For a while, the only thing that we three Runewrights wreak is a substantial amount of boredom.

There are dozens of meters worth of runework, all one vast, intricate machine that defines the prison we’re in. It defines the prisoners, the guards, the air, and the very stones under our feet; and it defines the complex energy flows that power everything, and the cycle that moves the mana from one kind of flow to another through a delicate dance that leaves everything powered and all the mana hovering around neutral in its affect or affinity. If we were trying to actually understand this, or change the innards of it, we’d be absolutely out of luck.

Good thing we’re only trying to exploit it.

Sara finishes before Zidanya and I do. She’s got a Skill that whispers something down my spine and shivers a name across the world, and I can only hear it as Scribe. There might be an adjective involved there, or there might not; either way, it allows her to rapidly modify existing glyphs and lay down new ones. She’s either got absolutely ridiculous mana regeneration or some sort of active Skill for it, I’m pretty sure - I can see the mana flows through the Visor, and as efficient as Scribe looks to be, she burns like a flare - and Zidanya and I bicker for a bit over exactly which warp glyphs to use, but we manage. I get a lot of mileage out of the Visor’s computational capacity; it’s been reduced since I first got the Skill, in what I can only describe as an act of malign intervention by the System itself that granted it to me, but it’s still good, I tell myself, and thrust away all thoughts otherwise.

Even with the Visor handling the heavy lifting on the calculus and geometry and with Sara helping us, it’s a long, tedious process. Zidanya’s work is meditative, ripples of change manifesting out from her as she communes with the metaphysical geometry of the space we’re in and shapes it to her will, and my own work is entirely through my Visor and through Interface; neither of us is particularly fast, but the glyphs we form are as perfect as the source material. I could be faster, if I wanted to play certain cards, but…

Well. We aren’t in a hurry, and some cards are best kept hidden until deployed.

The basic implementation of our plan is pretty straightforward, once Zidanya and I are done bickering over details. There’s a one-way warp glyph and a way to instantiate the Void glyph to be a vacuum, a draw of sorts; we tie all of the warp glyphs into the same target scheme that the original structure was using, without any of the safeguards and controls, and stick the vacuums on the other side of them. The linkage is the most complicated part, and one that there’s no way I could have done without Zidanya’s help, but other than that it’s all straightforward, even if the finicky bits of running lines to every single drawn glyph in just the right way takes a while.

I think it’s all straightforward, at least. Sara thinks it’s comprehensible, Zidanya thinks it’s gauche, and everyone else treats me like I’m raving about Things Mortals Were Not Meant To Know.

It takes a jumpstart to actually get running. I was planning on just having everyone with mana manipulation dump their pool into kickstarting the circulation, but Knives has an idea that, well. I’m not going to call it better, not out loud, but it’s better, even if it’s distasteful. It’s good practice for what we’re planning on doing later, and it doesn’t really take any setup. Both of the bodies were… exsanguinated, for lack of a better word, one by Amber’s sword and the other by Knives’s blades, and Tim, frowning and working with both some kind of structured spell and a Skill that sounds a lot like Evoke, gets the blood flowing from where it had congealed, running along the stone floor towards the glyphs.

Their skin is so very pale, I notice, but there should be noticeable bruising where the blood was pooling inside their bodies and there isn’t, and I turn away and try not to think about a whole number of things ranging from distressing to distasteful.

Things start moving rather faster once the blood touches the intake glyphs. There’s no magic in them per se, no remaining metaphysical existence carried along with hemoglobin and antibodies and glycoproteins as there would be if it were, apparently, a person’s blood. There’s something, though; if nothing else, there’s a connection that runs through the runes that define the two phenomenally complex automata masquerading as people, and which can be traced in a sort of sideways way to the other constructs that define the prison region.

The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

Those connections don’t wind up being necessary. The blood itself is conjured, obviously it is; it breaks down into mana as it runs across the appropriate intake, discorporating as the rune lights up and starts to whine. That’s enough to kick off the cycle, and the draw glyphs siphon off enough power to run without any excess draining into the Void itself, and I breathe a sigh of relief; I was pretty confident in our calculations, but it’s still nice to see everything go properly blue.

The color cascades. The activation cascades, and the whine kicks up a notch into a piercing wail, and my Visor’s interface lights up with a thousand different inputs. My fingers and hands busy themselves with pulling out this bit and dismissing that bit, with running the numbers on these and comparing them to those. [Interface], I say to myself, and I see the numbers shift as an error I’d made in calculating the flow rates through a glyph I hadn’t seen before is rectified and the noise drops an order of magnitude in intensity, for a moment, until it starts to crank back up again as the capacitance starts to fill and another problem shows up.

Every fix makes the cascade jump in flow rate, which means every fix makes the next fix need to happen sooner. I don’t think we made all that many avoidable mistakes, what with most of these glyphs being ones that even Zidanya hasn’t seen before, but that doesn’t make the scramble any less stressful. It’s nice, though, in a way; it’s all a matter of picking out the incoming pattern of pre-failure stresses as fast as possible and doing the math and coding to get a solution that doesn’t interfere with any of the other concurrent systems.

Of course, since I don’t understand most of the concurrently-running systems, that’s a cascade of joy in its own right, and Zidanya and Sara both get involved when it’s obvious enough. That happens twice; one might have been recoverable on my own, but the other is when I’m trying to recover a particular glyphic sequence from the verge of overload and I wind up having to metaphorically wire in a route to the Void for the overage and move on, leaving the two of them to clean up after me. It’s fine; I’m not working on my own, and neither of them is under the impression I’m some sort of paragon of perfection.

Well, I mean, they might have been, but they for sure aren’t under that impression now.

Up till this point, nothing all that visible to the rest of the party, the two parties, has happened. I mean, sure, three or so gallons of blood has been converted into mana and sucked into a mixture of three big vortices and ten thousand tiny ones, and a rune tens of meters long has sparked to life and started to scream, but I figure that’s not as impressive as what’s about to happen.

The stone starts to fade.

It’s not a subtle thing. The furniture and our footing goes first, as the rune kicks down into an intense hum and power visibly flows through the warp glyphs. There’s a shimmer that kicks in, jumping from glyph to glyph to lock out the transmission, maybe three seconds after it starts really going; another few seconds and the shield pops, long before the pressure in the system gets anywhere near dangerous for us.

It goes exponential, and just under six seconds later, we’re in what I keep calling the liminal space. There’s a featureless void for a ceiling and four walls, but at the same time there’s actually nothing, just an endless expanse of sameness, and below us is an intricacy of glyphwork, one vast rune so dense that it looks like a solid floor at anything beyond the most powerful magnification my Visor can bring to bear. This is the heart of the Temple, I’ve come to suspect; the glyphs underfoot in the liminal space might be the artificial intelligence that is the Temple’s overseer, along with being mana storage, capacity for agency, knowledge, and more.

It’s beautiful, but possibly only to me and Zidanya.

I look over at her and correct myself. No, this place isn’t beautiful to Zidanya; her brow is furrowed and she’s got a white-knuckled grip on Amber’s shield hand, and she’s shaking. This, I remind myself, was her prison for a length of time that made not just my own lifespan but the lifespan of a Worldship look short.

I want to say something, do something, to reassure her. Something burns in me, an anger that makes my head throb, at her distress, and I shove it away; our path out is the way to make her feel better, by getting out of this space and into one that isn’t tied to her imprisonment.

Conveniently, our path out is simple, because the door is right there.