Medea

I wasn’t used to walking this much, but I’m damned sure I wasn’t going to try flying today. Normally for getting around, I have a custom-made kind of folding seat that Lefty and Righty slot into for carrying me around places, but instead I walked the streets, the folded chair strapped to my back and Righty clutched in Lefty’s iron grip. Occasionally as I walked, something would pop into my head and I’d bring it close to my head to check for some minor detail or imperfection I might have missed, but the damned thing was no different to when I’d made it.

I’d made Righty first, with my mentor’s help. She taught me about the proper runes and seals for making a mental link with a tool first - something that she used a lot in her workshop - and over several months I had forged the steel sections, carved in the runic arrays, and performed a complex, multi-step ritual to complete the process. It involved a comprehensive understanding of Elven runemarks, and a lot of Well of Wonders classified magic to make work.

On top of that, Righty wasn’t even my first attempt. The prototypes were full prosthetic arms, attached at my shoulders, but I found that having a finite arm span was too limiting. I tried alterations like tools in the fingers or hidden blades, but as it turns out a regular, five-fingered hand was most useful for getting by day-to-day. The project was incredibly personal to me, and one of my greatest achievements to date.

And that doddering old bastard had taken it apart and put it back together flawlessly.

It wasn’t just my pride as a craftsman being bruised. The abilities he displayed unnerved me. I had no doubt that if the situation was different he could have reduced me to dust just like he had with my hand. Could he have recreated me too? I remembered the way he summoned duplicates of Lefty from seemingly nowhere too. Could he have done the same to a living person? The implications were endless, each more horrifying than the last.

Maybe my pride was a bigger factor than I would admit. If what Fyron is saying is true, then all that work into being a Runewright was a waste of time too, since magic is just whatever the hell people want it to be.

With no recall of the journey there, I found myself standing in the back alley behind the Well of Wonders emporium. I tried to release the tension building up in me as I opened the rusted back door by some dumpsters.

Inside was home. Not in a conventional sense, but I’d not known anything other than the warm orange glow of the forge filling the room, or the various tools neatly organised and displayed on every inch of the walls. There were specific work stations within. A table with multiple lenses for magnification and boxes of fine needle-like tools was for runesmithing, and the place where I spent most of my waking hours. Near that was an anvil with a rune-enhanced sledgehammer resting by it, enhanced to hit harder and silently (at request of the shop next door). There was also a station for painting and woodworking boxes and boxes of spare parts and failed prototypes, sealed chests of mana sources, and even a few wooden humanoid figures to be used as practice dummies for weapons or more recently, boxing.

Amongst the industrial aspects of the single large room, there were also various creature comforts. A small kitchen at the back with cooking utensils on display in the same way as the workshop tools. A large, threadbare sofa where my mentor often passes out instead of going home, and my favourite place - a loft area above it all, accessible by a ladder. My own little hiding hole.

Standing amidst the chaos was an Aniya. She was tall and muscular, unlike most elves, with her chestnut brown hair tied back in a messy ponytail. She wore a leather apron over an olive-green tank top, and a pair of thick leather gloves she was using to pull something out of the blazing mouth of the forge. When I entered, she lifted up the darkened lenses of her goggles to smile at me.

“Dee! I heard from Switch, good work on the fight!” said Aniya. “Heard you send that guy with the stupid tattoo home crying.”

I had honestly almost forgotten about the fight. “Ah, yeah. Don’t sing my praises too loud, pretty sure the fight was rigged.”

“You sure? Don’t downplay yourself like that, the guy was tough according to Switch.”

“Well yeah, he’s going to play up the guy as part of fixing the fight. ‘Volcano’ thought I saw just some short kicker, thought levitating would keep him out of my range. Someone else had cast the Levitation anyway, because he was floating before the fight even started and didn’t seem to have the mana reserves to keep it up, to put it politely.”

“Levitation huh? You send him flying?”

I smirked. “Absolutely.”

“Atta girl. How come you’re holding hands with yourself?” She said, nodding to the floating gauntlets as she dumped whatever she took out of the forge and dumped it into a bucket of water with a hiss of steam.

“Ah. That. Would you mind taking a look at Righty for me?”

“She not behaving?”

“Something like that. Just see if you notice anything off.”

Aniya took off her heavy gloves, took Righty by the fingers, and pulled it towards the runesmithing table. She tapped a few runes on the side of the desk to make a few floating magelights hover around the workspace, and pulled the large glass lenses in place to take a closer look.

“Hmm… yes, there is an issue here I see.”

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

My heart soared. I knew that it wouldn’t be so easy to make a perfect copy!

“This part here of the array.” She said, pointing to a section with a thin tool. “Someone prioritizes making this poor thing work as fast and strong as possible with no consideration to the longevity of the construct.”

My heart crashed right back down again. He’d even copied my imperfections.

Seeing the look on my face, Aniya gave a sympathetic smile. “Hey, I’m just kidding. It all looks fine. Obviously it works great, since you trashed that Volcano guy. Ooh, I know what will cheer you up. Do you know what his tattoo actually reads like in Elvish?”

I smiled despite my mood. “I know. You taught me Elvish, and looking up all the dirty words was the first thing I did with the dictionary you bought me.”

Aniya pretended to look scandalised. “Medea! I did not spend half my monthly funds to buy that book for you to use it for such vulgarity!”

“I was eight! Of course I would!”

“Despite that, you were so much sweeter back then…” she said, gazing wistfully up at the loft.

“Yeah, well. Sucks for you that I was raised by such an improper woman.”

She threw a leather glove at me for that. I caught it with Righty without thinking, then frowned.

“What’s bugging you, Dee?” Aniya said, trying to meet my eyes.

“Ah, it’s nothing. I’ve just been thinking about stupid things.”

“I like stupid things. That’s why I took you in.”

I threw the glove back at her and she laughed.

“Cmon, tell me what’s on your mind.”

I sighed. “I know this is something we went over nearly fifteen years ago, but how do runes even work? Take the rune for fire, for example.” I nodded my head towards the large marking carved on the side of the forge. It was three overlapping triangles with a small circle nestled in the middle of them. “What makes the fire rune and not, I don’t know, the water rune?”

Aniya seemed to give the question some serious thought. “Well, there’s some theories about that. Different, depending on who you ask. Most agree it has a kind of pictographic side to it. The dwarves would say that it makes it easier for the spirits of mana to understand what it’s for, like a codeword for fire. The elves say it’s more about the geometric arrangement and how the lines twist the mana into a certain shape for a certain effect. I’m more partial to the Kiti and Gooba theory.”

“Kiti and Gooba?”

“It’s an old story from the Scarlet Woods. It’s something like a short fat dwarf and a tall boney elf were wandering the land, with one being called Kiti and the other being called Gooba. Stupid names, I know. They went around asking people from all kinds of languages and cultures which one of them was called Kiti and which one was Gooba.”

“Seems like a waste of time.”

“Oh for sure, but the interesting thing is that most of the time people guessed correctly that the dwarf was Gooba and the elf was Diti. Why do you think that is?”

“I dunno, neither of them are common names in either culture as far as I know, but I guess I had already assumed in my head that was the way the names were too.”

“Weird, right? So I’m partial to the theory that there is a universally understood reason why a fire rune looks like a fire rune. I guess that’s a lot of words to say ‘it just looks like that because it does’”

I pinched the bridge of my nose with Lefty. “I’m starting to remember my frustrations with your lessons.”

“And yet, you were my favourite and most successful apprentice.” she said fondly.

“I was your only apprentice.”

“Details, details. Why are you wondering about deep questions like that right after a boxing match, anyway? You get hit in the head?”

“I was just wondering if there was some kind of way to use magic to whip together constructs faster. In theory.”

“Hah! I wish. Though I’d probably be out of work. Sorry to break it to you though kiddo, but those gauntlets of yours don’t work for spells with somatic components, which is pretty much all of them.”

“Yeah yeah. I’ve certainly tried that hypothesis out enough to disprove it.”

In truth, that was why I was so keen on making Lefty and Righty in the first place. Not having arms was bad enough, but not being able to use magic cut me off from most of modern life. I wasn’t convinced by Arryn’s tale of being completely mundane yet, but if he was I could empathise with how debilitating it could be.

“Anyway, I should probably head home.” Aniya said, turning down the fires in the forge. “I stocked up the fridge with some food, so eat before you turn in for the night.”

“Alright. I’ll be heading out in the evenings for the next few weeks, so don’t wait up for me.”

I started putting together a snack while my mentor packed up her things and left. I put my five bean, extra spicy, free-range gryphon meat burrito on a plate and sent Lefty up to the loft with it and followed it up with the ladder.

I remember first moving here, and this ladder was a nightmare. I didn’t remember the day Aniya took me in, but I remember this stupid ladder. She told me that she was walking to work one day and saw this tiny, armless thing sitting on the side of the road, completely out of it and covered in dirt and scratches. She took me in, trying to find my parents, but never did. She didn’t have any space at her company-issued apartment for me, but cleared out the loft and filled it with things for me. I loved the loft, but getting up a ladder without arms is very difficult, to say the least. For a while she built a pulley system, then a floating disk to get me up there easier, but after a while I saw the ladder as a challenge. I didn’t want to let it beat me. I wanted to be stronger.

Now, it’s no longer a challenge, but those memories remain. My space in the loft was very special to me, and hadn’t changed much as I grew up. Various racks with personal projects filled the perimeter of the space. Blueprints and notes covered every inch of the low sloped ceilings, and a pair of skylights shone the lights of the city in through the gaps in the paper. There was a small bed covered in dozens of various plushies that Ariya had hand made me when I was little to get me to warm up to her.

It worked.

I collapsed onto my bed, sending a stuffed manticore rolling on to the carpeted floor, and began to plan.

I don’t trust Fyron at all. Or Wyll and Arryn for that matter. But they might have information that I need to know. I don’t have to commit to anything too shady, just grab whatever knowledge I can and run with it.

My mind settled, I drifted off to sleep.