Who would’ve guessed that Herold Trugle would have gone out like this. Herold was younger than he should’ve been for this to happen, in his 60s, but time has a cruel way of throwing a curve ball at you. He had developed a disease from being in dusty old libraries and spell scroll storage facilities.
This disease caused the organs to slowly eat themselves. First it was the pancreas and then came the gallbladder, on and on, until it started to affect the major organs. The worst one was the second to last, this is where Herold was now, the brain. It affected the brain, and once nearly complete it finally went to the heart.
Funny enough it never touched the lungs, this disease made sure you knew you were dying until right before the end when you started to become feral. Herold was approaching that point; he could feel it.
His thoughts were more muddled than they should be, and his desire to continue consciously fighting was disappearing.
Suddenly, Herold started to fall, his legs wouldn’t hold him anymore. Why he had been standing, he couldn’t remember, all Harold remembered was his scholarly life and achievements leading up to the moment the disease was found in him.
All Herold’s life had been devoted to the study of magik. Whether it be old spells or new. Herold always tried to make them better. He could see from his studies that something was missing in the arcane symbols that someone constructed to make magik work. Herold was trying to devise an iteration of the arcane symbols that made the magik work the quickest and most natural.
This seemed like something that should be easy, but, alas, Herold had been working on it throughout his entire career as a scholar and he still hadn’t found the answer. Drawing the symbols was an exercise in concentration, each had to be drawn separately and held in the mind’s eye separately just to activate magik. It was so unnecessarily difficult; he didn’t know why people even decided used magik.
However, something that Herold did figure out and reveal to the world was the use of less symbol magik. To create magik phenomenon that was extraordinary, one would have to create the diagram of individual symbols and hold it in their mind’s eye while using another part of the mind to summon the intent of what you wanted to happen.
Herold figured out that, instead of conjuring the full 12 symbol diagram, one can reduce the number to create lesser versions of the spells. The less symbols, the easier it was.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
The one thing Herold managed to do was adapt his body to the feel of the substance of magik, ambient mana. Herold had asked around and figured out that no one else seemed to know how to do this. Not that it would help him much, Herold’s mana stores were almost non-existent. The most Herold had been able to do was create a one symbol fingertip light, the Finger Light, he called it; not very intuitive he knew, but Herold knew he wasn’t good at naming. He could only hold it for about a minute, but, nevertheless, it helped find his way in the dark.
Herold had a pitiful mana storage in his body and the time it took to get it back was far longer than anyone else he knew. The one symbol fingertip light didn’t last very long and the time until he could use it again was somewhere around 3 hours.
The only other major discovery Herold found was the ability to strain the symbol. The easiest way to explain it was symbols were abstract concepts given life for a short time. They constantly fed on your mana to stay grounded in our reality. Herold figured out you can increase the amount of mana flow to them to increase the effect made by the symbol. However, too much and the symbol could explode, sometimes staying grounded long enough to cause physical harm.
But the effects were awe-inspiring, to say the least. For one symbol constructs, one could funnel up to 400% normal mana consumption. Well, at least, for the fingertip light. Curse the gods for not giving Herold more mana to be able to work with, not that Herold believed in the gods.
The numerous times Herold funneled 400% to the Finger Light caused it to shine so bright that Herold couldn’t see without spots in his vision for a number of minutes. And the one time, only one time, Herold funneled more than 400% into it, it exploded, burned his finger and opposite arm, and set the small book storage on fire. Thankfully there were no books of real import in that storage.
Herold got to see the world use less symbol magik for a long time before he became a relic in the eyes of the world. And then, after being a hermit for years on end, contracted this disease, he dubbed Page Mold.
During his time as a hermit, all Herold did was study other topics. He studied war tactics, magik theory, arcane symbol delineation, arcane symbol swapping and replacement, firearms, and ways to expand mana storage in the body.
Herold would like to say that he learned a lot about all the subjects, but besides war tactics and everything about firearms, there were just tidbits here and there to most of the others, especially magik theory, and all the arcane symbol topics. One thing that was a theory on expansion of mana storage was the use of crystalized mana storages from recently dead mammals. It was a brutal practice in theory, but, thankfully, as far as Herold knew, it was only a theory.
Herold’s life ended the day he got Page Mold. He gave up on everything except trying to live. And, in the end, it didn’t even matter.
Herold’s ability to think disappeared right as his body lost the ability to move and he hit the ground. And his heart stopped, blessedly, from the quill, lying on his bedroom floor, as it pierced his eye and went into his brain. How it happened, Herold’s brain couldn’t even comprehend how it could be possible a quill could stand on end. That was Herold’s last thought as he died.