[The East Wing] An Odd Form of Magic (Solo)

[Satevis]

18th Day of Spring, 512 AV

It was late afternoon by the time he came around to his glyphing class. The class was situated in the East Wing, which was on the other side of campus from his morning classes. Satevis didn't mind the walk, though. This was the class he had been looking forward to all day. He didn't want to get too caught up in magic, or he would have taken classes solely in the College of Scholars, but he had to admit that even though he had many interests, it was one of the ones that he was most interested in.

But this was a little odd.

He frowned as he stood in front of the room on his timetable. It wasn't a classroom at all, but rather one of the smaller laboratories. Was there a mistake? He doubted that a whole class could fit in here. He opened the door and poked his head in anyway, just in case.

A woman stood inside the room, writing something on one of the tables. She was a small, slender woman, appearing to be in her mid-thirties. Her hair was cropped short, so it fell just above her shoulders. It was a dark brown color. The woman was human, her eyes a dark brown color. She looked up as he entered, a frown on her face. Satevis took a step back. "My apologies, ma'am," he said. "I was...um...told I would have a glyphing class in here."

Her expression brightened somewhat and she stood up. "You're Satevis?" she asked.

"Yes," he said, nodding.

"Well don't just stand there. Come in," she said. "And shut the door behind you. Sorry. I guess I lost track of time. I was replacing some of the worn out glyphs in this lab."

Satevis gave her a puzzled look, but he obeyed, closing the door behind him and stepping into the small room. "Are you the glyphing professor?" he asked.

She nodded. "Catherine Westwood," she said. "But there's no need to call me 'professor'. Honestly, you teach one class at this University and suddenly everyone's falling all over themselves calling you Professor this-and-that. I answer to Catherine. Or Cath. Whichever."

Satevis shifted uncomfortably. "I think I would prefer to call you professor," he said.

She shrugged. "Suit yourself," she said. "Anyway, you're probably wondering about the room. It's my personal laboratory. You came a little bit behind, and I didn't want you to start off confused. Magic's better taught one on one anyway. You'll come here until we catch you up with the rest of the class. Is that alright with you?"

"Yes," said Satevis, nodding. In all honesty, he would prefer learning magic one-on-one. His Reimancy training had been that way. But then again, having a class full of Reimancers was just asking for trouble. The woman walked over to a table on one side of the room and he followed, taking the offered seat.

"Now then, Satevis," said Catherine, seating herself across the table from him. "Do you practice any other form of magic?"

He nodded once. "I do," he said. "I practice Reimancy."

"How many elements have you attained?" she asked, smiling slightly.

Satevis returned the smile. "Two," he said. His skill at Reimancy was one of the things he was proud of, even though he had a long way to go. She nodded, taking that information into account.

"So clearly, you have some experience with magic," she said. "However, this might be a little different from what you're used to. Glyphing is the most basic magical discipline. Before the Valterrian, it was practiced by just about every trained wizard, however, it has declined considerably in popularity since then. You made the right choice to study it, as every wizard needs to have some skill in reading and writing glyphs. But glyphing, as important as it is to magic, has no discernible magical effect when practiced on its own. Glyphs are only useful when paired with another discipline, like your Reimancy, or my Projection. Following so far?"

He nodded. He understood this much about glyphing from the beginning. It was a strange form of magic, not useful on its own, but greatly enhancing other forms. It was the rest that he wanted to learn how to do--how to draw and understand them. At his indication that he understood, she went on, not stopping.

"The glyphs we use are one written form of the Ancient Tongue," she said. "So you're going to have to learn a bit of that to be any good at it. You might also hear them referred to as 'runes'. That's more of a colloquial way to refer to them. It's not wrong, but you might want to keep it out of any academic papers. Now, glyphs can be drawn with anything, but the thing about them is that they eventually wear out, so they have to be constantly replaced, like the glyphs on that table over there." She gestured over to the workbench, and Satevis looked, noticing several painted symbols up and down the sides of it. Some of the symbols looked faded, and there were holes where other symbols should have been. A fresh can of paint stood on the desk, and it was clear that Catherine had been painting new glyphs when he walked in. "So you need to keep track of them if you're conducting an extended experiment."

Satevis nodded. This was new information. He had always thought glyphs to be permanent. It was a bit of a surprise to learn that they weren't. "How often do they need to be replaced?" he asked.

She shrugged. "Depends on how much they're being used," she said. "They won't wear out until they're exhausted. So a one-time use scroll should last a long time unless you use it, but in an extended experiment, you might have them breaking quite often. Any other questions?"

So glyphs lasted for as long as they could continue to channel magic. That made sense. He wondered why he had thought it otherwise. He shook his head. "No more questions," he said.

"Good," she replied, pulling out a sheet of paper from the desk next to her. "So let me put you to work. Here's a list of some basic glyphs, and their meanings and pronunciations in the Ancient Tongue. Find the glyph for djed and practice drawing it. I've got paper and ink here, but use your own quill."

Satevis nodded, taking the offered paper. He fished his quill out of his backpack, dipping it in ink. He found the reference glyph on the list and began to draw.

[Satevis]

Learning to draw the glyph was slow going. Satevis could write. He had always considered himself to have fairly good penmanship. He could write in two languages--Shiber and Common--both of which had completely different scripts. He had thought that learning to draw glyphs would be easier because of it, but he was fast learning that magical symbols were a completely different animal.

Catherine watched him as he worked, occasionally stopping to point out a stroke that wasn't perfectly in the right place or a line that was crooked. She didn't interrupt him too much, but each time he paused in his copying, she told him to continue, telling him that he hadn't quite gotten it yet.

The more he thought about it, though, the more it made sense. When first learned how to write in Common, it had been difficult. The letters and alphabet were completely different from his own, and the hand that he thought had become quite practiced at writing Shiber seemed to stumble over the letters like a child learning to write for the first time. But the letters hadn't needed to be perfect. They didn't need to conform to a standard. Each person had a different hand. They would write cross their 't''s and dot their 'i's in different ways, depending on their personality, and as long as something could be understood, it did not matter.

Glyphing, though, was different, because he wasn't just learning how to communicate ideas. He was learning how to draw symbols that would become vessels and channels for power. They couldn't be drawn haphazardly. Even though they looked different for each wizard, even though they varied, they had to be right.

So he kept at it, swallowing his own frustration and accepting her guidance.

There was something familiar about this, though, sitting in a small room drawing the same glyph over and over again. He couldn't quite place it, but with each stroke, he felt as though he had done this before. What was it Eridanus had called it? A feeling of deja vu? In this form, there would be no memories, no flashes of insight. But sometimes, he found himself feeling as though he was simply...remembering. He was remembering how to draw glyphs, he wasn't learning how to draw them. He smiled slightly, wondering which of his past lives had been the glypher.

It would have been most of them, he guessed, since glyphing was standard before the Valterrian.

When he had finished five pages of the same glyph over and over again, Catherine motioned for him to stop.

"Good enough," she said. "You can keep the reference sheet. I want you to keep drawing them. That's the only way to get them right. Waiting for a professor to show up? Draw glyphs. Can't sleep? Draw glyphs. Putting off homework--."

"Draw glyphs?" asked Satevis. He shook out his writing hand, massaging the back of it with his free one.

"No. Quit wasting time and get back to work," said Catherine with a grin. She put the used pieces of paper aside, tucking them underneath a stack of folders. "I'll show this to you at the end of the term, so you can compare," she said. "Now...you've just learned how to draw your first glyph. But the glyphs on their own aren't going to help you much. If you really want to learn how to use glyphs for magic, you need to learn how to draw sigils."

"What is a sigil?" asked Satevis, listening intently.

"A sigil is a collection of glyphs used to perform a given magical task," she said. "Your most basic sigil has three components." She held three fingers up in front of him, counting them off. "A Focus, a Barrier, and a Trigger."

"A Focus is a single large glyph whose purpose is to store magic," she said. She pulled a scroll out of one of her desk drawers, unrolling it in front of him. "You might enjoy this," she said with a grin as she unrolled it. "I got one of my colleagues to prepare this, for...demonstration purposes." She gestured at the single large glyph at the center of the scroll. "This is the Focus. It's job is to absorb whatever magic the caster places into it. A Morpher might put an entirely new form into one of these. A Reimancer might fire a fireball into them. But a Focus on its own won't hold magic. It's a mirror. Whatever it absorbs, it ejects. That's where the Barrier comes in."

She trailed her finger around the circle of smaller glyphs on the outside of the scroll. "A Barrier is a set of glyphs whose main job is to keep the magic in the Focus inside the Focus. Say you're a Reimancer, which you are. Without a Barrier, firing an offensive spell into a Focus is just a really fancy way of taking your own head off. But when you draw a proper barrier, you can keep the magic locked inside the Focus restrained until the proper time. Now tell me. What's missing from this picture?"

Satevis frowned, looking up at her as he thought it over. One set of glyphs absorbed magic. The other restrained it and kept it from escaping. It seemed like a sound enough system, but it was incomplete. Why?

The answer hit him suddenly and his eyes lit up in realization. Of course. "It's still useless unless you have a way to release the spell from the Focus," he said.

"Very good," said Catherine. "That's what this little guy is for." She tapped once on the set of runes outside the Barrier. "The Trigger. When a specific set of circumstances is met, the Trigger breaks down the Barrier, releasing whatever's in the Focus. For example, this particular Trigger works when you recite a specific code word." She stared down at the Trigger, removing her hands. "Ala," she said.

The Trigger glyphs began to glow, the light spreading through the Barrier glyphs and breaking them as soon as they were touched. As Satevis watched, the Focus glyph glowed with a bright light, a sudden rush of wind escaping from it. The wind coiled outwards, scattering the papers on Catherine's desk. He could feel the force of it against his skin as it rushed past, gone in an instant. The scroll crumbled to pieces, its magic power exhausted.

The Ethaefal stared. That had been wind, and it had not had much of an effect. But he could imagine what would have happened if the same scroll had been made with fire.

Catherine muttered a curse under her breath, bending down to pick up the fallen papers. After a moment, he got out of his seat and helped her, setting the papers back on her desk. They were mostly papers with glyphs drawn on them, and he wondered if they were scrolls themselves or just practice. "Thanks," she said. "I told him not to make it so flashy." She straightened up, rubbing at a sore spot on her lower back before turning towards him.

"So," she said. "Now it's your turn. Remember that glyph I asked you to draw?" She reached over to her workbench, picking up the paintbrush there and handing it to him. "Paint it on your palm. Try and get it as exact as possible. Take your time if you have to."

Satevis frowned but nodded, taking the brush in his right hand. He set his left hand down on the workbench, palm up. She had set the reference sheet beside him, so he knew what he was supposed to be drawing, although his fingers remembered the shape. After a moment's hesitation, he dipped the brush in paint, slowly retracing the lines that he had just spent so much time drawing and redrawing.

When he was finished, he had a glyph on his palm. It wasn't perfect, but Catherine deemed it 'passable'.

"I want you to expel Res through that hand," she said. "Let me know how it feels to you. Just do my workshop a favor and don't use fire. I know you have at least one other choice."

He smiled slightly at her last sentence, but nodded, extending his left arm out. He hadn't used a lot of Reimancy in the past few days, but it was like flexing a muscle. Once you learned it, you didn't forget how to do it. He exhaled, expelling a small amount of silvery Res through the palm of his left hand.

Satevis blinked in surprise. Well, that was certainly different.

He transformed the Res into water, small droplets forming in the air and falling harmlessly to the ground. Satevis flexed his palm, staring at the glyph painted on it. Catherine watched him, leaning against her desk. "Different?' she asked.

"Somewhat," he said. "I had more control than usual. It was easier to channel the Djed through that particular point, and as soon as I decided to expel Res, it seemed to go immediately for the glyph instead of spreading into my whole palm."

"That's one of the most basic uses of glyphs," she said, offering a damp cloth to him. "Channeling Djed for other magical disciplines. Keep that in mind. You might find it useful sometime." She turned her head, glancing idly at the clock on the wall. "Well, we're almost out of time," she said. "Why don't you take the reference sheet and call it a day? Practice some glyphs tonight and come back tomorrow. Get used to drawing a lot in class this term. You aren't going to be able to do much with glyphs until you have an easier time drawing them."

He nodded, taking the cloth she offered to him and wiping the paint off of his hands. "Thank you, professor," he said. "Have a good day."

She nodded at him and he gathered up his things, slinging his bag over his shoulder and leaving the room.

[Arcane]

Rewards and Treasure! Experience Points +2 Glyphing +1 Reimancy +1 Drawing +1 Observation Lores Professor Catherine Westwood University of Zeltiva: The East Wing Glyphs are Temporary Pre-Valterrian Popularity of Glyphs Purpose of Focus Glyph Purpose of Barrier Glyph Purpose of Trigger Glyph Miscellaneous None Comments I like the NPC interaction and the humour (I'm easily amused) That said, try to make your solos longer if you wish to net more experience points. Also, you get Lores for listening to lectures, but XP only for actual practical work. Try to give more attention to the actual drawing of glyphs, and try to figure out a system that works for your PC regarding glyphing - a pseudoscience of sorts. Keep it up! Feel free to PM me for any questions or clarifications!