Kaius held the piece of paper between ink stained fingers, his hands shaking slightly as he stared at the complex mess of a runic sigil that had taken him the better part of an hour to write. It had to work this time. It had to.

He felt like he was going insane, pouring over the grain sized characters that built up into massive words, in turn whorling into curving lines of script. It wasn’t his hand writing. That was perfect. His first attempt, the one that failed to connect to his mana, had been due to faulty substitutions. Mixing up the seventeenth and eighty-ninth Vhaxanish characters. Easy to do. One was an upside down equilateral triangle, the other an upside down equilateral triangle with a slight flick on its left point.

Failures two through five had been grammar issues. Basic things, but each one had caused the formation to burst into a shower of sparks the second he pushed mana through it.

He’d fixed those.

It had to be right, now. Syntax was fine. Spelling was fine. He’d used the correct characters. The angles and cross over points on the lines of text were perfect.

Kaius took a shaky breath. Reaching out to the sigil. Mana connected.

A soft glow lit from the central point of the Vhaxanish formation, a ball of white light emerging to hover over its centre.

**Ding! General Skill Available! Would you like to learn: Rune Mastery - Vhaxanish (Rare)?**

“Thank the fucking GODS!” Kaius cried, throwing his hands up in triumph and letting the formation flutter to the ground. Half way it burst into flames, scattering ash across the floor.

He accepted the skill in a rush, pulling up its description. Unwilling to let a freak accident force him to spend any more time than was necessary on the utterly miserable script. Being forced to regain it would mean doing at least twice as many successful formations.

Rune Mastery - Vhaxanish:

Level 1

Rare

Lesser minds do not understand the value of precision.

This skill improves the users ability to create Vhaxanish formations, and increases the stability of the formations themselves.

Each level slightly increases speed and accuracy when inscribing Vhaxanish runes.

Each level slightly increases stability of Vhaxanish runes.

Each level slightly increases memory and learning capacity of Vhaxanish runes.

“Oh fuck off.” Kaius mumbled, reading the epigraph of the skill. That was ridiculous. Vhaxanish was not precise, it was cumbersome, unwieldy, and other scripts outshone it in almost every single use case imaginable. Thank you very fucking much.

A noise from the doorway tore him away from his frustration. He looked up, finding Porkchop poking his head into the office.

“You give up yet?” His friend asked. “I’m hungry.”

“Nope!” Kaius said, his voice a little more biting than he intended, still pissed off at his failures.

“So no food?” Porkchop asked, his whole body drooping. He sounded devastated.

Kaius immediately felt bad. “No! I got it.” He said, pushing himself up and away from the desk.

Porkchop perked up immediately, bounding away from the door. “Race you to the kitchen!”

Laughing, Kaius jumped into a sprint, tearing through the halls after his friend.

…

Kaus leaned against one of the massive benches that lined the manor’s kitchen. He assumed it must have been staffed by a good handful of cooks, tucked away as it was at the back of the ground floor. Though smaller than the barrack kitchen, it was still large enough to prepare food for several dozen people, and had a larder stocked to match.

He worked his way through the bowl of piping hot stew in his hands, wondering about the strange numbing sensation that had spread through his mouth. He had to assume it came from the strange spice that Porkchop had insisted he use. It was… Nice enough, he supposed. A little citrusy. He wasn’t sure how he felt about the numbing though, he’d half thought that he’d been poisoned at first, or was having an allergic reaction.

Porkchop loved it though. Kaius watched his friend momentarily come up for air before shoving his head back into the mixing bowl of food he had given him. It had taken a lot to convince him to wait long enough for it to not burn him.

“Sho Ghood” Porkchop moaned.

“I don’t even know why you do that. It’s not like you're actually using your mouth to talk.” Kaius cocked his eye at his friends antics

“You do it!”

“I do have to use my mouth to talk,” he said with a grin.

Porkchop pulled his head out of his bowl long enough to huff in Kaius’s direction, before diving right back in.

“I hope we can visit some place like this one day. Not filled with goblins I mean.”

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“We probably could,” Kaius responded. “Maybe not exactly like this, I’m pretty sure this is modelled after a dwarven deepholm. More of a dwarf-only fortress than a proper city. But the Stoneholds themselves accept travellers!”

“It was weird at first, seeing a city. So different from the forest. I can't even imagine how many people there must have been.”

“Same. I didn’t grow up much different. The frontier villages are nice, but they are terribly small. Only a few hundred people. It’s a bit too remote and rough at the edge of the frontier for most people. I visited Deadacre once, it’s supposed to be a small city but even that was overwhelming.”

“I can’t wait to see them. The villages I mean. You mention them a lot. Do you have any friends there?”

Kaius smiled, thinking about the small hamlets that he and his father used to visit a couple of times a year.

“A few, mostly in Threefields. It’s where me and my father visited the most. Illendra and her father at the inn, the mayor, a few others. I’m not even really sure if I could call them friends. Friendly, sure, but I only got to see them a few times a year for a couple of days at a time. Just long enough for us to restock.”

“Must have been lonely.” Porkchop said. “I can’t imagine growing up without all of my siblings and cousins, the Den was always crowded.”

“Not really.” Kaius shook his head. “I had my father, and my days were always full of things to do. Always more training after all. I like people, and meeting them, but unless I know them well, being around a lot of them can be quite exhausting. It’s a big part of why I wanted, want, to be an explorer. Lots of sights to see, people to meet, but never getting too bogged down.”

“Me too. The Den was nice, but it got so boring after a while. Even the forest. After enough time every tree is basically the same as the next. I’m looking forward to seeing more of what's out there.” Porkchop said, wistful emotions bleeding across their link.

Kaius nodded. He couldn’t wait to be free of this death trap. Admittedly, being down here was fantastic for training, and meeting Porkchop had been a blessing, but he missed the sun. The scent of pine on the wind. The stars hanging in the night.

That didn’t mean he was going to waste the opportunity. More Champions. More loot. More Honours. More Skills.

He dug his spoon into his stew, hurrying to get through the rest. He had to keep working on his Runic Lexicon.

…

Kaius walked back into the office, taking a seat at his desk. It was nice to take a meal break with Porkchop, and he felt comfortably full after the curiously spiced goat stew. Now though, he had to get back to working on collecting his skills.

He’d already successfully collected the scripts he needed for his keystone and controlling arrays, now it was time for the script he needed for the linking array.

It was a vital piece of the overall puzzle. His overall spell formation would be a disparate thing, made up of five different scripts working in tandem. That caused issues. Each style of runes had its own syntax, its own way of integrating separate arrays into an overall formation. He needed something to bind them together. To facilitate communication. Thankfully, it was not an uncommon problem for larger and more complex workings.

Modern runecraft often relied on utilising the strengths of specific scripts and linking them together. Centuries ago it had been the sole purview of masters and grandmasters, now it was something that any middling apprentice was supposed to understand, at least the theory of it .

All thanks to the work of the runewright Yosh. He was supposedly the kind of genius that is only seen once a millennium. He solved the problem of linking scripts by inventing a new one whole cloth. Yosh’s Supplementary.

It was by no means a simple script, but it was far far easier to learn than what was required to integrate separate scripts without it. Where previously one had to be at least master level proficiency in each and every script they wanted to link, the Supplementary allowed that with a mere working understanding of it and the other desired components.

It had its own drawbacks. It was built for one purpose, and one purpose alone. The Supplementary couldn’t be used for anything else. Often that meant that most did not truely dive deep into learning it until they were well into their journeyman years. Afterall, it wasn’t until then that integrating scripts was really viable or useful.

He was a little different, as a vital component of his spell array he had needed to learn it immediately. Admittedly his fathers teaching had been entirely focused on its use with his other key four scripts - and Gretchen's Standard for ease of practice.

Unfortunately, its sole use as a linking script meant that he would need to use it for that purpose. Thankfully, he already had an idea. A Ykkardian sigil of force, with a little basic shaping with Gretchen’s Standard should be enough for his purposes. Far less painful than trying to merge Vhaxanish at any rate.

In the centre of his page he wrote out a single twisting and looping line, slowly coming together into the form of a Force sigil. Ykkardian was nice to use as a baseline, its broad functionality responding well to shaping and controlling runes from a variety of forces. If he got his Standard right, the formation should activate for long enough to tear the paper in half. Something that would hopefully disrupt it’s working fast enough that he wouldn’t shower his desk in more ash.

He moved to his controlling array, quickly scribing the simplified runes of Gretchen's standard. Both the controller and the keystone had space for basic links, but they were incompatible. Working off different syntax.

Redipping his pen, Kaius moved into the sharp, angular forms of Yosh’s Supplementary. It was mostly a geometric script. Relying less on characters and sigils, and more on the natural ability of mana pathway geometry to effect the working. He started from the sigil of Force, twisting his line so that sacred geometry would modulate the flow of mana. Adjusting it into a form that would be recognised by the controller of Gretchen’s Standard.

A few minutes later he was finished. After waiting for the ink to dry, Kaius picked up the sheet. Holding it at arm's length, he held his breath as he reached out to the formation with his mana, nudging a little through the working.

The page tore in half. Kaius grinned.

**Ding! General Skill Available! Would you like to learn: Rune Mastery - Yosh’s Supplementary (Rare)?**

“Yes.”

Rune Mastery - Yosh’s Supplementary:

Level 1

Rare

If you cannot make something so easy that a Journeyman could do it, you were never really a Grandmaster.

This skill improves the users ability to create Yosh’s Supplementary arrays, and increases the stability of the arrays themselves.

Each level slightly increases speed and accuracy when inscribing Yosh’s Supplementary runes.

Each level slightly increases stability of Yosh’s Supplementary runes.

Each level slightly increases memory and learning capacity of Yosh’s Supplementary runes.

Kaius took in his new skill, happy to have gotten it done on the first try. It really hammered in how awful Vhaxanish was.

Oh well. Onto the next one. The grind never stops, after all.