Pristine stone blocks shifted underfoot as we traversed the ruins, each bearing the same strange rune that adorned the rest of the city walls.

“Hi Thorn, I’m Brook!” My sister said in a cheerful voice. “We already met before the naming ceremony but I thought it might be polite to reintroduce myself with my new name now that we’re working together!”

“Yes, it’s nice to meet you… again?” Thorn said, not quite sure what to make of my sister. She was perhaps a few years older than myself with dull orange-brown fur, nervous twitching ears, and a complexion that might have been labeled cute by my sister’s definition of the word. She carried a small pack on her back while a bound notebook in a waterproof leather pouch hung from her waist.

“Rain and Earth want us to ask everyone their paths and get a sense of what they do.” Brook continued. “So how about you? What do you do?”

“My primary path is ‘inscriptionist’.” She said. “It’s a tier three professional path and also my specialty if you couldn’t guess. My secondary path is low-level and inconsequential. I was brought along for my inscription work.”

“So what exactly is ‘inscription’?” I asked, curious.

“One of the four fundamental classes of magic.” She said, brightening up at the question. “Inscription is the manipulation of etheric mana through a set of ‘instructions’ drawn or carved into a conductive medium.”

Her explanation sounded like she was regurgitating a definition from a textbook. It was the kind of thing amateurs said to try and sound smart. Not very useful for people like me.

“Meaning you can draw magic runes to produce a desired effect.” I clarified. “The way you say ‘instructions’ implies you can do more complicated things than throwing around fireballs.”

“You can theoretically string runes together to produce any effect you want until complexity and efficiency become a problem.”

“That does seem useful.” I said. I could see why Rain compared my description of programming with it.

“Maybe you should take it up then!” Carmen said, clapping me on the back. It hurt. Why was even the healer this strong?

“Maybe.” I said with a cough. “I doubt I have the prerequisits to unlock a tier three path like that.”

“Inscription doesn’t require the inscriptionist path to use, the path just makes a few parts of it a bit easier. Anyone with an affinity can use magic. Just pick the tier two scribe path and you’ll be fine.”

“I’ll think about it.” I said. I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend my life stuck behind a desk drawing runes. Besides, I needed to talk with Autumn at some point.

“So what’s your two paths?” Brook asked Wind and Carmen.

“Don’t ask a warrior their path.” Wind said. “Giving out that information can get them killed.”

“Hendric told us.” Autumn pointed out.

“Hendric is an idiot who likes to talk.”

**********

Wind held up a hand for us to stop when we approached the lone standing tower, the massive spire leaning precariously towards the center of the octagonal ruins.

“Everyone waits here until I scout the inside and give the all-clear.” Wind said, pointing to a rectangular opening at the base where an old wooden door had long since rotted away.

Wind entered first to scout the insides for any unwanted residents. He appeared again in the doorway and motioned for the five of us to follow him inside. Carmen entered next, his finger tracing a pattern in the air until a sphere of light appeared suspended above his hand. It floated up to illuminate the room.

We stood inside a massive doughnut-shaped chamber that comprised the entire base of the tower. A thick central stone pillar arched up from the dirt-covered floor to form a ceiling some forty feet above our heads. Tarnished metal sconce-like fixtures clung to the walls along with the distant remnants of something that might have been furniture, but was now little more than a pile of dirt and rust. There may have been a staircase leading up through the room’s central pillar, but stone rubble blocked the entrance.

Autumn walked over to one of the tarnished metal fixtures set into the walls and tugged. It slid into her hands with the high-pitched screech of metal. The size of her head and elegantly designed, its metal seemed to shimmer blue in the beneath the sphere of Carmen’s light.

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“What is this made of?” She asked, “It hasn’t rusted in how long?”

“More than four thousand years.” Wind said. “But I doubt a sconce would be made of anything particularly useful. It might be worth bringing to Kar’ktar to look at though.”

I ran my fingers along the smooth walls of the room, noting that the lack of runes meant they were etched on the faces between the bricks. I wondered if the tarnished, but intact sconces bore similar runes. The idea of inscriptions intrigued me and I began to wonder where such magic was stored for so many years. Did magic travel like electricity through circuits, or was energy wireless transmitted between the stones? Then again, maybe magic worked in ways completely foreign to my understanding.

I heard another screech of metal as Autumn pulled out yet another fixture and tossed it to a growing pile at her feet. With some amusement I walked over and picked up one of the sconces with some struggle, amazed by how heavy it felt. I glanced over the silvery-blue metal, seeing no hint of engravings beyond its graceful swooping shape and artistic lines.

“There is nothing here.” Carmen said with a sigh. “I can’t sense any magic either. Do you see anything interesting Thorn?”

“Not offhand. We should clear the way up the tower” She said, walking over to the central pillar.

I turned back to the metal fixture in my hand and absentmindedly toed through the dirt with my footpaw. My claws cut through half an inch of dirt to drag against the smooth stone floor, an idea popping into my mind.

“What were the chances this tower had a basement?” I asked.

“Pretty good.” Wind said from where he’d joined Thorn to assess the rubble blocking the staircase. “But we’d still have to clean out the rubble.”

Assuming it would be accessed by the staircase. I thought. Something told me it wouldn’t, that there would be a different way down below. I wasn’t sure where that feeling came from, but I had to find out.

“May I borrow one for a moment?” I asked Autumn, hefting the chunk of metal in my hands.

“Sure?” She said, “They’re not mine.”

Autumn’s confused look turned incredulous when she watched me bend down and start dragging the wall-spike portion of the fixture through the dirt. Metal shrieked against the stone beneath, drawing the eyes of the entire room.

“What are you doing?” My sister asked the question on everyone’s face.

“Checking the floor for runes or a trap door.” I responded, continuing to drag the fixture

“Why?”

“I have a hunch.”

My sister rolled her eyes. “That’s not what I meant. Why are you checking the floor for runes by dragging a metal thing across it?”

“I should be able to feel it, and I don’t have a broom. Unless you’ll let me use your tail.”

“Well stop it! It’s obnoxious and it hurts my ears.”

“Nope.” I said. Now I had to keep doing it.

“J...River.” She said.

“Brook.” I responded with a grin.

“I’m going to have to side with your sister on this.” Autumn called from where she was liberating yet another fixture from the wall. Thorn flattened her ears against her head and shot me a glare while Wind and Carmen just looked amused by the entire thing.

Then, halfway across the tower floor, my fixture bumped against something.

“Thank the gods.” Thorn grumbled under her breath when the screeching stopped.

Bending down into a crouch, I brushed and then dug the dirt away to find a few squiggly lines etched into the stone. They looked suspiciously like a part of a rune.

“Huh.” I said, surprised that my hare-brained idea might have actually worked. “I think I found something.”

I looked up to see the rest of the party staring at me in amused silence, only for it to be broken as Carmen’s laughter filled the room. Soon, all six of us were frantically brushing dirt away from the floor, tracing a thin seam of stone that marked the edges of whatever this thing was. The moment Autumn uncovered the second rune, Thorn told us to stop and Wind leapt to his paws and sprinted out the door in search of Rain.

Wind returned with the patriarch a few minutes later.

“Everyone out of the tower!” Rain ordered after a single look at our hasty ‘excavation’.

I followed the others outside, stopping behind Rain just beyond the tower entrance. I watched as the Patriarch lifted a single lazy hand and the dirt carpeting the floor rose as a single sheet into the air. With a loud thump, it coalesced into a series of dirt spheres that floated one by one out through the door. They drifted off to the side before collapsing to the ground in a loose heap.

I blinked in amazement. It was the first impressive display of magic I’d see since Hendric and Wind saved us from the beetle swarm. Fuck swords and bows, I wanted magic. Real flashy magic.

Back inside we were greeted with a spotless floor of white speckled stone. In the place we’d just been digging, a square slab of stone some five feet across and adorned with runes slotted seamlessly into the floor. A ring of some fifty or so smaller runes were etched into the floor around the square slab.

A ‘secret’ door if I ever saw one.

Thorn rushed into the tower where she fumbled her notebook from its leather pouch and began scribbling on the nearest blank page. The rest of us crowded in after her and began examining our discovery at a more measured pace. To be honest they meant little to me.

“What does it do?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” Thorn mumbled. “Runes are new. Gonna need Wolf to look at them.”

“You mean old runes.” I said with a grin.

“Runes are added and removed from common use all the time.” She said. “Anything used during the Heli Empire era has since been lost or modified.”

“So you need to try and figure out what the rune does by understanding how the lines connect together.” I concluded.

“It’s not as simple as it sounds.” Thorn said. “New runes can take an expert anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks to decipher.”

“Can’t you just carve the runes into a rock back at camp and see what happens?” I asked, tapping the nearest rune from the outer ring with a claw.

The rune began to glow red at my touch.

Thorn snapped her book shut and scrambled for the door. The rest of us stared at it dumbfounded.

“EVERYONE OUT!” Rain roared.

Thorn’s reaction scared me more than Rain’s shout. I turned and fled with the rest, sprinting through the door and across the wet grass of the plateau. We stopped some fifty paces away, peering back through the tower’s arched entryway. Within it, the single rune continued to glow. We held our breath and waited.

Then the rune winked out.

Silence.

The four experienced members of our group breathed a sigh of relief.

“It would appear that the runes were still active.” Carmen observed. “Why can’t I sense the mana?”

Rain shook his head and then turned to face me, Autumn, and Brook. “Never touch a rune unless you know exactly what it does.” He admonished. “And always assume an active rune will kill you.”

We nodded.

“Thorn, you may continue.” Rain continued. “The rest of you stay out of the tower until the inscriptionists confirm it’s not dangerous. Wind, inform the other groups that some of the higher level rune systems are still active and have hidden mana signatures. Carmen, stay with River, Brook, and Autumn.” He glanced at the sky. “Our previous time frame still holds. I want to be back in camp long before sundown.”