Dalendor Per pressed down on his eyelids with his thumb and middle finger. He sighed and stretched and yawned. The tower room was cold, small and clammy, but at least it wasn’t dark. Sunlight shone in through large windows.
Ashley Emberweave looked up from her side of the table. Her back was to the windows, and she had kept her cloak on. The sun made her auburn hair blaze. Outside, the impossible spires of the city of Tenorsbridge reached towards the sky. The draft made her papers flutter. “You can rest if you want,” she said.
“I know, I know,” Dale answered. He rose and alternated stretching his arms over his chest. He did a few squats and then leaned on the table to take a breath.
“You should exercise more,” Ash said. “That should not wind you.” Her dark brown eyes were stern, as they always were. The good side of the Scramble happening was that she encountered fewer people telling her to smile more.
“I know that too. It’s just that all my stuff stopped working,” Dale said and glanced back at the corner of the room. There was a large chest filled with clothes. On top were a robe and a wizard’s hat. It was the traditional cone like hat with a wide brim. They were riddled with holes in the places where the runes had burned out.
“You shouldn’t replace exercise with enchantments,” she said and waved a hand dismissively. “Just go do a lap around the tower.”
“Maybe after we get somewhere with this thing. Have you made any progress?”
Ash threw a stack of papers from her hand to the table and leaned on it with both elbows. She lowered her chin on the backs of her hands and stared at the papers. “No,” she said and closed her eyes. “Everything’s gone. It’s worse than anyone wanted to believe. No rune has kept its old meaning.”
“I’m not sure the last part is actually true,” Dale said, steepling his fingers before his chest. His fingers resembled him in general: soft and delicate. He was clean-shaven, though Ash wasn't sure how much it mattered in Dale's case. His blond hair was parted in the manner of well-behaved upper-class boys of Tenorsbridge.
Ash opened her eyes and snapped her gaze at the young wizard. She squinted and blew air out of her nose so hard a paper on the desk moved. “This isn’t one of your weird theories again? Like the one about tiny teratomes going into your nose and causing the flu?”
“Well, I guess it might be one of those, yes,” Dale said and tapped his fingertips against each other, one at a time. “But listen! Some runes are baked so deep into how everything works! You couldn’t change them without altering how reality itself is. What if the rune of time would have been scrambled? Or the rune of death? Everything dead might rise up as an undead. Time itself might turn into… jelly or something.”
“No one has proven those kinds of runes exist,” Ash said. She pushed herself to sit straight and took a paper from her desk. It was filled with runes that had only slight variations from one symbol to the next. “Let’s concentrate on finding what we need and leave worrying about the fabric of reality to the Janitors.”
Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.
“The vaults below the city are rumoured to house many forbidden runes,” Dale said. “If they would just let us take a look, we could try to see if everything has changed or not.”
Ash drew a copy of one of the runes on a blank sheet of paper. She set a finger on it and channelled a miniscule amount of mana. It felt like cold water trickling under her skin towards her fingertip and dripping out into the rune. The rune glowed blue for a moment. Suddenly the paper grew thicker and turned into what resembled the foam that sometimes appears on sea beaches. Then the foam burst into flames.
“What use would there be in knowing if some runes had stayed the same?” Ash asked while pressing a damp towel on top of the burning foam. They had extra thick towels always on standby for just such situations. Green smoke rose billowed out from under her hands. “Ugh, smells like this’ll burn a hole straight through your nostrils into your brain,” she said, wincing.
“Guess we’ll mark that down as not usable for now,” Dale said while fanning the air with his hand and coughing. He dabbed the corner of his eyes with his sleeve. “But returning to your question, if we knew that some runes had stayed the same, it might mean this whole thing was intentional instead of being just a naturally occurring event,” he said after catching his breath again. “It might be an attack on Tenorsbridge!”
“That is one of the more wild conspiracy theories I have heard in a while,” Ash said. “And it’s above our paygrade, anyway. We just need to find any runes on the priority list.”
“Fine, fine,” Dale said and pointed at the desk with all the papers. “But this method is not working. The ratio of useful to cripplingly dangerous runes seems to be much worse than anyone wanted to think. One to thousands. Maybe to millions.”
“That’s why we’re careful,” Ash said and shrugged.
“That’s not the point! I just think it’s a waste of time and effort,” Dale said and waved his arm in a wide circle around the room. “We could be here for years and never find a single usable rune.”
Ash set down the pen on the table and fixed Dale with her gaze. “What do you suggest, then?” she asked.
“We get out there! Find some magic that still works. Maybe there’s something completely new out there. We find it, extract the runes and we don’t have to risk turning ourselves into slag or filling the room with poison or summoning a demon or something.” Dale swung his hand towards the window and the world waiting outside it.
“Too dangerous,” Ash said. “Bandits know that even trying to use magic is forbidden at the moment. They target anyone coming from the city.”
“We wouldn’t need to go out in pointy hats and bathrobes! We’d go incognito. Pretend to be some poor wanderers or something,” Dale said. He walked around the room, gesturing with his hands. He mimed them walking up hills and pushing branches out of their way in a forest.
“And where do you think we would find any runes? It’s not like they grow on trees. Except in the elven forest, but even you’re not suggesting that.”
Dale sighed and sat back down in his chair. He breathed out and seemed to deflate. “There is that, yeah,” he said. “It’s just that I really think that we won’t get anywhere here either.”
“Dale, I hear what you’re saying. But running randomly around the countryside is just even less likely to give us anything,” Ash said. “It’s only much more likely to get us killed.” She tossed the towel off the table and picked up her quill again.
Dale glanced at the desk that had a wide black circle burnt into its top. The towel had somehow lost its colour and turned grey while they had been talking.
Ash followed his gaze. “Well, maybe not much more likely, but you get my point. Start scribing.”
Dale sighed and took a blank paper from the stack. He dipped his quill into the inkpot but let it rest above the paper while gazing towards the window, frowning.
Ash sighed and laid down her quill. “If we hear anything promising, we consider looking into it. Ok?”
Smile lit up Dale’s face. He crossed over the rune Ash had drawn earlier and squinted at the next one. “Well then, until that, here goes experiment number 176,” he said and started drawing the next rune.