[SO-Sylira]A Comprehension of Composition

[Keene Ward]

The tenth day of fall, 515 AV

Though night had become his unspoken ally in the pursuit of all things magic related, Keene had had a fitful morning of cold sweat and faceless nightmares, leaving him awake and alert in the midday. For the majority of the journey, he had been rising with the setting of the sun, an adjustment that had taken only a few days to grow accustomed to, as the very fact he was on a chunk of de-branched forest in the middle of a blue-green wasteland was more than enough to provide a suitable background for radical changes in his sleeping habits. However, his sleep was often plagued, making it difficult to remain asleep for extended stretches of time. The more weary he grew, the greater chance he had for the simple bliss of nothingness in his unconsciousness, and with the late nights of mental exhaustion, he had experienced quite a few dreamless instances. As he gathered up his pack, pulling the strap over his shoulder, he made his way out of the ship's sleeping quarters, bare feet padding along the smooth, well kept wood of the steps that led in a steep rise upward.

As he broke from the murky shadow's of the ship's hull, Keene moved a hand to guard against the bright rays of the sun's light that beat down from above like some incessant beast, battering him on all sides, allied with the whipping winds that slapped against the baggy hem his britches. The taste of salt was in the air, and he could hear the crew shouting to one another over the din of the dervish he had stepped into. At night, the winds tended to be calm, quiet, peaceful. In the heat of the day, however, they coursed over the ship's deck with powerful excitement, darting off towards distant lands, whispers of their journeys sounding just out of reach. There were a smattering of people on the deck, most just as windswept as the young man who took note of them, though the crew of the ship seemed far less bedraggled with their tanned hides and easy strides.

One of them, a man who could not have been many more years Keene's elder approached him, eyes slanted in a strange contrast of suspicion that danced with curiosity. "You..." He began with an unsteady tone, his deep, rolling voice ill-suited for apprehension. "You're one of the wizards, correct?" As he had only recently risen from his dream pocked sleep, Keene's brow raised without much thought as he found there was a sliver of surprise at the sailor's accent. It was much the same as his own and Mella's before him: clear and precise. The other man stared at him with growing anxiousness, something that was no doubt sparked by Keene's blank-faced, silent reply. Realizing he had yet to deny or confirm, Keene nodded, his head moving in a slow, easy rise and fall. "I thought so." The man pulled a familiar wood bound book from within his trousers, offering it up to Keene with a frown across his thin lips. "You left this... tome on the deck last night."

Keene moved a slow, deliberate hand to receive the book, finding that the sailor returned it to him with no resistance at all, though his eyes still held the same glint of wariness. "Thank you for returning it." There was little indication in his voice that the words carried with them anything more than what was expected from the social contrivances that had been put in place by the overarching had of whatever society lay claim to the denizens of the wooden island they all inhabited, still, the simple act of adhering to social protocol was enough to soften the sailor's uncertain gaze some as his lips found a more comfortable turn towards his ears.

"A Sahovan who has not forgotten his manners. I must say, out of all the things I've seen on this ship, that is by far the most remarkable." There was a teasing lilt to the man's voice, jocularity far more fitting a quality to the deep bass of tone. Keene only nodded, whatever humor had been intended falling flat against him as he turned his attention to the glyphs within the journal, carefully flipping through the pages, making sure to verify that the contents had neither been altered nor tampered with. He found it unlikely that he would have left the book unattended, though the night prior had been such that it was difficult to recall exactly what he had done before casting himself onto the lumpy mattress of his temporary quarters. "Right. I forget most of you aren't very keen on jokes. My apologies." The man inclined his head in a pseudo-bow, one that Keene glanced at with little more than a flicker of interest before turning his attention back to a particularly suspicious page.

"Did you take my book?" Calm grey-green eyes rose to meet the light blue of the sailor's, their steady impassivity a start contrast to the growing fear that sparked in the other man's gaze.

"N-no I-" He raised his hands in a gesture of innocence, but all Keene noticed were the smudges of ink on his thumb and forefinger. As soon as the sailor realized his mistake, the hands were quickly brought back to his sides as his expression turned from friendly to mostly frightened. "I'm sorry! I thought- I don't know... I've been watching you and-" He stumbled over his words, the uncertainty and fluster almost comical had Keene been of a mind to notice it. "N-not like that, I just wanted to- I thought I might-" Finally, his blabbering came to halt as he let out a frustrated sigh. "You sleep heavily, more so than the other mortal mages, and I thought I could learn something of your craft from that book." He shrugged his shoulders, finally settling on a candid expression of apology on his features. "But even when I copied the pictures, I couldn't make anything happen."

Keene blinked, his blank stare steady as stone as he stared back at the sailor who's apprehensions had begun to swell in a pattern much like the rolling waves around them. "Of course nothing happened, it's just a sigil." He drew both quill and ink from his bag, fumbling somewhat with them and making sure to keep a tight grip on his writing implement as the winds that rushed about them threatened to cast it away. Dipping the nip, Keene drew a basic focus, barrier, and trigger - using the same vaknuirandaq as he had developed nights previous - taking a few chimes to get everything properly established. The sailor, uncertain whether he was meant to stay or not, lingered with an unsteady sway, his feet ready to carry him away at the slightest sign of trouble. He almost fled when Keene extended his hand to drop a marble sized stone from the pale blue mist that gathered around his palm into the sigil, but when the book was once more extended towards him, curiosity got the better of him. "Aim the focus and place your finger there." Keene pointed to trigger before releasing the book back into the sailor's custody. Glyphing, Keene had found, was different from other magics in that if one were to learn it without any other mastery over the arcane, the school was as useful as drawing or any other similar two dimensional art. As far as he was concerned, there was little harm in showing the man why his attempts had failed, though he had no intention of teaching the sailor anything more than that simple lesson.

[Keene Ward]

The sailor gave Keene and uncertain look, to which the young man responded with a dead pan stare. "A-alright." He turned the book so that it face away from them, towards the salty spray of the ocean's windswept waves, and carefully pressed his finger to the sigil's trigger. Unlike the many times Keene had used the command, once the heat of the sailor's hand met with the vaknuirandjaq, the pebble was immediately expelled, darting off into the air to disappear with an inaudible plink beneath the water's surface. There was an unmistakable rush of excitement in the sailor's bright blue eyes, but when Keene extended a hand, the book was returned with a composed nod of the other man's head. "I see. Thank you, mage. That was... very interesting." Keene nodded as he recorked the vial, slipping it back into his bag as he kept a firm grip on the quill in his hand, holding the book between his side and elbow. "Could you... teach me how to do that?"

"I could, but I won't." Keene's tone was hardly taunting, but the words hit against the sailor with far more effect that the waves that were brushed off by the sturdy hull of the ship's exterior.

"Why?" Any semblance of apprehension or fear had been quickly exchanged in favor of curious tenacity. In a way, there were no better times to be initiated into the swirling mists of magical mystery than on a ship filled with those who were intimately acquainted with the arcane. To the sailor's benefit, one who knew nothing of magic was wholly unaware of what magic required, though it was not something that Keene took into consideration with his reply, nor even a thought that crossed his mind.

"I have no intention of taking on a student nor creating a protege. Ask someone else. I have work to do." With that, Keene carefully picked his way over to the crates that had become his work space, a phenomenon that many of the other wizards had seemed to take part in, as few wandered into others' domains save to get to the places they had designated as their own. During the duration of the trip, there had never been anyone else who had laid claim to the firmly secured, wooden boxes, but as he set his inkwell to the side, partially shielded from the whirr of the wild winds that danced in an erratic manner as they bolted off from the waves of the sea, the sailor followed him, a determined glint in his eyes.

"I don't need to be your student, and... well, I don't really think I'm protege material." He offered Keene a grimace of smile, one that was returned with a slight arc of the young mage's brow. "I just want to learn a little magic, that's all."

If Keene's expression could have become more blank than it had been before, the sailor's final words would have been the catalyst for such a total lack of emotion to present itself then. "There is no such thing as a 'little magic'. Please go away."

The sailor lingered for a time, posing questions that were fielded with Keene's quiet refusals, until the other man finally settled to watch him from the opposite end of the ship. With the distraction somewhat removed, Keene turned his attention back to the book, testing different glyphs on the pages, penning his thoughts of theories into potential applications. The first was a rune similar to what Master Rayage had painted on him during their first meeting. It was comprised of a single hea, a curved arc with a dot in its crook and a smaller line from its bend, and a dala, a similar "u" shape with vertical lines coming out of either side. The dala was positioned such that the ends of its arc were only about a fingertip's distance from those of the hea, creating a broken, oblong oval that was to serve as a path through which djed could flow and become res more easily.

[Keene Ward]

The sigil itself wasn't something entirely useful to him. The production of res had become second nature to him, the whirl of his inner djed rising to the surface with all the force of a hurricane always carried with it a sense of loss, but it had become expected, familiar even. The pathway that the penned onto the paper before him, methodically drafting out several different instances, testing length of line and boldness of stroke, was an experiment in what the magic might look like if he created glyphs of similar intent to those he'd seen before. The massive circles that had encompassed the testing ground came to mind, but he had been unable to ascertain what any of them might have been used for. Some had drawn power while others had rejected it, a seeming mess of information that had had about it a sophisticated air, one that Keene had only just been able to pick up but been unable to pick apart.

Though uncertain, Keene began to pair various glyphs together, testing paths and switches, barriers and focuses, exploring less practicality and more the limits of what was feasible given his current ability - post arcane and mundane, as his hands had grown slightly more capable in the days he had spent with quill gripped tight. The winds whipped around him, but his pages remained mostly unruffled, his alcove providing just enough cover to still the invisible onslaught that pulled and tugged at his hair and pant legs. He moved slowly, almost to the rhythm of the steady rock of the ship, drawing and redrawing every symbol, staring down at it with a critical eye, then starting again. It was similar in scope to how he had first begun to learn to write in Common. The repetition was hardly cumbersome, as each time Keene experimented with a new concept, a fresh take on what the symbol might represent or what it could be used for.

As he worked, the light of the evening had begun to set in, golden, billowing clouds that had rolled in at the behest of the wind's beckons, and the gusts had begun to settle, simmering into gentle whispers that ran over and through the deck's various structures. In mirror, Keene's efforts had also stilled some, his focus drawn to the nature of the paths he had been experimenting with for the past few bells, unhindered by the occasional, curious stare of the sailor that had approached him before. As far as the young mage was concerned, the sailor was as trivial and distant as the word "Syliras" or "Sunberth". Out of sight, out of mind, as it were. Instead, the ink of the page had become the world, and his quill the only influence upon it.

The magic of auristics was one that Keene still required a fair amount of time to draw upon. It was a matter of chimes, but a glyph, properly traced and placed, could reduce that a fair amount. He still remembered how it had felt when the glyphs had been placed upon his arms, how the djed had been far more responsive, similar to the nature of his djed in the present. Glyphing could provide him an ease of control over the more subtle magic of the senses, Keene imagined it could prove useful in situations where a quick reading of an aura might be the difference between a continuation of existence or an end to the same. He had narrowed down the potential glyphs of the could-be sigil to three: korad, zapatl, and ala. Of the three, the ala seemed the most appropriate, as when he drew upon the djed, it was a transference of his entire self to his senses, a controlled stream of power. With that thought in mind, Keene added a pond to the collection of potential symbols, imagining that the balance provided would be relevant to the conservation of his energies.

[Keene Ward]

With a smaller pool to consider, Keene set about testing out various combinations. Those which he considered to be the most likely to achieve success were given second seat to those which were questionable at best. At first, he began with a combination of the korad, ala, and zapatl, creating an amalgam of various instances of word combinations, most of them nonsensical as far as Keene could read them, and all of them more mess than usefulness. More one for a process of elimination to avoid any oversight of potentially useful material, Keene methodically continued, wetting his quill, pressing the nib against the pages, and leaving behind monstrosity after monstrosity. After a time, however, he found that there were acceptable fusions of the glyphs, one in particular reading as alas koradizapatl. Though a definite translation for the more complex implications of the ancient tongue was something that Keene had always struggled with, it was an implication of growing ties: a concept that could be taken figuratively or liberally, as was the nature of the language.

The various combinations of one glyph with another, however, were all successful in their own ways, crafting new words and lofty concepts that Keene could understand at a rudimentary basis. It was no so much immediately useful information as it was a confirmation that the runes acted just as the words might, combining with relative ease to create new concepts. A puzzle, one that Keene had both time and will complete, was had presented itself before him in the form of an entire magical discipline. It was, oddly enough, invigorating, though it was something that Keene was not wholly aware of, finding only that the amount of time he spent with his nose in his journal, busily scribbling away the bells, had little effect on his interests, always searching, always testing, always learning. Given the relatively cramped quarters of the ship and the far less dangerous nature of the immediate area that was mostly empty, watery expanse, Keene was free to test his mettle against the seemingly endless conundrum of proper glyphing.

There were, however, several impeding factors, one of which presented itself as Keene turned the page, a familiar set of feet catching at the corner of his eyes. "Can I at least watch?" The nature of tenacity that had served Keene so well in his time on the island - for better or worse - seemed to be a quality that was as variable as the meanings of the runes he had been inscribing for the past few bells. With a deliberate motion, Keene closed the book, turning his eyes to rest with a steady, stony stare upon what had become the ridiculously hopeful gaze of the other man. Djed shimmered off of Keene's skin, an iridescent haze that moved along the subtle currents of the wind, wrapping around the unsuspecting sailor, testing the nature of the man's being and pulling away hints of information here and there before it returned, all the while Keene's silent focus set on gathering what it was the man was up and into the rolling cloud. Ticks passed in mutual silence as the tasked material wrapped around the closed tome, the miniature crystals of ice encrusting the object in a growing layer of hoary frost, small filligrees incorporating with the old, a new task to a shield already present.

Once it was done, a chime or so had passed. The man seemed almost ready to speak again, but Keene was just fast enough to put an end to whatever potential foolishness bubbled from within him. "If you can open this book." There was little else Keene could think of other than to give the man a challenge he could not surpass.

[Keene Ward]

Impassive eyes observed the sailor's futile attempts to break open the tome, the gentle flare of iridescent light present at all points were the man made contact. Neither tooth nor nail were able to penetrate the frosty barrier, and Keene waited patiently until the man finally tossed the book back at him, a frustrated hiss of air snaking out from between his teeth. "The petch did you do to it?"

"Magic." The blandness of his tone hardly made the word seem any less sarcastic, though it was said without any ulterior motive. He had given the man a lesson in the form of that which he wanted to be taught: opening the book was as impossible for him as it was to learn how it was impossible in the first place. Rising from his place upon the crate, Keene flexed his feet to stretch the stiffness of his legs before kneeling down and picking the book up off of the worn wood of the ship's deck. With a blank stare, he waited for the sailor to leave of his own volition, but the man stared back with a frustration to equal Keene's lack of one.

"I've tried to be nice, but if you don't teach me I'll tell the captain-"

A brow was raised, only slightly, as Keene interrupted him, his voice as cool as the dark spaces left by the setting sun. "Tell him that you were trying to learn magic from a Sahovan?" Though subtle, there was a slight bite to Keene's words, something that was not quite a threat, but close enough to it after the lack of emotion in everything he had said before.

He paused, uncertainly clouding the confidence he had held only ticks before. "The captain-"

"Has ordered magic use be contained, if at all." Keene's neutral features had once more gained precedence over his voice, the soft tone releasing whatever hints of emotion it had held before. "Teaching magic is hardly containing it."

The sailor shook his head, frowning in a more reserved sort of irritation. "Well, you're doing it."

Keene blinked, his eyes as impassive the stern mast beside them that rose undaunted into the fading light of the sky. "I am a mage." Each man stared at the other for a time before the sailor finally threw up his hands in a mix of disgust and defeat.

"Fine. You win."

He had not thought it a competition nor game, but as the sailor left in a huff to do what needed to be done to prepare the ship for the moonlit darkness of the night, Keene settled back down onto his perch, taking up quill and ink once more. He supposed it was not a bad idea to continue to adjust and increase the tasks upon the tome, as the more he wrote within it, the more potential there was for it to become valuable in the sense of knowledge to be gleaned. It would be a process, he was sure, but for the most part, it would simply require vigilance and maintenance, two things that he was not lacking in. With a slow, steady meter, Keene started back into his queries, further exploring the potential of paths through the most comfortable koradala, an offset of the two vertical lines of the ala with a horizontal connecting them. The half arrow of the ala's left line was still present, and it seemed the more angled, the more speed of the rise was implied, where as the more obtuse the angle, the more controlled.

With a notation of pond at the koradala's base, there was balance suggested in such a way that the djed was to be processed as an entity already in balance, similar to a filter to stop the flow of anything that did not meet its requirements. As for the glyph itself, Keene tested the markings in different capacities, bending the lines as they might appear on the curve of his chin or the slight dip of his temples, checking against the original sigils to see if the new ones still held as true. It was uncertain work without practical testing, but as glyphing was a magic closely connected not only to will but intuition as well, Keene found his current method of preliminary testing to be effective enough for theories. The work was time consuming, with how often he needed to re-dip his quill and trace and retrace his efforts. Without any further interruption, he was freed to work until his eyes were unable to remain open and, in the distance, light began to creep through the pale grey sky of the early morning.