Solo Do You Even Glyph?

[Elias Caldera]

30th Day of Spring
514 AV

Elias looked about his room and grimaced. This shykehole was nauseating to look at, let alone live in. He had no idea it would be so... so... he sighed. He desperately needed a distraction, and that's where magic came in. For today, it would be glyphs. Both an experience and a challenge, for they were more complicated than Elias cared to admit. Daunting really, especially to those who had too little patience to draw them. They were, if he was being truthful with himself, a pain in the ass. As a magecrafter worth his salt though, the young Ravokian refused to be beat. If there was anything that was true about the Caldera, it was their diehard, foolhardy persistence in the pursuit of whatever they wanted. Today he wanted glyphs, and once he had undertaken a certain study, Elias would absolutely, downright never abandon it simply because things got difficult.

As a field of magic, glyphing may not have been as flashy or as impressive as the others, but that did not mean it was in anyway less than they were. Glyphing was its own beast, unlike anything else, and that was what the professors in Zeltiva had drilled into him from day one. He could admit that reimancy came easier to him than the magical symbols. One could even say it was more fluid.

Ha!

He understood the powerful nature of the elements because on a deeper level, the ability to create and control something so personal as your own djed appealed to something primal deep inside. He could breathe storms, flick a fire to life, weave the water, and even raise the earth to his whim.... Well... not all of that, not yet anyway, but there was a much simpler connection between him and manipulating res that simply couldn't be found through the art of glyphing. No, glyphing was its own beast, and one had to play by its rules to tame it.

Regardless, Elias prepared himself for go at it, a serious one this time. There he sat within his room scribbling in his book or doodling on bits of parchment attempting to gain some semblance of a greater understanding. It was frustrating at times, especially when his carefully crafted works of magical greatness often shared a strikingly suspicious resemblance with that of naked women, but he was not deterred! He didn't care how many crumpled ladies he had to throw into the bin before he got it right, today was the day he forged ahead.

Elias began the slow, steady process of drawing his focus. Dipping his quill into the ink vial situated right next to him he carefully set about tracing the lines of the intricate pattern onto the surface of the parchment. With due diligence he drew a coin sized circle on the center of the parchment. He was thankful of the fact that he had spent a great deal of time working on the actual method of drawing a circle. It was ridiculous to consider, but this was how he had spent many a day, just doing simple shapes and patterns. There were many times when even the slightest deviation from a proper glyph had spelt disaster. Elias had no intention of becoming another warning to overly impatient apprentices. 'Don't be like that Caldera boy,' they'd say 'idiot blew himself up and summoned a sky full of candy gumdrops because he couldn't draw his glyphs right, blah blah blah, magic is not a toy, blah.' Nope, not Elias. He was nobody's lesson in failure.

[Elias Caldera]

As soon as he was satisfied that the basic template wasn't a preposterously terrible child's drawing, Elias allowed himself to move on in the process. He dipped the quill into the ink and then... paused without warning. What was he doing? He knew full well how to make this easier on himself. He set the quill down with a guffawing epiphany. Leaning back in his chair, Elias closed his eyes and concentrated. He felt within himself, sending out tendrils all throughout his body, and as each touched their source of djed, he gently began to pull. Then he began to push. Then he began to command. The djed flowed through him freely now, excited and properly frenzied into just the flow he wanted it. It flooded into his arms with a tingling sweetness akin to nothing else, and as it began to pool into his hand, Elias boiled into pure res. It was liquid in form, and soon so to was its element, as layer upon layer was molded into clean, filtered water. He tightened and compressed the little orb until it was small enough for his liking. With that done, the Caldera picked up the ink pot and ever so gently poured a small amount of its contents into the orb of water. The two liquids mixed, the water turning black and hazy in an instant. With so little water, what he ended up controlling was mostly ink in the end.

Drawing with a pencil or pen was fine and all, but Elias had long ago discovered the blissful simplicity that went along with incorporating magic into everything one did, so long as it made life easier. It had made his very sudden introduction to magic a tad bit gentler at his age, and it was using water reimancy to write with ink that had been his very first accomplishment. Needless to say, it wasn't long before the entire contents of the ink pot was swirling above his fingers and just itching to be put to use on some parchment. With a satisfied smile, the young mage went to work doing just that.

A tiny, slender tendril of ink snaked its way down from the slowly swirling bubble of black that hovered above, to his index finger hanging right above the parchment. The ink stopped at the edge of his fingertip, never actually coming contact with his flesh, but lying so close, it might as well have been a part of him. He gently dropped his finger unto the paper and began to draw.

First it was more circles, engulfing the first in jagged swaying lines. They had to be perfect, and so he was careful with his strokes, not wanting to deviate from the rythem he had swiftly established lest he risked spoiling the magic. He flexed his finger stiffly from the strain, but only once before proceeding again. This small amount of res required very little in the way of concentration or djed, which was a good thing, because the last thing Elias needed was his blob of ink splattering all over the paper. With his free hand, he carefully shifted the parchment, turning it so that he could steadily draw the twisting lines spiraling out from the central circle. Tick by tick, moment by moment, Elias's work of art sluggishly began to take form. The general concept was similar to drawing a sun but with a corona of elaborate complexity. It wasn't his own design unfortunately, but It had taken him a long time to even remotely come close to copying it suitably. The sad fact of the matter was Elias had few glyphs that were his own. He had rarely shown enough courage back at the Zeltivian university to break out of the habit of simply using more common, mundane sigils to accomplish his goals. He found it hard to chastise himself as much as he knew he should have. Creating your own patterns of power was a no small deal. It involved searching and an understanding in personal things that were still too far beyond the novice mage. The other students hadn't seen it that way however, and they had all easily manifested their unique methods while Elias had been left behind, copying out of tomes and scrolls until he knew many of his mimicked glyphs by heart.

He understood fully how important it was, but he simply promised himself "one day" and decided to move on. He had been making that same promise for what felt like years now.

[Elias Caldera]

A Focus was little else but a mirror, or a chest for storage. Magic would go in, and then magic would go out when it was called upon. Nothing overly convoluted or impossible to comprehend. He recalled all the wondrous things the dusty old tomes had coughed at him when he was first trying to grasp the concept. It was like a stamp, except the magic you wanted to save was the stamp, the glyph was just the wax that took on its shape. The books had also promised almost anything could be saved within these Focuses. From golems and summoned monsters to an entire plethora of spells. It had certainly sounded interesting then, and definitely sounded pretty good right about now. Now I just gave to learn how to summon golems is all.

His finger trembled from the pressure of remaining so still for so long, and he massaged it as carefully as he could so as to no interact with the ink trail that still twirled around it. He set to work with the next ring, smoothly finishing it to conclude with a total of three circles. This last one navigated its way around the sharpened edges of the corona, and once Elias concluded all was in working order, he began filling in the space between the two larger circles with a overlapping pattern than crisscrossed between them. Finally Elias was getting somewhere. Soon, he felt, he would be done.

When he was indeed done with the interlocking patterns that molded to two outer circles with one another, the young mage was hesitant to continue on any further without checking his work yet again for mistakes. It would be terribly inconvenient if he had come so far only to have a smudge there, or a crease there ruin everything. In the end, Elias smiled at his symbols approvingly. The entire thing held an air of pressure about it, as if more... edged than its many curves would seem to visually elicit in response. "That's the magic." he mumbled to no one in particular as he worked to stretch out the cramp in back. "Or its just the feeling of impending doom that comes with misshapen glyphs, either way, it still looks good enough."

[Elias Caldera]

Ever so gently Elias drew a large octagonal symbol in the top right corner of the parchment. It was clearly separate from the expansive sigil, and to anyone who had ever sneezed at a dusty old magical book in their life, they would recognize it as the ancient tongue written down. It was a rune, and it meant "Canoch." its author breathed out loud. Its translations was word, speech, that which is spoken. In essence, the trigger for his focus sigil. Of course, canoch wasn't the actual trigger, it was the basic instruction into which he would write the real trigger. He could have simply written down 'hey, say this and stuff happens, colon mark.' but instead he went with a much more inspiring and mystical approach. Everything sounded cooler in ancient. Within the bloated ancient symbol, Elias wrote, in common this time, Mirror. That single word would be his catalyst, and with it, he was now ready.

Not bothering to stand up and risk a shooting pain of cramped muscles that he was sure awaited any attempt at going vertical, Elias simply continued with his work as he was. The ink still floated above his hand, like an ugly swirling sack of an octopus. Now that its first job was done, the mage began repurpose it for its second. The ink began to dance across his vision, whirling and churning into small tendrils that weaved across and through one another. A measure of sweat had formed on Elias's brow as the shape he had intended finally seemed to be taking form. This level of intricacy was harder than I expected he fussed, mentally frowning at the strain on his concentration. Eventually, the ink blotch before him was no more, in its place was a dangerously deformed sigil, similar to what he had drawn on the page, yet laughably bad in comparison. Its design was clearly different, and obviously the back breaking time and effort he had placed on the written glyph had been conservatively glazed over. Simply put, it was ugly, but it would do.

With a rapid thought, the ink sigil floated its way gingerly towards the parchment, lowering itself nerve-wrackingly close to the completed glyph work. As it did so, the focus sigil began to exude a delightful blue light. Soon enough the ink begin to glow with the same hue. Slowly, steadily, Elias lowered the reimancy created mock glyph into the sealing one below. The two lights merged into a satisfying crescendo of brightness, and like that it was done. Elias smiled, feeling shamelessly victorious.

He had done it.

[Elias Caldera]

"Mirror!" He roared at the dumb thing for the umpteenth time. "Mi-rror! This is ridiculous." So it turned out he had not done it. In fact, he had done less than that, he had utterly failed. The scroll would not work. With an aggravated sigh unbecoming of any self respecting mage in his profession, Elias frustratedly went to work analyzing every single iota of the parchment. Where had he gone wrong? The sun, the corona, or the barrier that enveloped both of them? It couldn't be the latter, otherwise the spell would have never have been sealed in the first place. The barrier, like the name suggested, was what was need to block and lock the magic inside the focus that it protected. The ink would have simply fallen right back out had it malfunctioned. It had to be the focus itself. He must have missed something. "Wait..." he suddenly said, straitening as he held the scroll closer to his face. What was the ancient word for mirror? It had to be Da-something, it was the only word that made sense. "Daqur? Dar... Daraq!" Nothing, Elias moaned.

He had hoped the ink would come right back out and unto a second piece of paper he was holding underneath it. That was clearly not going to happen any time soon. Now he definitely had to go back to inspecting the lines, but from a cursory glance he saw absolutely nothing wrong. He had written this focus sigil a hundred times. The barrier was solid, and the trigger-

The trigger! Why in the gods' name had he written it in common? What kind of absolute buffoon writes a magic spell in common. It had to be in the runic form as they were their own glyphs. He had always, always undervalued triggers as something separate from the real glyph work, thinking they were simply the single step instruction on what to say, not the actual magic behind the release. "If mirror isn't the trigger, then it has to be the only thing properly written into the trigger; Canoc-" The ink came spraying out of the parchment, and all of it directly into Elias's face.

Something like a groan and a gag put together pathetically escaped the young glyph master's darkened lips. He opened his eyes and surveyed the room around him, as if looking for someone else to help, or at least confirm that that had actually just happened. No one but the wind. His head hit the table counter with a resounding thud of failure. No one might have been there to see that, but he could still hear the laughter anyway. He began to laugh himself. Ah glyphing, she was a merciless mistress sometimes. Naturally, Elias would have been furious at the whole literal mess. It wasn't because he had just doused himself in ink either, it was because instead of unsealing the spell as it had been placed, the focus had spat out the ink like a drunken ravosalaman puking over the side of his boat. That said, the fact that it had all landed on him like it did made it hard to stomp and curse and gnash his teeth, so instead he decided he would simply try again. It had only been around a bell since he had started on the first anyway.

Res poured from his hand unrestricted and formed a small ball. On his whim it levitated closer to his face, and then began to pull in the ink. Elias suddenly and violently lurched forward and coughed. The res died out immediately and the novice was left heaving over his work station, wide eyed and shocked. What the petch had just happened? It was like something had reached down his throat, under his eyes, and into his head and had begun to yank out his innards through a straw. Holy hell, he thought. Had that been the res? Was it... had it been trying to soak up all the water inside his body? He looked at his hand, shocked at what he had almost done to himself. That could have been bad, horribly, terribly, inconceivably bad.

I mean what kind of idiot sucks his own guts out through his face? Elias shook the disturbing thought away for the moment. He would certainly come back to it later however, that was for sure. For now, he resigned himself to stumbling over to a wash basin and wiping the ink off like a normal. He still had work to do, and there was no way in Rhysol's crimson hell was he going to give in now.

[Elias Caldera]

So he had wasted his time be designing a faulty trigger of all things? It would have been nice if that was all that was wrong, but he knew the troubles went deeper than that. Trial and error then he thought as he grabbed a new parchment and laid it down in front of him. His body responded with a sharp pain in his hip. Sometimes Elias really hated being this still for this long. His legs were tingling, his lower back ached, and he was pretty sure one of his butt cheeks had fallen off a while ago, because he certainly couldn't feel it anymore. At least his hand didn't hurt as much as it could have if he had been writing with a normal quill. Small mercies.

Elias fidgeted for a while and adjusted his posture. He planted his feet firmly on the floor beneath his table and set to work on drawing a second scroll. He’d probably been at this task for longer than he realized. Drawing glyphs took an extensive amount of time and patience, and it wasn't uncommon for mages to lose themselves in their ink. He stole a glance at the window and tried to determine how late in the morning it was. He frowned and tsked when he realized Syna was already taking her place high in the noon sky.

The first drawn sun was easy enough to create again. After having already done it once, the flow and pattern were already clear in his mind, saving him the time it took to rehash all the finer details like before. This time when Elias went to make the linking corona ring connecting the two outer Focus circles, he went for a more zigzag pattern. When he saw the magic in his mind he envisioned the majority of it being contained within the sun's heart itself with the residual energy from the magic being captured by the pattern between the two outer Focus circles. The barrier would then make sure nothing slipped through the cracks until it was meant to.

With the new pattern approach he had chosen, the magic was being woven up, down and around within the circles, eventually crossing over and rebounding upon itself so as to complete a perfect and complete circuit. Hopefully that would ensure that the magic being transfused into the seal would retain its original properties entirely, and not come spewing out like the last time. He wasn't sure however, why the first design had failed, and it troubled him deeply. He could have sworn he remembered it vividly, and yet still it did not work. What had he done wrong?

[Elias Caldera]

In about half a bell, Elias was finished with his second sigil. The sun to contain, the corona to capture, and the barrier to bind. He had even installed a trigger that wasn't a total mess. The word Daraq was carefully written within the second command glyph, Canoch. He had taken his time on the trigger too, just as he intended to do with his magic. The reason being If the magic being propelled into the focus was expelled at the exactly the same speed it was being introduced, then perhaps that was why the ink had lost its form upon re-entry, it had been going far too fast... or it had been going at all. This wasn't a fireball or a bolt of lighting to be hurled at some yukman, it was a stamp, it needed absolutely no movement whatsoever. The thought came to him surprisingly late, and Elias smacked himself across the forehead, nearly spilling the res controlled ink all over himself again in the process.

If this failed, Elias would be forced to surrender for the day. He was starting to worry the djed it took to manipulate the ink as he did, though little, was belying a more expensive cost on him than he realized. It didn't feel like it, but to hold res in such a state for so long a time didn't feel safe, and Elias had no intention of over giving ever again. It had literally been one of the first things he had ever done when he was introduced to his magical talents. They had told him -warned him countless times- don't lose control. Magic is a tool, a weapon, a means to an end, but never your master, never your leash. Control control control. Well he controlled himself straight into a small coma for a couple of days after trying to lift a boat out of the harbor with just his reimancy. Elias shook his head. He wasn't sure if he missed those days when he thought he could rule the world with just a wave of his pinky, they seemed happier. He knew that was less to do with his new, infantile magical view on the life and more to do with his mother still being around. The thought of her sombered him, and he lowered his head into his work to forget.

Carefully, he molded the floating, potless ink between his two hands, his fingers working tirelessly to help along the formation of the res. He knew it didn't have to be perfect, but he still needed an identifiable shape so as to know the glyph was a success. Plus if this worked, learning to create glyphs on the fly with his reimancy was something that would take a great deal of practice, so why not get started now. He lowered his palm sized hexagonal, diamond infused pattern of swirling murky black water into the Focus. The runes on the parchment glowed, then so to did his ink. Just as with the previous glyph the parchment flared brightly before his magic was stored within the focus.

When nothing happened, Elias knew everything had went according to plan, at least so far. Delighted, he picked up the paper and took to analyzing it. Every connection and line was where it needed to be, and just to make sure, Elias called upon one more talent of his to make sure this time. Djed flowed into his eyes, and the parchment exploded into color. For a magecrafter, being an aurist was almost paramount. Of course there were mirrors and lenses, but unless you were actually seeing it for yourself, actually feeling with your own eyes, there was just a part of the process that felt almost hollow and irreparably lost.

Just like fire creates smoke, everything creates an aura around itself. Regular items usually had a thin aura that extended around them one inch or so across their outermost boundaries. On the other hand, magical items like the parchment, or more specifically the completed glyph on the parchment, had variable auras whose size depended on their power. As Elias focused his sight however, the hazy azure light that swam within the the confines of his drawn lines told him he had been successful. Nothing seemed to be slipping out, there were no abnormalities with the flow of the djed within, and even the paper appeared to be encompassed, as its near unnoticeable aura had flared a little into its own ambient glow thanks to the djed that it had been subjected to.

"Alright, here we go." Elias carefully placed another piece of paper on top of the glyph and activated the trigger with a whisper. With his body still held in the grip of auristics, he watched with bated breath to see the transfer and unsealing of his work through the only eyes that could capture such indiscernible beauty. The trigger on the parchment responded with a tiny flash before fading away, then the entire thing came to life with a blast. Elias would have almost toppled out of his chair had he not known the light show was only that, a show. If he had been doing this normally, and without the djed in his eyes, it would have seemed much less grand a spectacle. The power faded from his body completely as he let loose his control of it. He slowly flipped the top parchment over and let out a resounding lamentation of disappointment. The ink had been transferred, but instead of his wobbly, useless glyph, all that came out was another splattering of watery ink. It had been moved through the focus and unto the next page and lost its shape completely. How was he supposed to seal and unseal glyphs into other glyphs now?

True, the thing he had created with his reimancy was so haphazard and sloppy that it would never hold so much as a child's attention, let alone a spell, but the possibilities that this was meant to have opened up to Elias were huge. He could have transported a glyph, any glyph, into any situation so long as he had it caught in another one. Perhaps he could paint the focus unto his palm next time. That would make things a thousand fold more convenient and practical. The idea of using reimancy to form glyphs in desperate situations had always fascinated him. It had manifested itself first in his water reimancy, but already the excitable young mage had plans for creating rock formations, or using fire to burn markings into a surface. The latter in particular seemed especially feasible as already Elias was beginning to touch on his second element, and by the heat he felt in his gut right now, he was certain he knew what it was going to be. The greatness within would have to wait however, as a wave of wariness rolled over him. It must have been the auristics, it had done more to drain him than he would have given it credit for. He meandered over to his bed and unceremoniously dived into it. He'd do more mage stuff tomorrow, right now, he had to sleep.

Just another day of magic.

[Nemesis]

Elias Caldera

Knowledge :

Skills

Skill	XP
Auristics	+1
Drawing	+2
Glyphing	+3
Observation	+3
Reimancy	+4

Lores

*Combining Reimancy and Glyphing
*Glyphing: Language is Important

Micellaneous :

Injuries

*Overgiving: Caldera will have a headache for the next few days

Loot/Expenses

*None

____________________________________________

Notes

*Interesting use of Reimancy there; never seen that before. I like how you accurately portray the learning stages, in all your threads - not getting everything right at once and all. It's refreshing to be able to watch beginner development.

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Thank ye!