“There is some confusion as to what magic actually is. I think this can be cleared up if you just look at the very earliest descriptions of magic. Magic in its earliest form is often referred to as “the art”. I believe this is completely literal. I believe that magic is art and that art, whether it be writing, music, sculpture, or any other form is literally magic. Art is, like magic, the science of manipulating symbols, words, or images, to achieve changes in consciousness. The very language about magic seems to be talking as much about writing or art as it is about supernatural events. A grimoire for example, the book of spells is simply a fancy way of saying grammar. Indeed, to cast a spell, is simply to spell, to manipulate words, to change people's consciousness.”

-Alan Moore

==POV: Caden==

With my avatar back in the core room I kept examining the cylinder. Another shard looked at it from within the core. A tendril of stone manipulated it as I directed. These was something there that was bugging me. My calculation skill or art skill, or something, was twinging. It just wouldn’t resolve into something concrete enough for me to work with.

I could always absorb it, and I was sure I would learn from it, but if there was something I could learn before absorbing it that would be even better. My prior knowledge altered what I got out of absorbing something. I learned that when I absorbed the same emblem multiple times. Each time I learned more based on what I gained the time before.

If I didn’t learn anything within a day or two I would absorb it anyway. The fact that it was using something besides folerth to run an emblem was important. It would give me additional clues in how to create them. Based on the degradation, I assumed that folerth was used for continuous or reusable enchantments. If you just needed a one off though, it looked like there were other ways to manage it.

I started to pace, that used to help me think when I was human sometimes. I went in a slow circle around my core even as another shard kept examining the object from inside it. As I walked around and behind the cylinder the core and I were on opposite sides of it.

Wait a moment…

I did my best to overlay my two points of view.

I created an imitation of the cylinder, but this time I left out any material that wasn’t silver, gold, or the crystal runes. I ended up needing to support it from both ends with stone so it didn’t collapse.

I rotated the cylinder and there it was. It was a set of runes transcribed into three dimensions. I already knew that the runes could describe things in three dimensions, that was part of the information I gained when I first got the skill. However, I didn’t realize they could be written out in three dimensions.

Now that I knew what they were I could read them.

One rune was for space, movement, transition, change. Like all the runes I had dealt with, it had complicated shades of meaning. The next one described a connection, pairing, duplicate, twin. The last was the easiest for me to understand, but difficult to describe. It was like the English word “this,” it was contextual and delineated the space inside the rune as the target. I suspected that this rune was the entire reason to use three dimensions. It was much easier to simply target inside the rune, than to try to describe the target space.

The crystal runes were actually the simplest. One stored mana, and the other was the trigger for the entire emblem to activate.

In all, the emblem could be translated to say this: “Move what is inside the container through space to the matched space simultaneously using the mana inside this storage rune when this trigger rune is activated.”

Trying to translate even the basics of it into English was awkward.

Actually… there was something even more important.

The activation of this emblem had used no chanting, no extra steps; everything that was needed was contained inside. I still didn’t understand some of the extra pieces attached to the runes. They added additional context for its function, but that didn’t matter. It was self contained, and that meant I should be able to create runes like this too.

The trigger rune in combination with the mana storage was the key, they specified sending mana to the entire system at the same time. Mana spreading unequally as I activated the previous emblems might be why they exploded. It was likely that the chanting, and hand waving, were at least partially there to show how to properly activate the forces involved. That eliminated the need for an additional rune network to be tied into all the other runes to regulate the initial power.

I went over and looked at the most basic emblem I had, the sewer grate.

It used a different form of targeting. Now that I understood what I was looking at I could read it a little better. It was attuned to the material it was inscribed into. Essentially the rune said to affect all the metal it touched or connected to.

It was a simple solution, but it would actually be easy to touch it with a large piece of metal and make the whole system have issues. Actually… let me try that.

I moved the sewer gate to an empty cavern. I made a small cube of iron and touched it to the gate. No response that I could see. I tried with a larger cube… nothing.

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Maybe it was more discerning than I gave it credit for. I recreated a small cube of steel instead. This was the same steel as the knife I got from the sewers. I touched the cube to the door.

There it was. Mana was flowing into the emblem at a greater rate. I tried to manipulate the cube of metal. It still deformed at my will, but there was a bit of resistance.

I pulled it away and used a larger cube. Even more mana flowed into the system, and the emblem started to disperse heat into the air. I used a slightly larger cube. The system started to disperse and I heard a faint sound of metal groaning under stress.

I quickly stored the cube away and the emblem started to cool down.

Okay, so this method had some definite flaws. If I could recreate it, it also had some great potential as a trap. Touch a large piece of metal to the emblem, and boom.

I would rather not destroy my only working copy, however. That would be an incredible waste. I wanted to at least absorb it so I could gain more information.

I put the gate back in my core room and examined Tam’s work instead.

Now that I was looking for it, I could see places where Tam had done something very impressive. I hadn’t recognized lots of runes that he used. That was still the case. However, I could now understand some of them. He had taken a two dimensional rune, transcribed it into three dimensions and combined it with other runes, then he had copied them back down into a two dimensional rune. All of the rune groups that did that had the same flourish of subtext applied. It essentially told whatever system was reading the runes to treat this as a three dimensional object seen from the specific view point the subtext specified.

And I was certain that something was reading the runes now. The instructions the runes provided were complicated, but they weren’t complicated enough. I thought they were, but the more I learned, the more I recognized the lack of core instructions needed to perform the actions that were happening. It lacked the kind of complexity needed to transport an object across space. The runic language was more like plugging instructions into a computer. Then something, probably the system, used those instructions to run a program. The instructions were complicated because they needed to be very precise, but that was a different degree of magnitude from the complexity needed to do the task from scratch.

Regardless, if I had to guess, I imagined that normal mastery of runes went something like this:

First, people learned how to make things like the gate. It worked, it was crude, and had places where it jury-rigged solutions. Then you had stuff like the cylinder. It took the basic lessons from before and streamlined them. It would do one job and do it perfectly, and it expanded into three dimensions so that it didn’t need to use more materials. And then you had Tam. He took that three dimensional efficiency and took it back into two dimensions. Writing groups of runes in the space that would normally only fit one. This saved both material and space. As people got better at the language they also got better at using subtext. I was pretty sure that Tam didn’t have any mana regulating and storing runes because his tiny additions to his runes handled all of that. I didn’t see a single rune in Tam’s work that exactly matched the basic runes I knew. Tam used that, and spacing, and two dimensional orientation, all together to give extremely complicated instructions in a minimal amount of space.

I couldn’t do that yet. I was fairly certain that each person who gained the lexicon gained a unique version of the skill. And I suspected that since Tam’s emblems were where I had gotten the skill from that mine was extra special. I knew more about the deep knowledge that led to altering the language, but I only just discovered a rune that would, hopefully, let me actually build a working one.

In the long run, that knowledge and having Tam’s work to study would probably propel my abilities ahead substantially. It had just delayed my ability to actually make use of it. I had a strong suspicion that students learning the language would normally learn some form of very crude trigger rune that they could use to start up an emblem. Either that or they learned the necessary chanting magic first, I wasn’t sure.

In addition, I had learned something interesting about materials. I wasn’t sure if the materials the cylinder used were some kind of special alloy, or they were just gold and silver. The crystal was probably mana crystal, but I couldn’t be certain. I had tried to put mana into other materials before but nothing had happened. The rules might be different for runes. The materials didn’t hold up very well, but the rune forced mana through them anyway.

And that actually worked perfectly for me anyway. If it worked the way I thought, I could use the activation rune with a network of gold or silver and let it burn away as the emblem activated. I could make the entire thing out of folerth, but it was mana intensive to make. That didn’t matter to me right now, but it was best to conserve as I could. That would work perfectly, both for permanent systems which I didn’t need to turn off again, and traps that only needed to activate once before my automatic systems would recreate them.

For now, it was time to try and recreate the strength rune. I had tried this before, but hopefully this time things would be different.

Since I didn’t want things to be too different, I decided to use the largest block of steel that I was using to test the door earlier. The magic had properly propagated through the steel on contact, even if it hadn’t liked the extra load. If there was something in the subtext of the runes that specified steel and I wasn’t seeing it, this should still work.

I carefully carved out the emblem from the door, copying it exactly. I checked it a couple of times just to be sure. Then I filled in each empty space with folerth until it looked the same. Then, I carved out a trigger rune off to the side and attached a thin network of gold from the empty trigger to the rest of the runes. Then I filled in the trigger rune with mana crystal.

If I was right, mana should enter the trigger and spread evenly through the runic matrix of all the rest at the same time. At some point the gold would probably break down, but by then the rest of the system should be working well enough to keep going.

I absorbed what I had made. Since there was no mana running through it, it disappeared easily enough. Using the pattern, I made copies of the whole thing, the various parts, and labeled all of them in my system. If I was successful in making it work, I would find it easy to reproduce. And, with enough experience and lots of work, I should be able to create an entire runic alphabet that I could access and create on demand. Even if I needed to add little modifications for a specific job, I could save a lot of time.

Okay, here we go.

I poured mana into the trigger rune, letting it fill. Then the gold sparked. Flashes of heat came off the gold as mana flowed through the system. Ambient mana started to gather and enter as the rune responsible for that fully activated. Mana continued to grow. A section of gold sparked more heavily, then it burned through. The entire thing exploded violently.

I was glad I was testing this far away from my core.

However, despite the explosion, this was still a success. It had taken several seconds before the rune exploded. Before, they had always failed almost instantly.

From what I saw, one of the runes was drawing more power to stay even with all the rest, so the gold to that rune had failed first.

I could slowly increase the amount of gold to each component and between them to see where the problem was, but gold wasn’t exactly valuable to me. Instead, I recreated what I had already made with a quick thought. Then, I thickened the gold filigree everywhere. This way I could just look at what sections of gold were more damaged afterwards. From there I could learn more about what was drawing the mana, and I could make more fiddly adjustments for the future.

I activated it again. Less sparks this time. Slowly, the mana across the entire system increased and started to work. Then, the mana dipped and then completely stopped flowing through the gold. It had worked. The rest of the emblem was running and stable.

I did a quick test and tried to turn part of the metal on the bottom of the cube into a thin tendril. It stretched out, but it fought against the change.

Now I could do some magic.