Caleb handed over his phone, and Jeremy set aside the crystal he had been turning over and over in his fingers.
“Hi, honey,” his mom’s voice came over the line. “Sorry that I missed your call earlier. I was in a town council meeting with some of the other neighbors. Things are still a mess as you can imagine.”
“I can imagine.”
“So, how are you?” She asked. “Where are you at?”
“Uh, I honestly can’t remember the name of the nearest town. Sorry. But we are headed back your way.” He sighed and looked out over what had become the familiar site of the cars parked side-by-side in the driveway, the wide front lawn, and the circle at the end of the court. “We’re just trying to track down Atticus because we lost her a couple of days ago.”
“Oh no, honey. I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Yeah,” Jeremy said. It had been two days since they cleared the dungeon, and he was starting to feel restless—still camping out at Henry and Julie’s house, hoping that Atticus would show up but feeling the pressure to move on to the next place. He’d been slowly coming to terms with the fact that Atticus had gotten lost in an unfamiliar place and was unlikely to be able to find her way back to them. “I think we’ll probably just move on and start making our way to you guys soon.”
“Well, I certainly hope she turns up soon, then!” his mom said encouragingly. Then, something caught her attention, and she spoke in a lower voice that Jeremy could not hear. Her voice returned a couple of beats later. “Sorry, I’ve got to go. Keep me updated on your trip back home, okay? We’re excited to see you safe and sound.”
Caleb had already wandered off again. He and Zanie had just come up from the stream, where they were getting in a little bit of target practice with their M4s. So, he was probably in the garage cleaning the guns with his telekinesis. Jeremy just pocketed his phone and picked up the crystal from where he’d laid it in the grass beside his lounging spot on the lawn.
Unlike the crystal from the nightmare dungeon, which had looked like a regular piece of quartz, this one shimmered with mana. It cast the internal lattice structure of the crystal in an iridescent sheen that glinted and shifted independently of any exterior light source. And there were runes etched into its shiny surface.
Jeremy rubbed his thumb over them, then tilted the crystal against the sunlight so he could see them better. They were all unknown to him, which did not mean that they were not to be found in the book anywhere – he had yet to read every single page – but some of the runes from the life sense spell had not appeared in the book yet, so maybe these were novel as well.
But he could not shake the feeling that some of them were familiar.
“Hey,” Zanie sat down on the grass beside him, “you figure anything out with that crystal yet?”
“No,” Jeremy held it out for her, and she picked it up from his palm to hold it up and peer at the runes inscribed on its shiny, reflective surface.
“You said it has mana in it, right?” She asked.
“Yep.”
“Huh,” she scraped her fingernail across the etched lines. “Do you think it might be because of these runes?”
“Maybe. I can’t figure out where I’ve seen them before, but I know I have.” Jeremy said.
Zanie lay back in the grass with one arm behind her head and kicked one of her feet up to rest it across her other knee. It had gotten hot again, sweltering summer returning with a vengeance for what was probably the last time before the weather actually took a turn for the cooler autumn temperatures. So, she was wearing only a tank top and leggings and had taken off her shoes as soon as she and Caleb got back from the stream. Her feet were bare now.
“Well, it’s not like you’ve seen runes in that many places, right?” She pointed out.
“No, not really,” Jeremy mused, “Just when people cast spells and in the book. And I guess I saw a bunch of them carved into a stone pillar in the tunnels where all this started. From the spell that was suppressing magic. Those are the only runes I’ve seen carved into something, actually.”
“Maybe you recognize these from that pillar then?” Zanie handed the crystal back to him, and he peered at the etchings.
“I don’t know,” he hedged. “I just don’t think that’s it. I can’t place my finger on it, dammit.”
“Then maybe they are from the book,” she put her forearm across her eyes to block the sun, which was shining down at a high angle from where it had just begun its descent in the sky. “Take another look through it.”
Jeremy hummed. Flipping through all the pages when he did not even know what the runes on them meant seemed like a waste of time. Then he had an epiphany.
“Ha!” He shouted, grabbing Caleb’s phone out of his pocket and pulling up the pdf of the book. Zanie shifted her arm to peer at him as he sat up straighter in the grass and flipped through the pages.
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“Did you scan the insides of the covers?” He asked.
“Yeah.”
“Here!” He held the phone up in triumph, then showed it to Zanie. On the inside cover was the spell scribbled out in blotchy penmanship that he had noticed when he first looked through the book. Since then, he had not thought much about it. But he remembered wondering if it was just a regular spell someone scribbled down or some type of enchantment that was on the book.
He held the crystal next to the phone so that the sun would illuminate the etchings and they could compare. “Look, it’s the same runes.”
“Some of them are the same, yeah.” Zanie agreed.
“They must be for enchanting something,” Jeremy concluded. “This crystal is enchanted somehow.”
“I guess that could be the case,” Zanie said.
“I wonder how you use it?” Jeremy put the phone away and tilted the crystal this way and that. “I wish I knew what the other runes meant. I’ll have to look through the book for them and see if I can’t figure out what the spells they are in are for.”
“Here, let me take a look at the crystal again.” Zanie held her hand out, then peered at the runes. “If we each look for one and try to figure out what it does, we can probably decipher it in no time. I’ll look for this one.”
“Alright, cool.” Jeremy took the crystal back, and Zanie propped herself up on one elbow. She fished her phone out of her pocket, looked at her notifications, then sighed and swiped them away. Jeremy tilted his head curiously.
“Have you been keeping in contact with your family?”
“Yeah,” she glanced over at him with a small smile. “We text back and forth. They think I’m staying at a friend’s place after my apartment got flooded. I keep telling them that it’s too dangerous to travel right now, so I’m staying put.”
Jeremy pressed his lips together and nodded. “They would expect you to come home if they knew you were traveling around?”
“Yeah,” she let her head fall back and squinted at the bright blue sky. “We are the kind of family where blood is thicker than water and all that. In a crisis, we all come together.”
“But not you?”
She lay back in the grass again and put her phone on her chest while she pursed her lips and thought about how to answer him. “I guess not. I mean, the support is amazing. I love them, and they love me. And they aren’t bad or anything, but sometimes family...” She shrugged, and the grass shifted against her shoulders. “Sometimes, I need to protect my peace. Keep some boundaries up. And if I go home, it’ll be way harder to do that, especially with everything that is going on.”
Jeremy nodded. “I get that.”
“Well, anyway, thanks for letting me tag along with you guys.”
“Thanks for tagging along with us,” Jeremy countered.
She smiled, then picked her phone up again. Conversation over, Jeremy supposed.
“I’m going to go tell Caleb about the runes,” he said. “He’ll be excited. He really wanted to be able to enchant stuff.”
Jeremy climbed to his feet and brushed his clothes off before wandering into the garage. Henry had set up a big, industrial fan that was as tall as Jeremy’s hip. It filled the garage with a low vibration of white noise and cooled it considerably. Caleb stood outside of its wind, in front of the workbench where bits and pieces of the guns floated around him. The area around him smelled of gun oil and metal as opposed to the humid kicked-up dust scent in the rest of the garage.
“Hey,” Jeremy leaned back against the workbench beside him. “I think maybe that we might be able to figure out how to enchant things.”
“Yeah?” Caleb was concentrating hard on his spell, so he did not give Jeremy the enthusiastic answer he had been hoping for.
“Yeah,” Jeremy said. “I’m not positive. But pretty sure. The runes carved into this crystal are also written on the inside cover of the book.”
“And you think that means they are for enchanting?” Caleb finished sliding a pin in place so that the springs would hold and let the parts of the carbine rest on the towel he had spread over the workbench so that he could turn his full attention to Jeremy. “Alright, hit me with it.”
“So these first couple runes are the same in both, but then the rest are different,” Jeremy explained. “I want to figure out what the rest of the runes mean, so can you look through the book and try to interpret one of them while Zane and I do the same for the others?”
“Sure.” Caleb squinted at the crystal. “What does it even mean, though, for that to be enchanted? Like, what does it do? How do you use it, because that my answer your question about what the runes are. If you could figure out what it is enchanted to do, I mean.”
“No clue,” Jeremy shrugged. “I know that there is mana in the crystal. So, I don’t think trying to channel more mana into it would do anything. But, I guess I could try that.”
“Here, let me take a look at the runes.” Caleb held his hand out for the crystal. Jeremy handed it to him, then pointed out which one Zanie said she was going to try and decipher. Just then, Zanie called his name from outside. Which would be a pretty quick turn-around if she had already figured out what the rune meant. He left the crystal with Caleb and then went outside to see what she wanted.
“Come here,” she was sitting up in the grass now, gesturing with little, jerky waves for him to come join her. As he walked over, she got to her feet. When he stopped beside her, she grabbed his arm, then turned him to face toward the court and pointed.
“Is that Atticus?” She whisper-shouted.
He followed the line of her finger, which led to a man standing out in the middle of the court. On his shoulder, a black cat perched. Jeremy could not really tell if it was Atticus from this far away. Honestly, black cats all looked pretty similar.
He shrugged, then shouted, “Atticus?”
The cat’s head swiveled around. The man upon whose shoulder he was perched also turned toward them. He had his hands on his hips and had been looking at the center of the court, where there were still scorch marks on the asphalt from the lightning strikes that originated with the storm and the single lightning elemental that had come out of the dungeon. He was wearing plain jeans and boots, with a green T-shirt that fluttered across his chest in the slight breeze.
Like Caleb, he had long dark hair that was tied back from his face. Unlike Caleb, however, he had blue eyes that were shockingly light against the dark olive tone of his skin, even from several yards away. However, the feature that stood out the most was his long, pointed ears.
“Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” Zanie whispered.
The black cat leaped down from the elf’s broad shoulders, then pranced over to Jeremy and sat at his feet. It looked up with a loud meow. Apparently, it was Atticus. Jeremy put aside the strangeness of the elf for a moment and crouched down to scoop the cat up. He hugged her close to his chest and stroked a hand down her soft fur in relief, then held her up in front of his face and glared.
“Where in the hell have you been?”
She just hung there in his arms with her feet stretched beneath her and claws poking out a little bit. The look she gave him in return as she meowed again was equally unimpressed. Zanie smacked the side of Jeremy’s arm.
“Maybe pay attention to the literal fucking elf?” she hissed.