[SO-Sylira] A Figurative Study

[Keene Ward]

The sixth day of fall, 515 AV

The night had become his study, the ship his solar only once the majority of her passengers retired beneath her deck to either rest or do as Keene did above. Over the course of the journey, he had found that the rocking sway of the ocean's influence had no impact on his abilities, something that others seemed to be at the mercy of. Though he did not find his immunity particularly fortunate, it did occur to Keene somewhere in the ink filled bells that his studies would have been greatly impeded by such ailments as the "seasickness". It was a passing thought, one that Keene quickly discarded in favor of dipping the tip of his quill into his inkwell before pressing it back to the page in his journal with relentless, though gentle, concentration. With his runic library established, he was better able to craft the actual glyphs, finding that while it was still a challenge to impart will into the ink as it was laid down to sink into the fibers of the bound papers he worked over, the symbols were a weighty aid to help ground his thoughts along a more linear path.

To create a focus, Keene began with the symbol for "youth" or nen, a single dot of ink at the center. Around it, he drew an oval, effectively two yaqs to complete the basic focus. Along the inner curve of the oval's lines, Keene pulled lines towards the initial dot, crossing them near the ends to create four angled ranuri all pointing at the first nen. The intent was to keep whatever magic was directed at the focus within it, constantly pulled and drawn back to the center, the point of origin, influenced by the desire to stay within the confines that Keene had dictated. He penned the focus several times, each time working to remove unneeded strokes to keep the lines as clean as possible. Occasionally, the rocking of the ship would push the page up to the heel of his palm, smearing his work and requiring him to start again. Trial after trial, he testing the size of the focus, the width of the lines, the motion of his quill. There were, mostly, failures due to an unsteady hand, a stumble over the paper itself, and more often, simply a bad design. When he was finished, however, the focus - while basic in nature - had an odd draw to it, its purpose clear to any who thought to consider it.

To test it, Keene let a small bead of res drip from an outstretched finger, twitching the single digit as the pale blue liquid fell, transmuting it into a bead of ice that slipped into the inked page with little issue. As there were no other runes to declare what was to happen to magic the symbol drew up within itself, there was a brief tick of stillness before the dark lines of the glyph faded as the ice reappeared, popping back up out of the book as if it had bounced off of some buoyant mechanism hidden somewhere beneath the pages. Though the rune itself had not disappeared, the lines had grown faded, as if with age, and there are parts where the symbols were definitely non-existent. His lips turned down slightly as he studied the after math of the event, hand catching the ice as it drifted upward and letting the frozen liquid melt in his palm as he mulled over his journal's face.

Rune References

[Keene Ward]

He remembered Master Rayage speaking of glyphs as though they were limited in a way, temporary in creation thus temporary in practice. It was inconvenient, but it was the limitations of the magic. Just as reimancy could not be conducted without the production of res nor shielding the release of one's djed, the magic of glyphing was not meant for permanence - or at the very least it was something that was not inherent. The baseline established for a focus, Keene redrew it a few times before it was satisfactory. The ink he had brought with him was more than enough for his studies, though as he had spilled quite a bit of his first vial several nights previous, Keene dipped his quill with conservation in mind. His trials with glyphing had been mostly theoretical, and with the drop of ice, he had started his foray into the world of practical experimentation. From what he knew, if he put too much force into one of his spells, the glyph would be unable to contain it, something he'd discovered early on in his magical investigations. Thus, he planned to keep his tests contained, a dual benefit, as any forms of magic that were more than what he had done already were enough to get him cast from the ship's company; something that a nuit might survive, but a young human would find overwhelmingly challenging at best.

At the top of the focus, Keene lightly sketched a single square, dividing it in half with a vertical line to denote irst. He created several more boxes, placing them at various places around the oblong focus, crossing those out which he found to lack the desired effect. It took him several chimes of drawing, redrawing, and so on and so forth, until he came to the decision that four irsts placed about the focus equidistant from each other were a good start to the barrier. Pulling ink from his quill's nip, Keene drew a curved "u", angling it from one square to the next. From the "u"s crook, he set a small line moving away from the rest of symbol. Within the "u"s crook, he placed a small dot to finish the construction of hea. Just from a cursory glance at the overall structure of the growing sigil, Keene could tell the single hea didn't work. He set about much in the same way as he had with the first part of the barrier's conception, repeating varying forms of the Nader Canoch symbol, stretching, compressing, multiplying, and generally testing the limits of the symbol itself until he arrived at a relatively acceptable form.

The singular line that was attached to the curved portion of hea's "u" had been elongated and curved - in face the entire symbol was reminiscent of a curved line - with its end a small distance from the topmost square's edge. The opening of the symbol extended in its own arc, both ends an equally small distance from the rightmost square with the single dot still situated in the crook of hea's arms. The warped symbol was repeated, "connecting" each irst together to form a simplistic barrier. Thus, each "veil" was drawn to the next, not through desire but the very act of reaching itself. Staring down in contemplation, Keene redrew the sigil several times, checking the curvature of altered symbol so that it was relatively uniform with the others. While it was difficult for him to read and write, as it had been something that he had learned from a young age, the act of penning arbitrary symbols and craftsmanship of ink via quill were two things he had not had much practice with. Thus, with each stroke, Keene's focus was required not only for the conceptual placement and representation of each symbol, but to keep his hand steady and lines pure.

[Keene Ward]

Once the focus and barrier were copied to a point where Keene felt confident they would function without interference of poor craftsmanship, Keene drew another bead of res from his fingertip, once more letting it fall towards the glyph's center, only this time transmuting the liquid into a pale pebble of marble. As it entered into its inky confines, Keene frowned down at the sigil, djed rising up throughout him to feed into his senses as he watched his spell bounce around the barrier, moving at variable speeds until it hit a chink in the symbols and the spell was released, ink fading as the stone rose up into the air, riding the same momentum it had had on the way down. Plucking the rock from the air before it had a chance to descend, Keene leaned back against the crate that had been serving as both desk and chair during his time aboard the ship with a soft, thoughtful sigh. The magic of his auristics was pulled away, internally settled to properly flow through his body and take upon itself the purpose of his essence once more as he gently rubbed his temples, letting his eyes close as he considered potential augments to the barrier to keep the magic within it rather than to circulate round and round.

There had been nothing to control the djed itself; though Keene had not placed much strength into the spell, it didn't change the fact that the glyph was having trouble with containing and controlling the djed rather than the spell. He imagined had he any other discipline to cast into the ink filled parchment, much of the same would have happened. His hand moved as his thoughts did, toying with various symbols in a methodical listing of his ideas. First, he drew two lines on either side of the entire faded sigil with dots on either side of them, a segmented daraq to denote that there was no difference in the runes of the barrier. It read incorrectly, and Keene quickly scrapped the idea, various shapes and symbols starting to fill what space was left on the page as he continued his investigations.

The moonlight drifted down from the heavens in an unfeeling haze of milky white, catching at the rises of the waves and sinking into the darkness of the waters below. In the distance, there was a soft cry of some air bound creature in the steady symphony of the ocean's lapping metronome and the ship's creaking response. The few figures who littered the deck, Keene included, were mostly hunched over their own work, too busy to notice the ethereal beauty about them, too consumed by their own thoughts to take a small taste of that which the world around them had to offer. The winds drifted about Keene, as they usually did, lazy and content in their nightly journey across the salt filled mountains and plains they passed over with ease. He had come to find the presence of the children of the god that had marked him to be familiar; though he would never find it as such, they were, in a sense, comforting in their familiarity, and each time Keene broke away from his introspective studies, the winds drifted around him, soothing in their own way.

Drawing a calming breath through his nose, Keene let it drift from his lips, carried away by a playful twist of wind that tousled his hair with a customary flick, hints of mischief hanging on the invisible current's undertow. His eyes were drawn towards the sylph's path, recognition glowing in the small lights the moon cast over his grey-green gaze. While he could not be certain, as the winds were as capricious and the weather they enacted, it was likely the same breeze that had followed and guided him about the mountain seasons before. He held up an ink-stained hand, letting the wind pass through his fingers as he had done time and time before, a small warmth in the bottom of his stomach, like a hint of honey, flickering for a tick before Keene offered the breeze what was, essentially, a welcoming, blank-faced nod before returning to his work. The winds settled then, relaxing back into their lackadaisical fugue with only the occasional rise of interest when there was a particularly large upset of the ship's bobbing path or when Keene leaned back to take another few ticks to let his eyes rest in thought.

[Keene Ward]

Balance was the key, or at the very least, the latest potential key that Keene had chosen to test. The djed had been passed around against the barrier as he had intended, only it had been an uncontrolled mess, much like tossing a stone into a rapidly rotating cart's wheel. Chance dictated it was possible for the stone to hit a spoke in such a way at such an angle that it might remain, whirling away at the same rate as the wheel, but probability suggested that it was a slim one. Drawing a vertical line with two horizontal planes pulled opposite of the other on either end of the first, Keene began to troubleshoot with pond. He reasoned that if he could regulate the djed at set points as it passed against the barrier, he could keep the energy contained. The focus had kept much of the magic initially, but the pull of the ranuris were only enough to fuel the initial draw, something that didn't bother Keene all too much, as the point of the focus wasn't to keep the magic, but to allow it to be stored in the first place.

Testing various forms of pond led to a single symbol being placed above the topmost irst, beside those on either side, and to the bottom of the bottom-most, with each pond "facing" towards the right such that the top horizontal line was always to the left of the vertical, turning as they were placed, creating a cross-like pinwheel effect. With four ponds in all, Keene found the sigil to look much the same, however, as he drew upon his auristics, allowing the djed to course through his senses, specifically his sight, Keene found that the glyphs, while empty, seemed to be far more stable. With little else but ink, Keene was unable to glean anymore information from the muted auras of the thin black lines, but he kept the magic in its place as he let another drop of res slip from his fingertip, transmuting it with a twitch into a small bead of glass.

He had never used his augmented sight in tandem with reimancy, and the soft burst of colors as the res' aura condensed, shifted, and reworked itself in the short tick it took to become glass would have been mesmerizing, had it not been immediately interrupted by the sharp flash of the sigil's aura activating as the magic was drawn into it. His stare intensified as he gazed down at the coursing glow before him, tracking the movement of the magic within the glyph, gauging the most obvious, dark blue hue of the glyph itself against the bright white of the stored djed within it. As before, it began to move in a circle against the barrier, the dark blue of the aura's stability lightening as the magic passed through each part of the rune. After about a chime had passed, Keene forced his djed from the comfort of auristics, reigning it back before the various layers of the magic's aura became too intriguing a maze to stop himself. Keeping his eyes closed for several chimes until his heart had stilled some, Keene gazed down at what had, for the past five or so chimes, been a successful containment of magic within a glyph.

There was little to suggest that there was anything different about the circular set of symbols near the bottom right corner of the page on the book that sat harmlessly in his lap. From a practical point of view, the containment of the small bead of glass was, essentially a waste of time. From a theory to practice point of view, however, it was progress. Keene wiped finger on the side of his pants, removing what little wet ink was there, before placing it over the edge of the barrier. Without disturbing the markings, the glyph held and no magic was released. Success as it was, Keene took the quill and drew a straight line across the entire sigil. As the line crossed into the containment field, the glyph was broken. The glass popped out of the focus, ricocheting off of his arm with a soft slap before it rolled down and away from him. Keene made a mental note that any kind of tampering with his sigils was ill-advised before re-wetting his quill and flipping the page.

[Keene Ward]

The final experiment for the night was one of a triggered glyph. Master Rayage had explained all the rudimentary process of the magic in a way that was more than enough to serve as a stable foundation for his studies, but it did not change the fact that the theory was hardly applied without plenty of experimentation. At first, he attempted to replace the topmost of the irsts with a yaq, though after several copies and an eventual magical test, it proved to only immediately break the barrier. He tried several different instances of adjusting the barrier itself to incorporate a trigger, but in the end, he determined that unless he denoted some sort of specific differentiation between the barrier and the trigger, the magic treated everything the same.

Moving on, Keene attempted to simply place a glyph next to the sigil to act as a trigger, but he found that it was difficult to impart cohesive will to the symbols of the trigger without it appearing as a complete sigil. From there, he tested several different words, debating between korad and glig before finally deciding on the prior after several pages of deliberation. With the bonding glyph in hand, Keene attached the glig to the curved line of the upper right yaq. For the actual trigger itself, however, Keene set about testing out several ideas on paper. He first isolated the specific kind of trigger he wanted to create: a physical release. There was the potential for many other types of activation, something that Keene was aware of but found that too many possibilities were little more use than limitations, which meant that for the sake of simplicity it was best to operate around a single form of release. The medium of touch wasn't entirely arbitrary either. In the quiet of the night, Keene had little need to break it with words meant solely for the testing of his magical abilities, thus it was much more simple to test with something quiet and unobtrusive.

Initially, he tried to use the simple rune of randjaq, the circle attached the the end of the right most line of korad with the dot and vertical line denoting the middle of the glyph. On its own, however, the symbol of "limit" wasn't enough. To create a true trigger, the glyph required some sort of condition to met, simply denoting it as a limit wasn't enough to affect the sigil. He cycled through various glyphs, altering the randjaq with abase, roza, djas, and dala but finding them all lacking in one way or the other. Even without auristics, he could see the inconsistencies in his attempts, everything falling short of performing suitably, let alone optimally. Instead of focusing on the trigger, Keene turned his thoughts towards what it was he wanted to achieve: release of magic via touch. To release the limit placed through the randjaq, Keene figured there needed to be, essentially, a secondary clause.

The language of Nader Canoch was unique in that it used a limited vocabulary to denote endless meanings. Vaknui Keene knew to be fire, but with the variable nature of Nader Canoch's meanings, he supposed that fire could be heat which, in a vague way, was close enough to touch. Drawing the angled point of vaknui off of the randjaq's vertical split, Keene re-penned the would be trigger several times until he felt satisfied. It didn't read quite as "touch" when he stared down at it, but the concept of "press" was applicable enough. Taking several more chimes to recreated the sigil he'd been working on for the majority of the night, Keene added in the trigger, linking it with the korad, before dropping a fresh bead of ice into the focus' center. Waiting a few ticks to make sure the barrier would hold, Keene pressed his thumb over the trigger. Nothing happened, and when Keene removed his thumb, he found there was a blotch of ink that had marred out the carefully crafted curves his trigger.

Recreating the sigil once more, Keene made yet another note to himself that tampering with or otherwise altering the trigger's glyph would void the intended effect. If it would have worked or not, he wasn't sure, but previous instances of trial and error had suggested that there was no way to tell without removing the confounding variable that had been his dirty thumb. In this particular case, it only required him to clean the wet ink from his skin rather than to remove the entire digit, though the thought did briefly cross his mind as a passing consideration of as many possibilities as he could process in the short span it took to carefully rub his hand against the top of his cloth covered thigh. Starting down at what had become the vaknuirandjaq - a circle with a vertical line splitting it in half, a dot in the center, and an angle who's point was a small distance above the central dot with both ends extending out and past the circle's confines - Keene prepared another drip of res, choosing stone out of little more than a short-lived habit that had formed during his repeated investigations of the night.

Once the spelled was stored, Keene waited about a chime, meditatively wiping his finger over the cloth of his pants before moving in one swift movement to place his thumb over the trigger. Similar to before, nothing happened immediately, but after a few ticks had passed - enough that Keene was preparing to draw his hand away - the stone popped out of the focus, the ink fading with the transfer of its power into the projected spell. Blinking, Keene pulled his thumb away, starting down at it with a contemplative frown. His touch was colder than most; his fingers perpetually chilled and lips typically several shades cooler. He supposed, as he'd denoted touch as warmth through the vaknui, that the trigger had required the actual heat of his finger rather than the pressure of his touch. With still many questions to pursue, Keene delved back into his efforts, occasionally taking time to pause and listen to the quiet whispers of the wind or to let the soft moonlight glow pale against his resting eyes. There was still so much for him to learn, and with the relative entrapment upon the ship, he had little more than time to do so.

[Pulren Marsh]

A Grade is Coming
Your Wave

A technically satisfying read. Keene is clearly his Master's student and will one day become one of Mizahar's legendary Wizards.

 

Keene

XP

• Writing 5
• Glyphing 5
• Drawing 4
• Auristics 2
• Planning 1

Lores

• Glyphing: Testing a Latent Glyph with Reimancy
• Auristics: Surveying a Glyph for Flaws
• Honoring Zulrav's Presence

Your Grader,


Pulren Marsh