NOVEL FROG Chapter 38: Inscription
Kaius crouched over a wide wooden board outside of the church. He’d broken down one of the splintered pews and made a small pile of the flattest and smoothest sections of wood.He had a need for them. The next two skills he planned to acquire, Sense Illusion and Sense Mana, were both tricky things.
Father had had plans for how they could work on them. Kaius remembered their last trip to Elmhollow, another of the villages they visited on occasion. A caravan had been passing through, and his father had spotted that they had a minor artefact. A trinket really, more of a children's toy than anything. The small metal orb would cover itself in an illusion of shifting colours. His father had snapped it up, and had kept it buried at the bottom of his bag for the last several months.
Unfortunately, the orb had been left at their camp when he had been forced to flee, so he would have to make do with what he could himself. Thankfully, he’d more than progressed far enough in his lessons on runes to set up a simple formation that would fuel itself with a mana gathering array. Hence the boards.
Tracing the sigils in the dirt would be nowhere near precise enough for his needs, and while stone would have held up to the rigours of magic better than scrap wood he had no chisels, nor the time, to engrave any of the headstones.
A snort drew his attention. Kaius looked up and smiled. Porkchop was lying next to the outer wall of the church, twitching slightly in his sleep. It had taken them hours to work their way out of the maze, and on their journey back they’d been ambushed by a pair of direboars. Thankfully, between his growth, and his friends prodigious strength, they’d had them handled. One of them was currently roasting over the hearth inside now, the delicious scent of roasting meat and rendered fat wafting out of the churches open windows.
As soon as they had returned, Porkchop had started mumbling about a nap and passed out in seconds. Bloody adorable. He might know that the meles was a terror when he wanted to be, and a nigh mythical creature besides, but he was so damn fluffy.
Kaius shook his head, returning to his task at hand. He grabbed one of the pieces of charcoal he had scavenged from the hearth before he had started cooking, drawing out smooth swooping lines on one of the boards.
He was going to use Gretchen's Standard. One of the simpler scripts, more something used to train apprentices than something true practitioners employed in their craft. That was important. He had no doubt that without a full skill list he would be offered a mastery skill for the work. That meant he had to avoid using any of his five favoured scripts.
They were the ones he had narrowed down with Father. Each offering a potential use for his plans for his class. They were also the scripts that he planned to use to forge his next legacy skill after True Sight. According to his father, many of his ancestors had gone the route of using runes. Their sixth skill was to thank for that.
It was unique amongst legacy skills, at least those he had heard of, in that it could be merged from any five runic Mastery’s. Instead, the process of merging required a specific mental intent and image to be held in the mind, making it a far harder process than normal. It would be the lynch pin of his spellcasting formation, and had been for the classes of his father and many others in his dynasty.
Among other benefits, it drastically eased the enmeshment of multiple differing runic scripts. Something that was normally hellishly difficult. The realm of masters, not the unclassed.
Getting offered a mastery skill for one of the scripts he planned to use in that merge could be disastrous. It had the potential to make it too difficult for him to reacquire with the limited tools he had at his disposal. He’d have to pick another script, one he was far less familiar with, and one that was far less suited to his eventual intent.
So he used Gretchen's Standard.
Kaius began to visualise the central sigil that he wanted in his mind, hoving over the board with charcoal in hand. While the script might have been designed for use by novices, it was by no means simple in isolation. The central binding rune would be a whorling knot of intersecting lines and angles. He traced the image in his mind, leaning heavily on mental visualisation. He double and triple checked the image that floated in his mind's eye, making corrections as he saw an angle out of place, or a line slightly too thick.
**Ding! Mental Visualisation has reached level 7!**
A headache set in, Kaius struggling to hold the image stable. It snapped into place, finished.
**Ding! Mental Visualisation has reached level 8!**
With a steady hand borne from a lifetime of practice, he traced his charcoal over the wood, setting down the sigil into the centre of the plank.
Next he moved to the emission arrays, three concentric circles connecting to equidistant lines that exited the central knot.
**Ding! Mental Visualisation has reached level 9!**
Inside the circles he inscribed lines of balance and unity. Linking chains came next. Jagged, angled things that would connect the emission arrays to the locus of the inscription, an equilateral triangle lined in a hymn of deceit and lies. Each rune of the hymn was dense, tight. Forcing him to shave his charcoal down to a point with every few lines. The minutes ticked by, stamina draining as it forced back strain induced tremors.
**Ding! Mental Visualisation has reached level 10!**
**Ding! Mental Visualisation has reached level 11!**
More than once he smudged a line, wooden refuse and charcoal making poor materials for the deft work of runic inscription. Biting down frustration he simply reached for a rag, wetting the cloth and wiping away the whole rune. Restarting a line would have left minute discrepancies in thickness, something that would reduce the lifespan of the array.
It was already a hack job. He’d be lucky if it lasted long enough for him to get his skill. It had to be as perfect as he could make it.
**Ding! Mental Visualisation has reached level 12!**
Kaius moved to the final set of runes he needed for the glyph. A shaping array to influence what his sigil actually did. He scribed another line of hymns, this time on the interior of the triangle that surrounded the formation. These would serve to hold the illusion mana in stasis. If he did it well enough, it should project an illusory orb a handspan above the binding rune.
**Ding! Mental Visualisation has reached level 13!**
Biting his lip, he traced the last line. He was done. Now he only had to see if it worked. The array should, if he had inscribed it with enough accuracy, pull mana from the air to charge the effect. With the density in the Depths, it should only take fifteen minutes.
Kaius fell back onto the grass behind him, his hand aching and his head throbbing. It had been a nerve wracking experience. Without his father yelling at him every time he made a mistake, there had been a few times he had second guessed himself. But he was done, and he’d know if he was successful soon enough.
**Ding! General Skill Available! Would you like to learn: Rune Mastery - Gretchen’s Standard (Uncommon)?**
**Ding! General Skill Available! Would you like to learn: Steady Hand (Common)?**
He dismissed the notification, rejecting the skills.
While he waited for the sigil to activate, Kaius rested, recovering his mental focus for when he would have to once again suffuse his eyes with mana. As he watched his jury rigged illusion generator, the charcoal lines he had drawn seemed to flare. Black dust sank into the wood, leaving what looked closer to a series of ink lines on paper than a rough sketch.
He sighed in relief. The mana was flowing through, binding the formation to the material of the board. To save on complexity, something his chosen script was notoriously bad at, he hadn’t put in any control or contingency runes. Once it started generating the illusion, it would keep running until it burned itself out. Random wood was bound to be a poor conductor of mana, and as more flowed through his written circuits it would accumulate damage.
Eventually the array would collapse, and if he hadn’t gained his skill by then he would need to repeat the process.
A haze in the air started to rise from his array. Kaius narrowed his eyes. It was a sign of poor efficiency. He’d done a truly shit job if it was bad enough that the rising mana levels were contained poorly enough to be visible to the naked eye. It couldn’t be helped.
Even at the best of times, with suitable materials and inscription tools, his actual execution of runes was middling. At least, that is what Father was so fond of telling him. Kaius had a sneaking suspicion he did very well for an unclassed with no relevant skills. The fact that the rune held together at all when it was simple rough charcoal on wood was nothing short of a miracle.
It did, however, mean that the inscription was close to having pulled enough mana to activate. He needed to infuse his eyes now. No way was he wasting whatever precious time he would have with the illusion generator.
He threaded the mana out from his soul quickly, the task coming easier after having done it so often in the last day. The energy saturated his eyes, held in pace with a firm mental grip. His eyes teared up, caustic mana sending needle fine points spearing into his delicate orbits. Yet the mental strain of holding the volatile resource under pressure had lessened. There was no headache.
**Ding! Intelligence has reached level 14!*
A subtle pop echoed out from his inscription. Above it a cream coloured orb snapped into existence, roughly the size of his fist. It seemed as solid and substantial as the wood it floated over. The soft blue light of the cavern washed over it, shading its underside and washing its top in a cerulean hue.
It worked!
The orb flickered. Growing insubstantial. Ghostly. No longer affected by the light, losing shade and blue tones - making it look flat and two dimensional.
..maybe not perfectly. But it worked! The inconsistent activation might even work in his favour. If it was visibly illusory, even if only for a moment, there was a likely chance of one of two things happening. Either there was a problem with one of his linking runes, and the array was spiking in resistance. Choking the illusion of the necessary mana it needed to sustain itself.
On the other hand, those same runes could have an entirely different problem. They could be ramping in resistance, and resetting when the flow dropped too low to sustain a continuous throughput. That would mean a smooth ramp in intensity. Perfect for training Sense Illusion.
He had to hurry.
Kaius held his mana stable in his eyes, staring at the illusory orb in an effort to find any inconsistency. It’s ghostly flicker aided him, his eyes quickly picking up the slightest ripple barely a moment after it snapped back to physical substantivity.
**Ding! General Skill Available! Would you like to learn: Sense Illusion (Rare)?**
Kaius accepted the skill immediately, avoiding taking a look at its description in favour of staring intently at his illusion generator. With his skill acquired, he released his grip on the mana in his eyes, letting it dissipate.
As soon as the skill formed in his soul space a new set of instincts flooded through him. When the orb flickered, and during the monetary ripple straight after, he got the intuitive sense that it was wrong. Fake. But only then. The rest of the time the orb looked as real and physical as it had since it had first popped into existence.
He watched. There. Right after the ripple. The colours weren’t quite right. Too.. inconsistent.
**Ding! Sense Illusion has reached level 2!*
The linking runes were acting as a variable mana gate. Sheer dumb luck and poor execution had worked in his favour. Kaius grinned.
Shadows shifted on the orb, just barely inconsistent with the oddly flat lighting from above.
**Ding! Sense Illusion has reached level 3!*
This was perfect. He was worried he was going to have to make a dozen of these arrays! If it managed to hold out for the rest of the hour, he just might be able to cap the skill.
Kaius watched the slowly flickering orb like a hawk, discrepancies and tell tale giveaways growing by the minute.
**Ding! Sense Illusion has reached level 11!*
Smoke wafted up from the scrap piece of pew, the hovering illusion of the cream orb winking out of existence. The illusion array burnt itself out.
Kaius sighed. In the end, it had lasted the full hour, but his estimation of how quickly Sense Illusion would grow had been off. He’d need to make some more formations to cap it off, then he could move on to Sense Mana. Thankfully the array he needed for that skill would be a little simpler. Just a mana condenser and emitter without any shaping formations.
But first, he had some skills to look at. A shiver of anticipation crawled up his spine. It was always so exciting looking at new skills. He’d grown to crave it. Another slight benefit to his legacy skills, he got to see a whole lot more of them than most.
He pulled up the description of Appraise.
Appraise:
Level 8
Rare
Every object has a history, a use, and a story. Know these and their true purpose is revealed.
Skill that enables slight insight into the status of items and artefacts. Higher rarity and more powerful items are more difficult to appraise. Enchantments and skills can block this insight
Each level slightly increases the skills ability to overcome insight blocking effects.
Kaius nodded to himself. He had known that higher rarities could resist appraisal, but it was good to see it all laid out for him.
He was pleased with his growth. Both Appraise and Inspect were notoriously easy skills to level, as one could simply use them on any non living or living object that they passed by. As he and Porkchop had made their way back from the centre of the glade, he’d practically appraised every third flag stone. It was boring work, but important. Inspect had skyrocketed in comparison, having reached level sixteen thanks to his inspection of the many trees in the glade.
It was something that would level in the background, but it was important he merged the skills as soon as possible so that he could acquire the last skill he needed for True Sight.
He moved on to his most recent skill.
Sense Illusion:
Level 11
Rare
Reality can be obscured. Facts can be hidden. Lies are prevalent. A proper seeker of wisdom observes not the falsity, but the cracks through which the truth shines through.
Skill that aids the user in seeing the truth behind illusion and mirage effects. Level disparity, skill level, mana investment, and illusion quality can block this insight.
Each level slightly increases the skills ability to overcome insight blocking effects.
Kaius dismissed the notification. He was glad to finally have acquired it. Illusion effects grew more common as one descended the depths, and it was not unheard of for careless Delvers to fall prey to cloaked traps and camouflaged ambush predators.
Looking back to the messy stack of wooden boards he had secured for himself, Kaius forced himself to suppress a groan. He didn’t want to wake Porkchop after all.
He’d finish levelling Sense Illusion, work on Sense Mana, and then he could rest.