I’m patient once I sit down with Zidanya at the table, giving her time to muster her thoughts. “We will begin,” she eventually says, “with you. Show me those things you’ve learned, and those things you understand not at all, and those in between.”
“Show you with… what exactly?” She settles back into her chair, shrugging pointedly. “A puzzle, huh. I’m good with… hey.” My excitement shows in my voice. “Okay. I can do this.”
The Keyhome is an amazing place. One of the amazing things about it is that it’s just a little bit mutable. Normally this mostly shows in the fact that the layout of the interior is different every time you enter it, but a side effect is that if you have the right Skills…
[Conjure Visor]. The Visor forms over my vision, and I wait patiently for it to initialize, for my sight to stabilize. I then have to modify it a bit, because all I can see is the absolutely blinding radiance from Zidanya, like staring into someone welding or like when I didn’t have enough vision protection when I was experimenting with magnesium-catalyzed reactions. I have it adjusted well enough within a few minutes, and then focus on a Skill I hadn’t gotten the chance to use in a few days.
[Interface]. The malleability of the Keyhome’s furniture means I can tap into the underlying logic it uses to configure its surfaces. The same principles that mean it can have different wood-grains and stains on the tabletop mean that in a moment the table is solidly white, and there’s an array of glyphs on it.
“Hold.” Zidanya’s voice, and I stop. “You know,” she says slowly, “I meant that you might use paper and ink, and draw.”
“I’m bad at art,” I confess, flushing. “Without the Visor’s help, I can’t actually draw glyphs at all, even the simplest ones. It’s something I’ll have to work on.”
“Nahaseh grant you grace, it will join no few things.”
I flush harder, but don’t argue. I’m no stranger to jumping into a domain of expertise where I completely lack any, and as enthusiastic as everyone always was at having the navigator interested, their focused attention and high expectations always meant a cliff to climb. “These are the glyphs I know,” I say instead. “The ones I know what they do, at least. For elements, I have fire, ice, lightning, stone or maybe earth or soil, and air, but either I don’t know the last two well enough or they can’t be used independently. I have Empower and Amplify,” I add, as Zidanya nods in amused recognition, “and two other of what I call meta-magics, but I don’t know what they actually do well enough to use them, like the stone and air elements. I’ve been calling these two Weaken and Extend.
“Then, let’s see.” I frown at the table. “There’s the void glyph, obviously, that one is straight-forward, you get different behavior coming in at the top points, the side points, or normal to the four long sides. Haven’t gotten it to work with the small sides, maybe they don’t count.”
“Normal?”
“Perpendicular, crossing in perfect opposition.” I wait to see her nod in understanding. “What else, um. Storage fractals, obviously, three different kinds. They all have their different tradeoffs, mostly around how many directions they ingest or express from or to, and some differently tricky throughput constraints, but mostly the Temple and the scrolls have used the single-trunk ones. There’s the power regulator, takes the heartbeat and makes it a square wave -” I look over at her, and she inclines her head. “Crenellations, like? Straight up and down for the phase change, not a curve?”
“I know the regulator and what it does, but your words mean nothing to me.” Her words are… brisk, if anything, and light.
“Well, uh. Okay, moving on.” I frown at the table. “I don’t actually know what those four do. They’re in the Visor because I was able to confirm that they’re distinct glyphs, but I haven’t had the time to sit down and figure them out. Next column, your jump-glyph, and your variant collector-glyph. Um. Five different summoning glyphs, three glyphs to turn magical power into motive force, a glyph sequence that does something related to invisibility, a glyph sequence for permeability, that was a nasty trap. This glyph is mass, as in I want this spell to target more things, and this glyph is I want this spell to target only one thing, and I don’t know how either of those actually work, practically speaking. Finally, this is what I call the buff-glyph; it turns an element into a beneficial effect, it’s pretty strongly themed. I haven’t been able to construct a debuff glyph from first principles, but I feel like it oughta be there.
“This is a control rune. I don’t know how it works, but it’s part of what I add to my Motes to turn them into proper orbs, ones that are a lot more flexible on targeting and motion and whatnot.
Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.
“Then there’s this.” I wave at the last area of the table. “These five runes don’t make any sense. I mean, there are bits and pieces of them that make sense, but they have so many glyphs or glyph-parts that aren’t in the others that I can’t make heads or tails of them. One of them is Share the Pain, three of them are for healing, and the last is Blink, in the short-range teleportation sense. I sort of have a sense for how Suppress Positive Effects is put together, and Dampen Magic and Suppress Magic are just variants on Disenchant and Dispel that have a duration glyph. Right! Also I know a duration glyph. Um, and there’s another paired-only glyph that I use, but I can only use it in a very specific way and, well.” I take a deep breath. “I don’t want to talk about that one right now, and I can’t reproduce it anyway, I can only use it as part of the orbs.”
Zidanya waits for me to make sure I’m done, then takes a deep breath and puts her head in her hands. “Safaran be with me, this is a disaster in the making.”
“Hey!” I’m surprised at how much that hurts. “What’s that supposed to mean? I thought I was doing just fine!”
“You spoke of foundations?” She lifts her head up to look at me, then squares her shoulders for some reason, like she’s about to walk on stage. “Magelord James,” she says, slow and formal enough for an announcer, “you have no foundations. This is rote. Hardly even rote knowledge.”
“That’s unfair and untrue.” I let the anger show. “I understand the storage fractals and the regulator, as you -”
“- you understand how they function!” Zidanya cuts me off with a shout, and I flinch backwards hard enough that my chair almost goes over backwards. “That is not understanding! You understand even those few, those two glyphs as a child understands the nipple!”
“That is enough!” Amber’s voice fills the room with its roar. I’m staring at the table, at the glyphs that are one of the most important puzzles I’ve ever been set, a puzzle I’m so obviously failing at understanding. Her arm is around me before I notice her footsteps, a hug that’s soft but firm. “Zidanya Medah. Apologize.”
“Why? Is it not my place to say -”
“You spoke to wound.” Amber’s voice is slow, trampling over Zidanya’s protest. “Your words cut a man who bears the scars of a hundred slow bleedings and you know this, and for what? Will he be more motivated to study, having been called a suckling infant? Pray to Safaran Herself that his progress is not impeded by your intemperance; he learned this in a matter of weeks, while fighting for his life as a stranger in a land he’s never been before!”
“She’s not exactly wrong.” I say it into the silence, Visor dismissed. Early into the silence because I can’t handle that kind of silence, Visor dismissed because it seems pointless right now, with as much as I don’t know. “I don’t have a foundation. That’s… kind of the point.”
Zidanya stands up slowly, and I can feel Amber’s tension as she walks over to me, and then she’s reaching out to me and I almost flinch again. I don’t, and her hand rests on my shoulder, and she sighs. “I was … intemperate. Forgive me?”
I want to say yes. I want it like fire, want to smooth over the moment and move on. I’m so tired of doing that, though, and something like a spine is doing the talking. “What,” I say tightly, through a throat gone dry, “am I forgiving you for?”
“I spoke cruelly,” she says slowly. “It’s as the Paladin says; I spoke to wound, and I am sorry to have done so.”
I don’t say anything for a moment. She pulls her hand away, and something in me almost breaks, like she’s leaving and I’ll be alone again, and I lean against Amber and draw strength there. “Is this…” I swallow. “Is this going to happen again? I’m… pretty familiar with the kind of apology that I think I’m getting, and usually the thing happens again and again, and then…”
“I’ll na so easily depart ye, lord.” Zidanya’s voice is thicker than usual, with an accent I can’t place. She drops back into her chair, and I’m shivering against Amber’s chest, arm tight and pulling her arm around me. I’m bad at confrontations, and Zidanya is so beautiful and brilliant and powerful, and even so I don’t say anything. She’s quiet for a long moment. “I’ll not forswear myself, nor gainsay; I’ve my own wounds. An ye… if you will forgive me when my scars speak, I’d be grateful, but I’ll not pretend I do not dread the true sky; a prison it was, and two thousand years of loneliness I have in my soul, but the dead do not so easily take to change.”
“If you cannot -”
“- okay.” I cut Amber off, squeezing her arm, and then let go and sit upright. “Can we talk about runes now?”
They both blink in surprise. Zidanya recovers first, smiling yet another one of those this-has-meaning smiles. I don’t know that they understand, but at least they’ll play along, and that’s something. “It would be,” she says, leaning forwards and putting her palms on the tabletop, “my pleasure.”