2nd of fall Coren made sure the door of his cot was locked before opening his chest and digging around for a bit, before he finally found what he was looking for at the bottom of the chest. A shard of icestone carefully wrapped in a bundle of cheap linen and more importantly a shield cast around it to keep the heat from getting to the heat-sensitive mineral so it didn't get flaky, erasing the remains of the glyph's that had been used to trap the creature . Picked it up and carefully deposited it on his desk before unwrapping the shard, leaving the shield up around it. Coren pulled out a few of his remaining sheets of parchment out of his pocket, smoothing them over as he took a closer look at the glyph's covering a side of the shard. He dipped the quill in his ink and began to sketch the design over to the parchment. Trying to recover as much as he could from what was left of the glyph after it had been discharged. Quite the task, not only was there a part missing from the glyph, seeing as it was just a chunk of icestone. But it was also drawn by a wizard who didn't use his glyphs. Or glyphs even vaguely related to them anyway, so trying to fill in the damage on the parts he could see wasn't much else then educated guesswork and a lot of trail and error. And trail and error it most likely was going to take. Still after nearly draining parchment supply he finally managed to get something out of it. From the looks of things the only part he had managed to save from the exploded creature was a trigger of some sort, if he was allowed to guess he would think it was what triggered the explosion. Though he couldn't be completely sure, if he had been the mage he wouldn't leave it by just one booby trap if he wanted his work destroyed. Though the fact there was still a shard left after it went of was proof that the mage had been sloppy on this particular animaton. Or was just bad at designing booby traps or maybe that the mage was sloppy in general, but he didn't want to think about that possibility for obvious reasons. Sloppy mages where a danger to everybody and everything around them. It was only after an entire bell that Coren finished his first conclusive draft of what was left of the design that had been carved on the icestone, nearly half of what was left of his parchment stach had been blown on the other tryouts, but those had been rejected because of wrong lines, some damage he had to fill in but was proven wrong later by how the other parts of the glyph went, or his hand had slipped, or what he thought was a carving in the icestone turned out to be just a crack after all. Either way, what he had now in his hand was a pretty decent idea of what the glyph had been. From what he could see and deduce his first idea that it had been a trigger had been correct, he could clearly see the trigger sigils on the design and the paths that connected it towards the barrier it would release on the time it triggered. More importantly, he also managed to figure out why it was triggered. It was a trigger that went of when the sigil was touched, and the trigger sigil was quite detailed, covering a large part of the chunk of ice. So there where two options, either the trigger was rigged to go off when the material was touched, which he doubted since animated creatures had to be maintained sometimes, the book he had read about that was clear on that part. SO unless it was designed as some kind of suicide bomber that was off he table. He pulled the sheet closer to him once more and gave it another look over, there where two other options, one was that the glyph went of when the trigger glyph was touched, which would make disarming it difficult from what he was going on off now. The other one was that the man was skilled enough to only let it go off when somebody else then him touched the icestone creature. That would be a good safety feature and would make disarming it very very hard. Coren let out a sigh and wished he had a cup of coffee, this was going to be one very long night indeed. |