with Ethelvaed. He added, “We’re both close to the peak of Flare, but we need to advance before we reach the facility. They’ll follow us there, and we would very much appreciate your guidance, sir.” Pirin had used up most of the wild treasures in his void pendant.
Nomad nodded. “That can be arranged. While you push yourself to the very peak of Flare, we can prepare your runebond formations. Come with me.”
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Pirin only had a few wisps of the stolen cloud treasures in his void pendant left, and his core was nearly bursting with Essence. It’d just be a few more days until he was ready to advance to Blaze.
His hands trembled with anticipation. What runemark would he get? What would the Chancellor or the other elves think when he returned with runebond tattoos up his arms and face?
He wanted to see the look of all the countylords’ faces.
But first, they had to plan out the runebond formations.
He, Myraden, and Nomad sat in the cargo hold. Nomad had gathered a bunch of old maps of the southern sea that Alyus and Brealtod didn’t need anymore (they had a new one courtesy of the raid on Lady Neria’s airship, and it was better than any of the older ones). They turned the old maps over to the blank backsides.
Nomad and his raccoon-cat knelt on the deck of the cargo platform at the center of the makeshift sparring arena, etching out runes on the backsides of the maps with normal black ink and a quill.
“For your runebonds, you need to script a pattern across your flesh,” Nomad said. “The ancient southern dynasties, who studied martial magic and laid the foundation for where we are now, developed a common set of sutras that a cultivator—that’s what they called wizards—would etch onto themselves. The dwarves of the north translated these sutras into runic scripts and developed their own forms that a wizard uses.”
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Pirin nodded slowly. Myraden stared without moving, but he knew she was still paying attention.
Nomad continued, “These runebonds further solidify your connection with your familiar and ground your Essence channels altogether in reality. When you advance to Blaze, you will have physical Essence channels in your body.”
“What does that do for us?” Myraden asked.
“Better manipulation and Essence control. It is necessary to push your Essence to a higher, purer grade. Your techniques will be more powerful, your cores will hold more Essence, and you’ll be able to draw on your Familiar’s strengths better.”
You better take your mask off when you do the etching, Gray said. I don’t want to feel that.
“Sorry,” Pirin whispered to her, “but even if I do, I think you’re still going to feel a bit.”
Gray hung her head and let out a disappointed rumble.
He looked back at Nomad and asked, “This…solidification of the bond won’t break my pure Essence techniques, right?”
“It shouldn’t.” Nomad grimace. “Forgive the phrasing, but you’ll always be an Embercore, and you’ll always need the mask to stabilize the channels.”
“It’s alright, sir,” Pirin replied. “I…don’t really want to lose the pure Essence techniques. And the instabilities work to my advantage now.”
“Ah! Very good, then!” Nomad inched over to the second sheet and tapped it with the back of the quill. It outlined a few sets of rune-lines that formed an oval shape. “This one is the coremark. We’ll have to adjust the runes as usual, but it will take the same shape for everyone. It goes around your navel and just above, and it holds your core in place for this advancement and beyond. Without it, your core will be incredibly fragile.”
He leaned back and slapped his thighs with ink-covered fingers. “We’ll adjust it for both of you as we go, and I’ll need help from both of you as we plan the markings. But that’s the basic idea.”
He raised his finger, then said, “Oh, one last thing. Usually, the powerful wizards and their families have specialized runesmiths who can also finish the markings. They have steady hands and strong wills. Once you start etching with the ichor-ink, you can’t stop.” Nomad held up his hands. His fingers had a slight jitter to them, even holding them at face-height and close to his body. “I’ve fought many battles and taken a great many hits, and I am getting older. My body can’t heal all wounds perfectly anymore. You wouldn’t want my help.”
Pirin glanced at Myraden, then back at Nomad. “Even if I don’t remember perfectly, I’ve had a healer’s training. My hands are steady. And…my muscles remember that, even my mind doesn’t.” He scratched his cheek. “Besides, after they found me and made me king, I’m sure they made me practice quite a bit of handwriting.”
He held out his mask and turned it over, showing Nomad the runes he’d carved in the back of the umberstone. “I did these myself.”
“Those are excellent quality carvings,” Nomad said.
“I have been practicing my handwriting for as long as I remember,” Myraden said. “I was once set to be my province’s Cursebearer, and I had a formal education. I may not be a master runesmith, but I have a steady hand.”
“Then you may do your own runemarks,” said Nomad. “I reckon it’ll work better that way, anyway. You’ll feel the flow better.” He stood up and folded his hands behind his back. “Now, I’ve got plenty of paper, and Alyus says we have about a week and a half before we arrive. Plenty of time to push yourselves to the peak of Flare and finish planning the runebonds.”
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Pirin spent every day the next week pushing himself and integrating the last of the wild-treasures into his body. He tied the enhancement down, solidified its purpose, and prepared himself for the push to Blaze.
If his core had been brimming with Essence before, now it was overflowing. It needed to be compressed into his core, and he needed to advance. His body wanted it.
But he couldn’t go anywhere without the runebond.
While he cycled Essence and integrated the treasures, he worked with Nomad in the cargo hold of the Featherflight. Pirin withdrew the sparrow Path manual from his haversack and flipped closer to the end, where it provided a schematic of rune-line tattoos that a sparrow-Path user had employed in the past, and furthermore, a suitable coremark.
But Pirin wasn’t a sparrow Path user.
“I highly suggest that we aim for half of the runebond etchings to match your gnatsnapper Essence, and for the other half to match your pure Essence and instabilities,” Nomad suggested.
“Suggestion accepted,” Pirin replied between strained cycling breaths.
And so Nomad withdrew a small leatherbound book of his own. He flipped through it for a few seconds before showing it to Pirin. It contained a bunch of runes and script-y, flourishing logograms that Pirin couldn’t read.
“You didn’t think I had just memorized all of the southern sutras and dwarven rune-lines, did you?” Nomad asked.
“Well…”
“I’m good, but I’m not that good. No, no. I came looking for disciples to help me set things right, and I bet on myself being successful—hence why I brought this book with me.”
So, between the Path manual and Nomad’s assistance, they made a plan. On half of Pirin’s body, they’d use modified sparrow sutras—forgotten southern hymns that spoke of little birds who flitted about on the wind and tweeted soft songs in forests and gardens. It was malleable and windy; it was fast and agile. They twisted the sutras around and replaced some runes that spoke of the birds’ size (a gnatsnapper wasn’t a small sparrow) and added in some hard, rigid markings to reflect the wraith spirit bound to Gray.
No one knew how to pronounce the words anymore, at least, not as the old southern scripts wrote them. In dwarven, they still functioned, but they wouldn’t sound anywhere near as pleasant, and none of the poetic form would work.
On the other side, they adopted scripts about lightning, clouds, and storms.
At first, Pirin had been skeptical, but lightning was the perfect image to draw on. It couldn’t be planned or controlled. It was inherently unstable, and it bore great power. Clouds? He had forged his enhanced body with clouds. They were perfect. Storms were unstable clouds and the fathers of lightning—they bound the two concepts together.
And the coremark? It had to tie both halves together, but he had no idea how.
That is, until they found a long script about a sparrow in a storm. There were no perfect translations for it, but Pirin knew it was the right one. Gray concurred.
On the morning of the eighth day of planning, when he and Myraden had both planned out their runebonds, they sat still in front of Nomad, admiring the maps they’d defiled and the new plans they’d made.
“No better time than now, right?” Pirin asked. “I’m ready to start.”