Solo Modern Methods

[Alses]

e

Timestamp: 50th Day of Winter, 513 A.V.
Location: The Bharani Library

Midwinter found Alses – or Sela, as she preferred to be when chained down to a Konti form – in the dreaming hallways of the Bharani Library. The place was grand and beautiful by day, yes, but at night it had a special grandeur all of its own – both inside and out.

On the outside, some enterprising architect had made the most of the monumental Alahea-Suva fusion architecture that the celestial city sported as its own style. Most prominently, nestling everywhere amongst the collections of columns, the dramatic friezes and frescoes and sudden sheer drops into the lower heights, around the snarling faces and snatching claws of gargoyles and grotesques there were guttering oil lamps scattered across the grandly frowning façade, the pale stonework thrown into harsh relief by the leaping flames, high relief and deep-graven shadow.

Entrances should be made by firelight.

The doors were themselves massive, making staff and supplicants alike insignificant, but the intricately-cast bronzework was so finely weighted on its gargantuan hinges that they swung open and shut with barely a whisper, preserving the golden silence of the precious, precious library. Lit by the softly changeable light of skyglass glowglobes – the accumulated knowledge was far too great and far too valuable to risk a flame, even behind a double-glass cover – its whole character changed.

Even the dust motes, usually flaring gold in Syna’s forgiving light lancing in through the many windows, changed – bright silver, now, reflecting Leth’s pale imitation, brilliant points of light in the blue-washed hues of the night library.

With her copy of The Reader’s Guide to the Library in one hand – to interpret the unusual navigation system that had evolved over the centuries since Bharani’s founding – Alses ghosted under the wrought-iron arch between the Seekers’ desks, nodding a greeting to the poor unfortunates on duty before briskly making her way to Centre Point, the heart of the library and so, for Alses, the best place to plan directions to and from.

The shimmering trail of glyphs set into the floor led her unerringly there, the echo of her footfalls drunk into silence by the thick pile of the carpets and the listening shelves. At the centre of a sort of atrium that pierced all floors of the Library, Centre Point and its towering, intricate clock was like the spindle of a spinning wheel – everything rotated around it, everything led to it.

And thus, as a consequence, everything led away from it, too.

Alses leafed quickly through the Reader’s Guide, index finger running down the dense text and the occasional clarifying diagram, hunting for the section that would further her goals today. She was after anything that could shed more light on teaching, that arcane process she found herself engaged in, more often than not stumbling around in the dark without any real guidance. It was only by dint of her own prodigious skill in auristics that she’d managed to keep her lessons on-track so far, and without anyone being the wiser as to her own state of confusion.

The solution had come to her embarrassingly slowly. Lhavit was, after all, a city of instructors and teachers in all sorts of disciplines, from magical to the mundane, and so someone, somewhere, had surely penned some sort of work on their techniques, tips and tricks for dealing with students and conveying information.

Thus, Bharani Library, the city’s repository for knowledge, and her current quest, following the obscure and esoteric marks of the glyphs – forged in metal that glowed golden in the day and hard silver at night – through the miles of shelving, round the great pillars that held up the weight of the entire edifice, up the sweeping staircases and then finally down and along the aisles to her destination.

Well, hopefully her destination, anyway. It was at the focal point of one of the many light-wells peppering the library, a circular room three stories tall, topped with a gleaming glass dome and lined with curving shelves and an intricate telescoping stepladder system Alses had never really dared to use. Some of the gearing looked rather vicious.

Alone in that part of the library, Alses craned her neck to look at the towering ranks of books and the occasional cold glimmer of an artifact on the higher shelves. Her fingers trailed absently over the elegantly-bound volumes on the lower shelves whilst she scanned the upper reaches for the titles she wanted, the gilt flashing in the light.

No.

No, it was no good – she’d have to use the telescoping contraption to stand any chance of getting what she wanted.

Approaching the sleeping beast of brass and iron, all cogs and knurled wheels and strange pedals, Alses examined it cautiously. There, at least, there was a stroke of luck – some kindly soul had engraved – onto a mounted plaque there for the purpose – the operating instructions, in a fine and clear hand.

One little worry down, several million more to go. Gingerly, Alses seated herself in the contraption, recalling the instructions.

‘Disengage brake (B),’ she thought once comfortable – or as comfortable as it was possible to get, anyway – casting around for the knurled lever marked with an ornate ‘B’. She found it quickly, prominently marked just like the instructions said, and obediently pulled it when pushing seemed to do nothing. There was a rather anticlimactic clunk noise, and nothing else appeared to change.

‘Pedal to the desired position,’ That was the next instruction, and for all its weight the telescoping ladder moved smoothly and silently on incised rails, effortlessly following the curve of the shelves.

Re-engage brake, Alses remembered that one and how to do it, pushing the B-emblazoned lever forward and down and feeling as much as hearing the clunk of the brakes slotting into place under the machine.

‘Pull gear lever (G) to change to vertical motion,’ was the next – and rather enigmatic – command, but the helpful instructions hadn’t led her wrong thus far and the shelf set she needed gleamed directly overhead, maddeningly out of reach – for now.

There were rather more serious noises this time; the clanking and clunking of metal and the gleaming shift of various parts of it moving in a disquieting mechanical way, but they quickly settled. As Alses cautiously began to pedal once more, she saw what had happened – the mechanisms had shifted so the force from her pedalling was directed upwards, making the platform telescope skywards.

Well.

That should make things easier.
e

[Alses]

e

It was rather fun, actually, to be so high on the cliff of books that reached up from the ground floor, far below. What had been massive, important, immediate down there looked innocuous, childlike, shrunken into irrelevancy by the distance and the shimmer of dust in the moonlight.

Azure radiance cascaded down all around her, spilt from the skyglass pillars and the decorative statuary clasping the shelves, turning her skin an actnic, painful shade only slightly shy of hard white. Looking at her would be painful – an echo of how she herself felt whenever she caught a glimpse of corpse-pale flesh in the mirror of an evening.

At the moment, though, she wasn’t considering her looks and the lack thereof, rather being engrossed in trailing her fingers delicately over leather-bound volumes, reading by the flaring gilt lettering the titles and the subject matter.

She was close – the titles flashing past under her roving eyes were all in the right general area:

‘Advanced Instruction, Tenser’s Tome of Transformations, Pitfalls in Teaching…that one looks interesting…’ Alses thought absently as she scanned across the ranks.

‘…Theoretical Debate, Reductive Reasoning In – ah, here it is!’ Triumphantly, Alses eased a thick tome, a recommendation, out from its place and looked around for the lowering mechanism that would let her descend to floor level safely and quickly.

Fortunately, there wasn’t much in the way of mechanisms on the platform and she quickly found the release lever, the whole of it whirling round and round as the platform slowly managed a stately descent until she could simply take a big step and trip onto the polished floor, back on terra firma, the book she’d wanted clutched securely in her arms.

Now to find a suitable table.

Oh, there were places that would do scattered throughout Bharani – the room she’d been in held a desk and several overstuffed chairs, for instance – but Alses found the light at night too harsh and unforgiving, straining her eyes.

Fortunately, Bharani was well-equipped with a plush reading room in which warm glowglobes blazed and real fires snapped and crackled – behind clear quartz shields and doubtless many other defences, all to protect the precious books from harm or scathe.

Alses padded through the quiet hallways with an air of purpose, eyes locked to the floor in order to track the sinuous uncurlings of the glyphic direction system. She didn’t want to get lost and end up in Archaeology, or Gardening, or something else similarly remote and far from where she wanted to be.

The Red Reading Room, that was her favoured destination, warm and snug and well-lit no matter the bell, with plenty of overstuffed armchairs and ornate desks at which she could read and make notes in peace and comfort.

The two other occupants of the Room at this late bell looked up when she entered, blinked owlishly, and then settled back to whatever esoteric tasks had so absorbed them before the susurrus of wood on carpet as Alses entered roused them from academic reverie.

Soon, Alses would be joining them, attempting to wring out every scrap of information from Practical Instruction. She was starting to run out of ideas for her students, after all, and simply standing in front of them for day after day in a lecture room whilst they obediently scribbled down anything she said – up to and including the patently absurd, she’d determined, when a rare imp of mischief had combined with a monumental disinterest in the technique she was discussing to lead her to make up all sorts of unusual and plain wrong ‘facts’. And they’d all written it down with nary a whimper of protest.

Reasoning that someone in Lhavit’s long and illustrious history had to have suffered from the same sort of problem, Alses had done what any self-respecting scholar and academic would have done under similar circumstances and gone to the library in search of information – anything to give her some background, some grounding in principles and to see what other people had found to work in the past. With that sort of thing behind her, then, she could experiment and come up with her own unique style.

Alses cracked the book open and breathed deeply of the scent of books, breathing gently from the paper and leather, a mixing melange of the two with an indefinable addition all of its own.

The click of her inkwell being set down and her quill being deployed was loud in the comfortable hush of the Reading Room, but it quickly dissipated, lost amongst the background snap and crackle of the logs behind their flameproof shields.

Prepared, calmed and centred, Alses began to read.

‘Teaching is a demanding and exacting profession with many pitfalls and traps for the unwary, from the simple and easily-avoidable loss of control to a lack of ideas, enthusiasm and drive for a subject or indeed an area of a subject,’ she read, and found herself nodding in agreement.

‘The good teacher, therefore, recognizes these shortfalls, or the possibility of these shortfalls, and takes intelligent steps to rectify them before they can impact on the education of the students entrusted to their care – and it is a trust, a sacred trust to safeguard the knowledge of centuries and millennia and impart it to the next generation(s). To that end, this book has been compiled to aid the instructor in identifying and avoiding some of the most common classroom traps and pitfalls, as well as providing a wide variety of diverting and yet still instructive activities that can revive flagging interest and engagement in lessons.’

Also good advice. This was – as per the recommendation – looking promising, and Alses spent a few ticks in mental thanks before diving in in earnest.
e

[Alses]

e

Time had little meaning as Alses read and read, carefully turning the creamy pages – nothing but the best for Bharani books, the better to preserve the knowledge – and scouring the rich inked words, close-printed on the page by a consummate professional of the art, for their meaning and any ideas therein arising.

‘It can be useful for the teacher to transfer the bulk of the learning to the students, on occasion,’ she read, curious and intrigued. ‘Indeed, this can often be more valuable than a lecture, and not only from a pupil’s perspective; the instructor gains insight on how their lessons are being absorbed and often how students learn best.’

Well. That seemed sensible – but the book was still talking in broad, sweeping generalities rather than specific examples. Perhaps there was something a little more specific later on in the book…Alses found her fingers riffling down the pages, ready to turn whole wodges of pages in one go.

She stopped herself, mildly horrified her own mind – tired though it might have been – for letting her think that would be acceptable or even useful. The scope for missing something useful was simply too big.

Furiously, Alses applied herself to the text once more, intent on reading every word properly. No telling what she’d miss if she gave into the temptation.

‘Interactivity is also a vital learning tool for many subjects,’ the book continued, blind to her near-distraction. ‘Encouraging students to engage in their own learning through targeted group activities, presentations and roleplay scenarios can produce excellent results for relatively minimal effort on behalf of the instructor – although key goals should be emphasised in a wrap-up lecture or symposium to ensure all necessary points have been considered.’

Well. That was interesting. Giving in to temptation, Alses skimmed forward, riffling through the pages, her curiosity piqued.

‘Roleplays, roleplays…what are roleplays?’ That was the thought running through her head as she leafed rapidly forward through the pristine volume. ‘Re…re…remonstration, no…ro…ro…where is it?’ A few further pages on, and an exclamation of delight, quickly stifled.

‘Ah! Here it is!’ came the triumphant thought as the word jumped out at her from the page. A split-tick was spent appreciating the quality of the paper as her hand glided down the centre of the book, smoothing the spread out, gently easing the stiffness of the spine. Had Alses been more experienced in the field of books in general, she’d have known that that stiffness showed this was a new copy, barely read.

As it was, she simply ignored this and began to read, eyes flicking rapidly across the page – the speed at which she read was a point of private pride.

‘Roleplay in the context of teaching is the application of acting and pretend scenarios to illustrate a point that is otherwise boring or difficult to convey. There are several different methods of roleplay, as follows:

1.) Student-led. This type of roleplay is useful with larger groups. The teacher produces a scenario, or several scenarios, and distributes these to the class. Students are typically given a pre-prepared scenario (there are examples further in this book) and act them out in groups whilst other members watch and assess the unfolding events from an outsider’s perspective. This kind of approach is especially useful for developing communications skills, and especially after a demonstration roleplay or two have been performed in front of the entire class. This form of roleplay is also particularly effective at breaking down barriers between students, and can serve as an effective and efficient icebreaker.’

Alses sat back, sucking absently on the end of her quill. It might have been useful to know that earlier, she thought ruefully, mind drifting back through the seasons of teaching under her belt, all the students she’d taught – stumblingly, at first, admittedly, and with many an obstacle along the way.

There had been field trips and accidents and lectures and practicals – she liked to think she’d given them a fairly varied time of it, but roleplay was a new one on her. Interested, intrigued, she read on eagerly.

‘2.) Observational. This type of roleplay is most useful to allow pupils to get used to highly-charged situations of one kind or another – be that high-level negotiations between merchants or political deals – through observation of the scenario being played out in front of them. They are able to observe the different methods used, the general style and ambience expected and required, and if the teacher inserts themselves into the situation then pupils can gain a valuable demonstration of the skills they are expected to acquire.’

Hmm.

That might be an interesting thing to attempt. There were bound to be at least some merchants or civil servants on the rolls of alumni in the Dusk Tower, and at least some of them would remember their student days fondly, surely? Perhaps even enough to consent to play along with her ideas – just forming and amorphous for now, but with the shape of something concrete slowly accreting in her mind.

‘3.) Teacher-led. In this kind of roleplay, the instructor plays an integral part, guiding the student through what they need to do whilst also acting out a part in the scenario. This is useful for some of the more personal skills, and can also be an effective teaching tool when combined with larger groups of students, opening up avenues of critique and discussion that the intelligent teacher can direct and steer in order to achieve learning goals.’

Alses was less sure about this one; she felt she needed some distance from any actors so she could monitor events and her class both. She’d got a reputation for being omniscient within the bounds of her classroom – and a little way beyond – mostly by dint of her powerful auristics and an excellent set of eyes and ears, and losing that because of getting too involved in a roleplay would be…unwise, she felt.

Perhaps if he could rope another instructor in on the venture…but that wasn’t entirely likely. Although Chiona Dusk might be interested, on reflection…

Mentally, Alses chalked that one up as a ‘maybe’.

‘4.)Realistic. Possibly the most difficult of all the common iterations of roleplay scenarios, this involves an entirely realistic simulation of an event. For maximum effect, the students are ideally not informed that this is a mock-up until afterwards. This puts pupils under the greatest stress and allows an instructor to assess ability under situations as close to reality as possible, but can be very difficult to engineer.’
e

[Alses]

e

Alses was making careful notes on the different types of roleplays documented, mind racing with newly-opened possibilities, avenues of exploration, plans and plots and nebulous ideas all swirling around in her brain.

The trick would be to cherry-pick, to figure out which would be the most realistic and, crucially, the most achievable. A fully realistic simulation, for instance, that was probably an expense the Dusk Tower wouldn’t countenance – save perhaps for the examinations, and even then it was only a possibility. The richest Tower in Lhavit hadn’t got there by being profligate with their cash, after all; look after the topaz kina and the millions look after themselves, Chiona had told her once.

Even though she was doing very well for herself, Alses was nowhere near acquiring millions – but it was something to aspire to, in the fullness of time, perhaps. After she’d built all she intended to, after she’d run out of things to spend money on – it was only ever a means to an end, after all. It was important, Alses instinctively felt, to remember that.

Kina – and mizas – only had value because people accepted that they did, after all – far better to secure them in buildings and artifacts and precious items first, an insurance against perfidious chance.

Shaking her head, Alses brought her mind back to the topic at hand with an effort.

‘Now…what can we do, and how can we do it?’ she thought, not sucking pensively on the end of her quill by sheer force of will. It was very tempting.

‘So…if not a fully realistic scenario, what else can we do? Teacher-led roleplay, perhaps?’ It was a thought, yes, but one that she eventually rejected, after considerable deliberation on the subject – it might be suitable for some fields of endeavour, something non-magical maybe, but in the case of auristics especially she needed to be able to devote her attention to the students as a whole, rather than playing any role.

Otherwise she flirted with the siren demon of overgiving, trying to keep so many auras at such a resolution in her head whilst also taking a sustained and active part in proceedings. That was a decidedly non-meditative course of action, and one that exponentially increased the risks – and risks were to be avoided if at all possible.

The consequences were very rarely pleasant, after all.

‘If we want to do a roleplay, it looks like it’ll have to be one that the students just watch,’ she thought, slightly ruefully, and still somewhat unsure as to how it would all work. This…would require some planning, to say the least.

Not least of which was how to get the students to see what they should be seeing. It was no use plonking people in front of a gormless bunch of the next generation and simply expecting them to be able to follow everything that was going on without any sort of direction and focus; that wasn’t how teaching worked.

So.

The question was, how best to direct them, how best to control and corral what they saw and what they did, how they reacted and how the situation would be resolved.

A briefing, maybe? Some background on what they were going to see, what they should look out for?

Maybe – but then again, that could be too structured; they might not use their brains and their initiative to figure out what was going on, to tease apart the complex webworks of lie, half-truth, believed wisdom and the actual crux of the matter at the centre of it all. They might just take her word for it, as they did with so much else, and they might not try to gain that all-important experience which was the eventual goal of the roleplay she had in mind.

Even so, she noted it down as a possibility, carefully making notes on what she would need, and what she would like to have in order to make it work.

Chiona Dusk, the more experienced instructor – and someone with access to the vaults of the Tower – was always a useful source of information and critique, and Alses had got into the habit, over the seasons, of presenting her new ideas to her friend, informally, for a bit of feedback before she went down the official route.

It had saved her from ignominy on more than one occasion.

Leaning back in her plushly red chair, enjoying the feel of silk and velvet on her skin, the soft pressure of the upholstery, Alses contemplated her notes and the books in front of her. Whilst it wasn’t traditional research of the sort she loved, with just the silver thread of an idea dancing through her brain, the faintest gossamer-thin thread of possibility gathering solidity or being cut to the quick by the information in the books and scrolls and artifacts of the Bharani Library, but it still had something of the shadow of that, and she delighted in it.

So, if not a briefing, then what else?

Something magical, maybe? The answer was staring her in the face, although it took an embarrassingly long time for it to percolate through: Glyphing.

With glyphing, she could give every student her power; she’d know exactly what they were seeing, and they would know too – she could be absolutely certain that when she mentioned what to look for they would be able to follow her directions, see what they needed to see and then be able, later, to translate that to their own powers, rather than her floundering around instructing them based off what she could see and some educated guesswork on behalf of her students.

Yes, glyphing might well be the answer to her problems. It was only with considerable difficulty that she managed to contain the delighted laugh.

Glyphing, though, meant scrolls.

Lots of them.

Ooh, lots.
e

[Alses]

e

Alses was taking advantage of the calm and quiet of the library Reading Room to make substantial inroads on her Glyphing workload. She only had small groups of students, after all – creating individual scrolls wasn’t an insurmountable task.

It did, however, call for a great deal of exacting and demanding work, and it was, after the first few scrolls, repetitive.

That said, it was valuable experience, and experience in Glyphing wasn’t something Alses would turn down or disdain; the discipline had proved itself quite versatile over the years, and its utility had only grown as she’d grown more proficient with the curves and arcs and whorls of its runic structure.

It was a fine thing to be able to write letters in runes, she’d found; there was absolutely no room for misunderstanding, since the intricate shapes were djedic mirrors impressed on the world by her own will. They held within their very structure, those static arcs of magic, the concept she was striving to get across, shorn of anything so mundane and cumbersome as an actual language, with all its traps for the unwary and all those possibilities for misunderstanding.

All of that vanished in a glyph, there was just the pure quill of meaning, burned into the world by the force of a djed-aware pen, and that was a beautiful and laudable thing. It didn’t mean one had to tell the truth in a glyphed letter, it just made it slightly more difficult to lie.

Creamy paper, cool and smooth beneath her fingertips, spooled across the table. It glowed warmly blank in the even light, ready and waiting, positively begging for thick black ink, then for a rainbow of shimmering colours, and then…ah…then for the glimmering of true shade and hue that came from magic, and only from magic.

Such works of art she painted, such masterpieces of the senses! But alas, some masterpieces were so transitory – hers burned themselves from the page, leapt into the waiting mind, expanded the perceptions in the most glorious manner possible and then, in a few chimes or bells, depending on how much of herself she’d given up in the creation, they faded to nothing.

So sad, so sad…but for her, the glorious artwork was eternal and ever-changing, dancing across her perceptions whether she was awake or asleep, painting the world for her to delight in, the jewel of Mizahar exposed beneath the deep layer of mud that coated it, all the claggy cloying injustices and irritations about the planet suddenly cast aside.

She had an…uneasy…relationship with art, especially these days. In the past she’d been slavishly admiring, appreciative of the way it could all speak without words, tugging at the heartstrings, but now…

Well. The artist unseen painted her a positive picture gallery everywhere she went, and with that constant barrage there came unexpected baggage. Now an artist – a painter, anyway – had to have real passion, real emotion behind every brush-stroke and every pencil line, otherwise to her the work was…boring. Drab. Not worth consideration – even if to the unaided eye it was a sumptuous piece of work indeed, brilliant and flawless in its presentation, moving in its subject matter.

Perhaps that was why she liked sculpture so much; pouring bronze and hewing marble or whatever it was that a sculptor actually did took effort as much as it took skill; someone had to really believe in what they were doing to make something good out of a lump of metal or a block of rock. Alses was aware, in a vague sort of way, that one could make exactly the same argument for painters, that it took work and vision to turn blobs of colour into something coherent and wonderful, but there was nonetheless something about a sculptor’s work that resonated more frequently with her than did paintings.

Shaking her head to clear it of irrelevant thoughts – a calmed and still mind was necessary even for the planning of a scroll, after all – Alses brought out her hefty journal of works and, after making yet another mental note to acquire another volume at the earliest possible juncture, began to leaf through it.

Alses had made auristic scrolls before, it was true, but that had been some time ago and she wanted to refresh her memory on what, exactly, she’d done – and crucially, if there were any pitfalls or traps she should be looking out for.

She’d never really been able to comprehend people who were slapdash and just charged ahead without at least a few ticks of thought – at least when it came to things like this. Why there weren’t more people around with brains like…like that cheese with all the interesting holes in it…she didn’t know.

Then again, they probably didn’t live very long if they’d managed to do something so dangerous to themselves; perhaps that was why she’d not seen any.

She realised she’d been staring blankly at the right page – a complex diagram of the entire scroll, which was broken down and subdivided on the subsequent pages, a sort of assembly-manual procedure – for several chimes without actually seeing it.

Glyphing.

Her old notes called for a focus glyph to be the centre of the whole affair. That, at least, was a concrete given; there was no improvement to be made there, save perhaps in a slight refinement of the design, but that was good; it gave her a solid base on which to build, something with which she was absolutely familiar and comfortable.

A slight smile came to her face as she remembered something she’d often used to tell herself. Strange that it didn’t spring to her mind so easily these days; perhaps it was time to bring it back into the forefront of her recollections.

‘Feet on rock, before we build our castles in the air.’

Still with that telltale upcurve of her lips, Alses considered the next stage of her design, the barrier portion, a glimmering necklace of half-pearls and three-quarter pearls in a dizzying array, garlanding the focus glyph close about, the ghostly impressions of mirrors and reflections still hanging around the inked strokes.

There was also a tiny disjunction glyph inside each and every one of them – why had she thought that to be a good idea? Simpler by far to include just one master breaking glyph and Path its effects to the centre of each one; why hadn’t she thought of that back then?

With the benefit of distance, experience and clarity, the new approach seemed so obvious, staring her in the face, positively screaming to be noticed – ah, but such was the lot of the more experienced, looking back on what they’d done before.

Introspection, the curse of the Ethaefal in particular, rarely paid off.
e

[Alses]

e

Alses was softly absorbed in the curve of the ink as her quill glided across the waiting surface of the scroll-to-be, marking out the cardinal points that would be the lynchpins of everything that then followed, the foundations – to switch metaphors – on which she could build…yes, on which she could build her castles in the air.

Her quill skated elegantly along in descending spirals as her mind followed its tracks and filled the wake with thoughts of suction and thirst, of the aching hunger of nothingness wanting to be something, anything. That was the essential hunger at the heart of a focus glyph, the never-filled greed of a bottomless pit, forever grasping and grasping with avaricious hands.

She felt a familiar ache in her gullet as she drew: hunger, seizing the chance and rising up from the dark places where normally she kept the inconvenient feeling at bay, fed by the arcane impressions of her glyph as it began to take form and shape under her racing quill.

Ah, but it couldn’t just be hunger, oh no – that would be a surefire recipe for disaster; the glyph would fill and fill until it was glutted with magic, until every curve and line creaked with an overload of djed and then…

Explosions were the least of it, when chained magic got loose.

Best to avoid that. Part of the solution was the barrier that would surround the glyph itself, but a key component was the very structure of the focus itself, the curves and whorls and impressions behind them that informed its final shape and thus its role. It had to be a reflecting mirror as well as a sink for magic, a fountain and wellspring of djed just as much as it was a prison for the stuff, and those considerations added their own layered complexity into the rune.

Brow furrowed, Alses continued to draw, carefully tilting the quill to vary the thickness of the lines as dictated by the burning concepts flowing out from her focused mind, running down through the musculature of her arm and out into the world through the detailed synergy of hand and brain.

The pressure of the quill as she wrote furiously was forever changing, altering, shifting, subtly influencing the glyphs she impressed on the page. Her fingers quickly began to ache from the continual variations, a tingling of phantom lightning dancing up and down her hands.

‘Distractions, distractions, always so many distractions!’ Alses thought with a sigh, mind rising from the focused plane necessary for the exacting art of glyphing under the influence of that prickly-tickling sensation, unpleasant but not actually painful, as such.

True-blue light flashed and flared around her fingers as they hovered over the half-complete glyph, banishing the needling near-pain and making her hands as good as new. Having dealt with the niggling annoyance that had so bothered her, she was able once again to sink herself into the calmed and focused state so necessary for any magic.

‘Mirrors, Alse, fountains and springs, methods of release,’ she reminded herself as she picked up the quill again, the endless and mesmerising jets of the Crystal Fountain, the joyous release of water from some stygian underground reservoir into the beautifully free and clear sky, glittering in the sunlight, chiming in the vaults of her mind.

In between the sucking, hungry lines and whorls – her stomach growled rebelliously once more – Alses began to weave the more pleasant releasing mechanism of the focus glyph, freedom writ large in sparkling ink.

In short order, as she wove the glorious freedom into the rune, a heady mixture, the whole of the focus glyph was complete, shining bright in her sight, perfect and complete, an entity entirely unto itself but without purpose yet, with nothing to fill its hungry whorls and voids and nothing to reflect back out into the world.

In time, that would come.

For now, though, Alses had to secure the unprotected glyph, to make sure it wouldn’t immediately discharge whatever magic she attempted to store in its confines, and that meant barriers.

In her initial attempt – successful attempt, that was – at an auristic scroll, she’d contained the glyph in an elaborate barrier, many small three-quarter circles, pearly to her sight with strong impressions of mirrors and reflection, of containment, confinement, imprisonment, almost. It had worked, of course – but it was a bit of overkill, really, and she’d for some reason thought that each pearl of the barrier would need its own disjunction glyph.

The whole of it was just needlessly complex, and whilst Alses was bang alongside beauty for beauty’s sake, with something so…so…impermanent, she didn’t think it worth her time and her effort, especially when it was going to be looked at for a few ticks at most and then burn into oblivion as it gave up its magic to her students.

They would appreciate it more for what it gave them than for the elegance of its lines, the beauty of its overall form; wasting time on making it look pretty would be just that – wasted time – and whilst she had an infinite supply of time, most other people didn’t.

Best to make the most of the time she did have with them, then. Seize the day, that was the phrase people used, wasn’t it?

So, a barrier, garlanded close about the focus glyph, the central point of her sigil that would accept the energies she channelled into it, trapping them in recursive curls and whorls and loops of tangling ink, that was the aim. The focus glyph itself would be both guide and warden for her magic, taking the djed as it poured from her and directing it along the intricate, complex and branching djed-holding portion of her work where it would be contained, squirrelcaging around the laid-out conduits and channels, forever baffled and routed and looped back in upon itself by the glyphic lines and curves, a complex interaction that was almost mirror-like to her mind's all-seeing eye, able to capture and reflect the magic cast at it.

Barriers.

Last time, she’d used sixteen small pearl-circles, each one carefully buttressed and reinforced. Sixteen had been a conscious choice; the number was a powerful one in glyphing, especially when paired with something in a six formation. No-one knew exactly why this should be the case, and had expended many thousands of words in saying so, and still more sprawling tracts of scholarship on their own theories.

This time, though, she felt she could get away with a lower number – perhaps six. Her drawing skills had improved, as had her proficiency in glyphery, and she felt confident she could produce – with a bit of practice – free-drawn circles of the type required without too much in the way of difficulty and effort.

A bit of a practice first, though, on some scrap paper, wouldn’t go amiss. Just in case; there was no sense in ruining a perfect focus glyph with some shoddy barrier-work and having to start all over again.
e

[Alses]

e

Alses’ sensitive fingers shifted position on the warm haft of her quill, the sharp nib of the implement angling minutely in response to the motion, bringing a new facet of the pen to bear on the task at hand. She’d experimented with several different styles in order to reliably free-draw the pearl barrier glyphs that she tended to favour in scrollwork, and had eventually settled on an angled nib as the most appropriate.

It drew razor-sharp ink lines, thin as she could wish for with plenty of space for extra runes to flesh out and add additional layers of control as she needed or wanted. Reductionist principles applied here; a simple and structurally-sound foundation – in all senses of the world – was what she wanted, something on which she could then further build, secure in the knowledge that what had been already scribed would endure.

One after another, they poured out of her mind, down through the interpreter that was her hands and pen together and out into the world, joyously full-formed and champing at the bit to do their duty, to fulfil their purpose for which she’d written them. Alses sympathised, but the sigils and overarching structure had to be completed first before it could all be woken, otherwise the left glyph wouldn’t know what the right was doing, and the whole of it would disintegrate into a useless mess in mere ticks.

‘Patience,’ she soothed as her pen caressed the paper consolingly, smaller movements now, more precise and finicky, all curves and unusual, unexpected angles, an uneasy reflection of the volatile concepts she was working with. Still to come, looming large in her consciousness now, the crawling tendrils of the pathing glyphs that would link the vulnerable, soft interior of her pearl barrier sigils to a spiky, unstable, destructive trigger glyph, a spiny and nasty thing, all coiled purple and black, radiating the dark heat of menace to her skin and sending chills up her spine as she crafted it.

Breaking and dissolution, destruction, fire and flame and tumbling ruin, those were the images and memories that her foul trigger glyph encoded, trapping the antithetic forces in glittering prisons of ink. They were there, though, quiescent in the drying liquid, turning those elegant curls and coils into bombs.

Which was, of course, the whole idea. Triggers were arcane bombs, just waiting for the right initiating factor to erupt and fire the rest of the scroll, the miniature explosion before the main, a microcosm of the mechanism itself.

Alses followed the progress of her craft through an aurist’s senses, far more watching the flash and flare of djed than she did her own skating hand, letting the information and inferences her prodigal skill evoked from the magic of the world inform her actions. There, for instance, when the djed streams met just so, a scintillating charivari of half-there light and colour and sound, that was where her quill elegantly kissed the apex of its curve and plunged down into the crawling morass to pull up another gossamer strand of reaching djed.

Pulling back slightly, to survey her handiwork, Alses had to suppress a shudder as she beheld the Trigger. A layer of antithetical fighting djed, toxic violet to her Sight, almost corrosive to her enhanced senses, making them recoil from the phantom force of it, its appearance set her on edge; bright violet and other hadean shades almost never boded well, and never mind that she’d purposely induced the chaos. Something in her heart never sat well with it; she was too used to the magics of crafting and building, where order and shimmering beauty held sway over the seductive and chaotic allure of destruction.

But sometimes destruction was necessary, to allow something more glorious to rise from the ashes. In this case, that would be some measure of her own talents, rising like the dawn from the focus glyph that would be unleashed the instant the pearl barrier crumbled.

Even in something so tuned to dissolution, though, there was still perfection to be sought, a way of making the foulness the pure quill of ruin itself. Elegance could be sought even in an orgy of destructive djed, in the silver bars of the prison that would release upon the instant the conditions of her Trigger were fulfilled.

It was here that Alses pushed the envelope once more of what she was capable of, refining the inviting curves and free, open conduits of the raying paths that would take the toxic magic right into the heart of her barrier strongholds, slipping the power inside all the defences she’d written.

A mean spike of headache stabbed and needled at her cranium as she worked and sweated and cursed the ideas in her brain that proved so much harder to put into practice. She’d blazed the trail – generally speaking – a few times before, though, and each subsequent attempt made the path wider, smoother, easier to travel, meant she had to think slightly less about the key fundamentals, the exact angles at which lines had to curve and coil and intersect. That, in turn, let her turn more of her brain towards the experimental side of things, applying reductionist and expansionist principles wherever they fitted best and all-over working out more elegant methods to achieve her goals.

Elegance, yes, that was the goal – the ultimate goal of any academic, come to that, to have their work described as ‘elegant’; there was no higher praise.

Alses strove for it, naturally, and every time her glyphs sprawled their ornate opulence around her magecrafting pedestal, across the acres of her personal diaries and notes or otherwise made their appearances – in scrolls like this one, for instance – she got closer to that elusive pinnacle.

One day – like she had with auristics – that lofty throne would be hers.
e

[Alses]

e

Working with the subtle and elusive power of glyphing was always far different from any discipline of magic she’d yet encountered, even magecraft and animation. Its was a subtle power, a dreaming potential path that glimmered elusively, the merest phantasmal whisper in the ascending glory of impossible light and shadow that was the aurist’s world – at least, until touched by other magic.

Then those gossamer pathways would rise to full wakefulness, would suddenly impose order and structure and an external will on the world within their grasp. Perfect machinery, crafted to a purpose and executing it with a breathtaking finesse and no extraneous waste whatsoever, that was the goal of the glypher, and with every attempt, every practice and pushing of the boundaries, Alses felt the lofty goal drawing closer and closer.

Glyphing, for the intelligent user, had so many potential applications – and one of the most intriguing that Alses had been reading about in one of Bharani’s innumerable tomes, probably one of the twenty-six volumes of Grummen’s Lexicon, was the concept of binding.

She would have been lying to herself if she tried to pretend that her heartbeat hadn’t quickened when she first read the fine copperplate hand, baldly laying out the requirements and limitations – of which there were few – of the Grand Oath.

One of the most versatile and subtly powerful tools in the arsenal of the proficient Glypher is the Grand Oath.

Legend tells us that this appropriately portentiously-named device was originally handed down – if such is the right word - from the gods to mortals to ensure that deals forged were unbreakable, inviolate and unbroken. Literally. Drafted by Qualaya, the civilised goddess of writing and memory, the complex glyphic sequences and specialised runes call to the realm of the Ukalas on a fundamental level that even the most puissant of Alahean sciences have as yet failed to decipher fully – although it is doubtlessly only a matter of time and resources.

Fitting for something essayed by the metaphysical pen of a deity, the Oath is almost infinitely flexible and its fullest ramifications and complexities would take a lifetime to even begin to unravel. Happily, the principal forms and strictures that delineate and define the skeleton framework of the Oath can be picked up with effort and practice.

Indeed, it is hypothesised by several scholars of Qualaya’s work that there still remains some divine guiding principle behind the skeletal mortal framework that guides the Glypher’s hand and unconscious mind to full completion of the Oath itself. This subliminal djed flux has been put forward as a potential candidate to explain the necessity for high-quality ingredients in the construction stage of the Oath – gold-laced inks, for instance, gem-treated charcoal, gilting and sturdy vellum or thick parchment.

Empirical evidence conducted by the Royal Academy has shown that lesser materials – more common coal-derived or gall-extracted inks, without the benefit of philtered reinforcement and purification – simply evaporate the instant any more than the primary structure of the Oath is completed, often with considerable damage to the paper and sometimes the desk beneath on evaporation, and thus it is recommended that the Oath-scribe takes the utmost of care with their ingredients.

There follows a conceptual map of the Grand Oath for the diligent student to learn from. As always, the Glypher should be aware that it is concept and not form that matters, as every Glyph will be different.

There had then followed a very intricate diagram, sprawling across an entire page and with four further pages of explanation of each and every curving line and switchback and jaggedy arc, every spiralling helix and soaring spike, all the seemingly-decorative flourishes that surrounded the central space and much else besides.

Alses had drunk it in eagerly, reading the pages again and again until they burned in her brain, mouth parted and her breathing harder and faster than usual as her mind snapped and raced around this valuable, valuable titbit of knowledge, of the possibilities it opened up.

The fact that it had originated as a sacred tool did not bother her unduly, and neither did the later development of its secular usage. Indeed, there were many advantages she could immediately see to an Oathman – or woman, for that matter.

Properly-worded, a Grand Oath could give you someone who could be trusted implicitly, without the possibility of betrayal. It could make upstanding citizens of hardened criminals – and vice-versa, of course, used badly – secure deals and covenants as inviolate and much else besides.

The possibilities were heady, dizzying in their profusion and rich with the possibility of power. Eagerly, Alses had read on, keen to wring out as many of the Oath’s secrets as possible, quietly ecstatic that this tool, this seductive and wonderful tool, had come through the fire and hell of the Valterrian.

The Oath does, however, have some limitations on its use. It is strictly tied to the personal; one Oath, one person, and no more. Thus, organizations as a whole, in the numinous sense, cannot be secured. Perhaps predictably, given this, Oaths cannot be reused; at the instant of signing, should the contract be accepted, the physical shell of the Oath disintegrates and the mandate applies.

Happily – or rather, conveniently – the Oath can be crafted by anyone; only the signatory is relevant to the functioning of the Grand Oath. They need not be the creator or instigator of the Oath, merely to sign their name in the full and certain knowledge of what they are doing.

This brings us to potentially the most important limitation of the process; the signatory must be aware of the text of the Oath in full. They need not understand the full ramifications of the wording – which is where some facility with language may prove useful – but they must be given a true account of the text of the Oath before they sign, otherwise the signature is invalid and the Oath unenforced.

It is also important to note that the Oath follows the letter of its law rather than the spirit behind it. Thus, again, skill with language proves valuable in crafting a useful and watertight Oath, and similarly may aid in escaping ill-advised contracts, provided they have been poorly worded.

Finally, the prospective Oathman/woman must sign of their own free will. They cannot be coerced into doing so with Hypnotism or physically made to sign, although it is just the physical act of signing that must be done freely; any number of persuasive techniques can be applied up to that point.

With a sigh and a shake of her entire body, a convulsive shudder that ran from the tips of her toes to the top of her head – sadly hornless – Alses brought herself out of the recollection and bent herself towards the task in hand.

She’d attempted the Oath herself, a few times, but something in the serpentine lengths still eluded her, still confused her, and the little errors mounted up until the whole of it collapsed before she’d finished. Her skill, evidently, her familiarity with the runes, what they represented and how they interacted, was alas still too poor.

Thus, practice, and the scrolls laid out in grand array in front of her now, just waiting for the touch of internal power to fill them with their purpose.

Sitting comfortably, Alses prepared to infuse them with her magic, drawing up long skeins of power from her nova-bright core and layering them one atop the other near the surface of her body, easy to reach and pull out into the focus glyphs by hungry scrolls.

Perfect.

END

e

[Catastrophe]

Alses :

Skills

• Reading: 3 XP
• Planning: 2 XP
• Drawing: 2 XP
• Glyphing: 2 XP
• Teaching: 1 XP

Lores

• The Bharani Library: Where New Principles and Ideas are Found
• Teaching: Where there are Shortfalls, but Rectification
• Interactivity: Teaching Students Differently
• Roleplaying (Teaching): Acting or Illustrating Various Scenarios
• Teaching Technique: The Different Forms of Roleplay
• Glyphic Triggers: Phantom Bombs of the Arcane
• Grand Oath: A Sacred Tool for Glyphers and Mages Alike

Loot

• N/A

Notes :

Another magnificent thread by the miraculous Alses! This was a very wonderful read, m'dear and I especially admired the way you described the way Alses understood and planned with the new knowledge of roleplaying. I cannot wait to see what else she learns!

If you have any questions or concerns regarding your grade, don't be afraid to send me a private message with the issues!

The Darkness Within