A Year Older

by **Keene Ward** on May 20th, 2015, 4:58 am

The seventeenth day of spring, 515 AV

He was a year older.

Keene kept track of the days as easily as he breathed or blinked, and, as he gently rubbed the sleep from his rested eyes, his brain reminded him that yet another year had passed since he had been born. The information was hardly sentimental, as twenty one others had come and gone with only one carrying any significance. It was the way of things: he, like all mortal beings, aged right alongside the rest of the world, bound to the ever rotating wheel of time. He did not feel particularly older, per say, as he was only truly a day older than he had been before, a week older a week before that. If anything, it was frivolous information that ran through his head along with the list of everything he had yet to do before the sun set to signal the end of just another day on the island.

He readied himself, not bothering to dress beyond pants and his sandals. The heat had begun to return, and while he had been burned a few times in the past, his skin had begun to shift from pale to something that was not quite tanned, but enough to keep him from blistering. Though his naturally cooler state of rest made the heat far more bearable than it could have been, it didn't change the fact that he was simply more comfortable when his sweat was allowed to cool under the ministrations of the island's sea breezes. Finishing tying the last strap to secure his chosen footwear, Keene bound his water flask to his hip before sending a small marble of res to gather the flame and guide him into the main cavern.

Breakfast was on the table, the typical sign that Atziri had risen long before him to tend to the darkness in whatever what she saw fit, and Keene slipped some of the jerky into his mouth to thoughtfully chew as he settled into one of the chair, pulling over and opening his book that he had dedicated to the exploration of glyphing. Uncorking the vial of ink, Keene dipped a quill into it, scraping it against the side of the glass to remove most of the excess liquid before beginning. The scratching scrape of the quill's point familiar and almost nostalgic had Keene been prone to such reminiscence. Instead, he simply focused on the task at hand. His creation of a separate alphabet to better categorize his minor runes that would eventually make up the symbols themselves had come along quite nicely. The majority of them were either lines of different length and angles or a combination of squares and lines. It was clean, clear-cut, and the more he refined them, the better able he was to intone meaning.

The word "focus" was scrawled several times in practice before he wrapped the letters into a circle, repeating the word through the angular representations. At the bottom, he inscribed "path", repeating the process at three other points equidistant from the first. Continuing, Keene added in "wall" and "gate" withing the growing focus, until it was finished, partially smeared where his hand had caught at the wet ink and a bit crooked for his lack of premeditated measuring. Repeating the process several times until the rune was clean and well formed, Keene set down his quill, letting his eyes close as he did so.

His breathing slowed as he eased himself into the consciousness of his djed, drawing up and through him, guiding it toward his senses. When his eyes opened, he could see the liquid nature of the ink sinking into the page, extending its influence into the fibers. He could also see the intention, the natural, continuing monologue of what the words were intended to do. There was no power within them, but there was a vauge emptiness in the aura, a space left vacant to be filled with the strength of force that had been suggested during its creation. The aura itself was small enough that it wasn't too difficult to draw away from his investigations, satisfied that the glyph had been drawn correctly.

The djed shifted within him, seeping back along the proper pathways as he calmly guided it to the steady rhythm of his breathing. It took about a chime before he felt the magic fade, and when he next opened his eyes, he took a moment to appraise the work before him. The focus needed a barrier to hold the magic within it, at least for what he wanted to do with it. Picking up the quill once more, he dipped, tapped, and returned to neatly scribbling within the pages yet unsullied by his efforts.

by **Keene Ward** on May 20th, 2015, 5:59 am

He kept his hand off of the paper as he moved, a dull ache starting in his shoulder that he acknowledged but did not allow himself to succumb to. Instead, he centered his focus on the symbols, systematically adding and subtracting specific parts of the dashes, angles, and shapes until he had a proper suggestion of "containment". It was compact, a solid protective wall that, as he began to experiment with how far from the focus he wanted it, would serve its purpose well should it hold. The sound of the quill and the whisper of the candle light's flicker were the only companions the young man entertained as the chimes passed. Several drafts were tossed aside, traded for either efficiency or effectiveness, until he finally decided to place the barrier like a diamond about the circular focus. He pulled circular arcs around the sides as well, using "path", "guide", and "flow" as a redirection of the hypothetical magic contained within the focus.

In theory, the glyph was a holding cell of sorts for a spell, one that, if a trigger were to be added, would act as if he had been there to cast it himself. However, it was only in theory. He had tried to apply his magic to the glyphs themselves, but they had never held. His hand had always been too unsteady or his intention not quite strong enough. With the addition of his slowly growing auristics, Keene had hoped that he might find his mistakes and correct them, but without pushing himself far past the point of what he was comfortably capable of, there was little more he could do than double check the intention of line and the implication of meaning. Still, it was more useful than not, and it allowed him the practice to focus on something far less fascinating that his own aura in order to better practice the activation and deactivation of his djed infused senses. While he wasn't certain if his efforts would bear proverbial fruit, the training of both hands and soul was worth the attempts successful for not.

Dipping the quill once more, Keene steadily recreated first the initial focus, then the barrier around it. His hand moved slowly, occasionally shaking from the effort, but allowing for a far more clean and precise stroke. It took a good amount of time, but by the time he was done, the sigil was certainly the best he could under the restraint of his own lacking skill in the field. Setting the quill to the side once more, he drew on the gathering clouds of his djed, rainfall beckoned unnaturally upwards rather than in the proper direction, filling his senses with its strength.

He scanned the sigil as a whole first, looking for any inconsistencies and finding several right off the bat. The barrier and focus were, essentially, two separate entities. While he had tried to connect them, their auras clashed. The smooth, steady lightness of the focus hit the barrier's shadow like a wedge forced into a space far too small. It was the case at every point the barrier made contact with the focus, and so he focused his attentions on the junctions in question. He drew a bit closer, though the physical proximity only made a marginal difference. Time seemed to be the deciding factor in what he could and could not see, feel, taste, smell, and hear when it came to his analytical addition to his magical repertoire; with time, however, came consequences, most of which were bearable to a point, but suggestive of prices far more expensive than he preferred to pay.

Shutting his eyes once more, he slowly let the magic fade, not practiced enough to do so without a fair amount of time passing. As he let his breathing move gently in and out, the steady flow of air a soothing rhythm, he focused on the mental images he had kept on hand in regards to the glyph's auras. Simply intoning first one desire and then another wasn't enough. To be a single entity, the glyph needed to be written as such. It was something that auras suggested, but their suggestion was just that. It was not an explanation on how he might make the rune more cohesive, only that what he had done already was not the proper, nor the most functional.

When his eyes opened once more, Keene reached over to gather up several dried berries, slipping them into his mouth with a thoughtful press of his fingers to his lips. He considered the myriad of potential solutions, tossing aside those that were either too complex or too ridiculous, slowly gathering a workable pool of testable hypotheses as he methodically chewed his food. It was possible the glyph simply needed a point of true connection rather than a forced joining, a sort of gateway through which the overall energy could be converted into what it was he desired it to be. It wasn't necessarily elegant, but then again, he supposed that the vast majority of practical applications of arcane knowledge was relatively crass in comparison to the theories behind it.

by **Keene Ward** on May 20th, 2015, 6:30 am

He took a short break to stand and stretch, moving through familiar motions to loosen the stiffness that had begun to settle into his muscles. As he did so, he considered other potential ways to approach the glyphing predicament. He supposed it was possible to create the barrier first and feed the protection into the focus itself, allowing the barrier to act like more of a carapace than a true shield. It would give the rune a far more holistic feeling, but it would also run the risk of confusing the sigil into acting as a single focus rather than one bound by a barrier. Pressing his hands as close to the ground as he could, Keene let the stretch settle into his thighs and knees. There was also the possibility that the sigil could function just fine as long as he didn't connect the two, as their purposes had been clear even in the surface of the ink's aura. Returning to his chair, Keene settled back into it, tilting his head side to side to work out the last few kinks that remained.

With the quill back in hand, he set back to work, again moving slowly and deliberately, dipping the quill often but careful not to waste the dark liquid as he had always been with his writing supplies. It had been something ingrained into him from a young age, before he could even remember. As the quill's edge slid along the paper, leaving behind symbols that had started foreign and grown into familiar constructs, Keene focused on his task, the memories of the past only a distant whisper. He had spent his entire childhood in a similar state, practicing both Nader Canoch and Common alike, that he could better understand both languages and read at a proficiency far higher than one might expect from a child. He had always performed at a proficiency above what might have been expected from others, but never high enough. It had driven him, made him into the man he was, driven by an unconscious need for perfection or whatever was closest to it.

It wasn't something he ever thought about, and as he finished the focus, he still didn't. His drive for perfection, for flawlessness, was flawed in and of itself, as he was fully aware that perfect could not be obtained. In his consciousness, he knew this to be truth, but in his natural drives that were often unexplainable by the rational, analytical dominance of his mind, he never felt accomplished, never felt quite whole. There was always something more, something greater, some mistake he needed to fix. He wasn't a perfectionist in the simplistic sense of the word, but rather a seeker of perfection with a firm knowledge that what he sought could never be found. The lines of barrier had begun, Keene's focus as steady as the hand that only wavered on the occasion of an unevenness in the paper's texture. There was one perfection he had found, but that had long since left him.

When he had finished, he stared down at the work, eyes focused on the inspection of the "gateways" he'd constructed to better assimilate the auras into each other. Without his augmented sight, the connections seemed fluid enough. The lines were clean and placed in the ways he had intended, though if his intention had been flawed, he supposed it was entirely likely the entire sigil would register as such. Slowing breath once more, he settled back into his amplifying magic. Feeling it flood once more over and through his senses, Keene gazed back at the new sigil, eyes immediately drawn to the connections, and lips turning slightly downwards. The "gateways" had not had the intended effect. If anything, they confused the flow of the auras into an even greater mess. Where there had once been only two auras at odds at several points, there were now a handful more, as it seemed the "gateways" themselves possessed a variable two or three small auras, each expanding in their own, disjointed way.
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by **Keene Ward** on June 4th, 2015, 7:59 pm

Drawing his attention away from the mess he had made all the worse by his adjustments, he focused on the individual parts. First, the focus, with its subtle, greyish desire to absorb. The aura was tinged with the darkness of the ink, the once wet nature, and after a small investigation, a fluidity that Keene assumed to be from the nature of way he'd penned the lines. The barrier was next, solid and thick, like stone. The aura hung heavy about the words, no room to allow passage of anything, though there too was a fluidity to it, tucked away in a soft off-white like the focus before it. It was slightly different, more protective than free like the focus had been. Drawing back from the glyph, Keene forced his eyes to close, focusing his attentions on releasing the hold on his djed to settle back into a far less stressful state of body and mind to better investigate what he had found.

His eyes were beginning to feel the hints of strain, and his mouth had taken on the residual taste of ink. Even as he let his concentration draw inwards to push and pull the flow of his djed away from the path that it seemed to prefer more and more the longer he used the magic, Keene's senses continued to expand. He could taste more than ink. There was a subtle bite of a bitter substance at the back of his tongue that hid a subtle sweetness. Rather than investigation, Keene turned his focus away, forcing himself to shudder the magic to a halt. The djed drifted within him, throughout him, for a time, before it began to settle back into the proper places, or those close enough to them.

When again he looked at the paper, he found that it was slightly more difficult to draw the lines into focus beneath his far more unsteady gaze. The side effects of auristics were bearable, certainly, but they were by no means convenient. Drawing up his quill once more, Keene turned to a new page. Both barrier and focus had possessed auras that appeared to be what it was he desired to create. The problems were the connections, the lack of unity between the sigil as a whole. While he was already aware that his glyphs could not hold his magic in their current state, with the assistance of his augmentative magic, it was much easier to theory craft than to practice rudimentary runes on his body to see how it might affect a single use.

As the quill was dipped, Keene steadied his attentions on the work before him. This time, when he began the focus, he kept the lines rigid, linear. His hand moved slowly, drawing first an 'x' then penning a square about it. Within the four sections, he pulled a single line from the center point to about half way. He paused then, flipping back through the pages to find his subjective alphabet to spell "protection" while taking care to keep the fibers from brushing against the still drying focus. A few chimes were dedicated to getting a firm handle on the relatively long word, but once that was done, Keene shifted his focus back to the sigil-to-be. With steady hand and care to keep only the quill's tip to the paper, Keene started on the barrier. It was a simple square around the first, the word "protection" repeated only four times on each side. The remaining space was filled with a thin connecting line that made up the corners of each side.

From the corner's points, Keene pulled a slightly thicker line down to connect to the smaller square's corners, thereby connecting barrier and focus in a way he hoped would serve as intended. He repeated the sigil several times, each reincarnation adjusting for either cleanliness of line or geometric parallelism. When it was finally complete, Keene set the quill to the side, stretching out his fingers first before gently massaging his palm in the idle practice of working out the strain that his far less developed muscles had been put under. The sigil that stared back at his steady perusal was simplistic in appearance. There was nothing grand about it, however it seemed well suited to the purpose he intended for it.

It was a well, of sorts, a storage of magic that, if the barrier was disrupted, would be released towards whatever direction the rune was marred. The pathways that led from the focus to the barrier were meant to act as directional guides, allowing the magic stored through the focus to charge the protective layer of the barrier, creating a reactive defense mechanism. It was all theory, unfortunately, as any time he tried to store his magic within his runes, they fell apart. He was still too inexperienced for them to be much beyond simple ink on paper, but it didn't mean he couldn't experiment with their potentials.

by **Keene Ward** on June 4th, 2015, 8:29 pm

With a slow, steady breath, Keene let his eyes close. His djed shivered, an anticipation of what was to come, easily drawn forward from the previous uses. It flooded his senses once more, and the familiar taste of ink settled on his tongue long before he opened his eyes to stare down at the soft shimmer of the glyph's aura. This time, unlike before, it was a single entity. There were variations within it, where focus melted into pathway into barrier, however it was the cohesive solidarity that he had been striving to achieve. It was hardly perfect, however, as the barrier especially seemed to be lacking the proper intent of protection. Within the words of his safeguard, the solid density of the aura's greyish light shone strong and healthy. The corners, however, were much less so. They were fainter and thinner, implications that should the barrier be broken, the magic would escape along the weak points rather that the point of interruption.

The pathways, however, were hollow, a good sign as their entire purpose was to act as intermediaries between focus and glyph. The flow of the pathways, however, was not quite satisfactory. Three drifted outwards from the focus to the barrier, though the fourth seemed to move in the opposite direction, a fault no doubt caused by a break in his own focus during the application of the ink. The focus itself seemed fine, however. It had a draw upon it, a subtle desire tinged in off blues and greens that hinted there was something more there, that it was incomplete. All these things, however, were speculation. Keene saw little more than a mix of various colors and a host of supplementary sensational suggestions to guide his interpretations. Auristics was hardly a science, but it certainly provided him insight he otherwise would have overlooked.

Closing his eyes once more, Keene took hold of the magic's flow. This time, the ache behind his eyes had grown into a dull throb of pain, making the process of finding the djed's proper flow more difficult than before. It took him a fair amount of time, though with his sense of sight cut off both by physical and mental means, he finally reminded himself to breath, a short gasp of air as his djed once more settled. His head ached, but for the most part he was fine enough. Carefully closing the book, Keene recorked the vial of ink, a small marble of res drifted from his fingertip to wrap around the quill's point, shifting into water as he gently tapped it against the table to clean it of excess ink.

When that was done, he stood up slowly, the shift of blood within him further aggravating the ache of pain, but not so much that it kept him from movement. After a few tentative steps, he found his stride, and headed out to leave the cave. What was left of the res collected the candle's flame, bobbing just off to his right and slightly behind to light the way. He was a year older, but there was little else about the day that was different. He had a job to do, duties to attend to, and there was little else to consider.

As the wind greeted him with a familiar tousle of his hair and gentle guide upwards towards his arboreal charge, Keene spoke into it, a soft, contemplative whisper. "A songbird stood upon the sill, its bright red plumage ruffling soft. It uttered out a single trill, before once more it drew aloft..." A year older in a life he had never expected. He supposed, in a sense, it was simply the nature of fate and destiny: to present one with things that were both anticipated and wholly unprecedented. He still had a long way to go, whether it was to his grave or something greater, and as he made his way up the steep incline of the rocky face of the mountain, the poem was pulled away on the playful breezes, a soft, drifting nostalgia that faded with the final words. "Yet I wondered, could it have known, I thought of it a passing friend?"