Chapter 8: Chapter 8 – Runework

Amber is adamant that we were done talking, and she has a damn good point. The power storage matrices in the runework started charging the minute I took down the Thousand Maws, and they’re still charging now, even after all of our … delays and rests.

None of it makes any sense to Amber. She’s used to Divine Temples, which I guess have a direct, involved overseer who has a shard of a God in them to help guide their management of the Temple. In a Divine Temple, you don’t get this kind of runework, with ambient-power draws that run through conversion matrices and into storage glyphs.

“Is this… necessary?” My Paladin’s getting antsy. “This analysis you’re performing.”

“Hm.” I pause for a moment to think about it, and then I’m back to staring at the secondary storage glyph. “Yeah. Especially if other places don’t have this kind of thing. I don’t want to pass up on the chance to see how it works, not the perfect, Temple-quality version.”

“How long?”

“Two minutes.” The power flow is fascinating. The ambient mana, mana otherwise unaffected by adjectives, pulses fast enough that I can’t get a clean reading with the Visor, only a sort of aggregate, vague statistical inference. It’s familiar, the speed of it and the amplitude both, in that sort of I’ve seen these terms in dives way. That, though, had the implicit codicils of but then I went on to the next problem and that equation was relevant for less than a minute, because in the hypothetical where either of those isn’t true, I’m dead or worse and so are a number of people measured in tens of millions at a minimum.

I don’t share any of that with Amber. Well, I tell her about the mana pulsing, and she calls it the heartbeat, or maybe Heartbeat, all capitalized-like. The thing is, what goes into the actual storage part of the storage glyphs is totally different. It’s not steady, but also not the sinusoidal curve of the heartbeat. It takes me most of the two minutes to figure it out, and when I do, the a-ha feeling is something I can’t describe.

“This is amazing. I’m not amazed, I’m in awe.”

“So you said, my lord.”

I ignore her, giddy. “The storage glyphs, they’re fractals, I knew that bit, and the energy gets stored in some sort of n-dimensional manifold mathematically defined by the fractal, that’s pretty obvious. Basic! But elegant, you can extend the manifold a lot, I’m not sure there’s a practical upper limit on how much energy you can store in a glyph. I mean, we’re talking ‘boil the oceans’ level of energy in just this decimeter-square sucker right here. Um. Fourish inches on a side?”

That gets Amber’s attention like the switch of a circuit. “I know Arcane units, barely. But truly?”

“Yeah.” I pause for a moment. Arcane units. So that’s what they call the standard forms. I should probably get used to talking in the vernacular form. “Well, I mean, no, there is a practical upper limit, if you look at it in its context, because there’s only the one path in, and it’s only as thick as it is thick, and I don’t mean the matter that makes the glyph that defines the equation that creates the fractal. I mean, sure, you can use a hyperspatial dimension, and then you have -”

“Time,” she says, interrupting me. “Do you still need to study this specific glyph?”

I’m in the middle of vocalizing the yes when I realize that no, actually, I don’t, I just really want to explain what’s happening to her. “No.” I try not to let the disappointment in my voice be audible, but by the way she pauses pulling on her gauntlets, I’m about as good at subtlety as I ever was.

“Adam?”

“It’s nothing.” I muster a smile for her, and then I get enough out of my own head to look at her for the first time in, oh, at least five minutes, and the smile isn’t fake anymore.

That’s enough for her, and she finishes pulling her gauntlets on, doing a flexibility exercise through the metal to check the fit and running through her weapons - swords, axes, hammers, knives, and a weird basket-shaped thing whose functionality I don’t immediately get - before dismissing them. The next room isn’t a combat encounter, but there’s no use in being sloppy, and most of the traps have some sort of oh, shame I didn’t have a shield there, now I’m bleeding and poisoned component to them, so it’s a good thing that Amber’s got one, anyway.

We walk through the threshold, and the blurs - neat trick, that, and a new one - resolve. It’s a room that looks a lot less real than the antechamber; we’re back to the notional-stone walls, and no extraneous features. That makes it easy to evaluate, at least. A few seconds of looking around are enough for me to know that she doesn’t need me for this round, which is good, because I’ve still got math and n-spatial topology on my mind. Not enough to forego watching her move, though. Even blurry, Amber’s an absolute vision to watch as she slides under a swinging axe, pops up onto her feet, jumps onto a horizontal axe, and squats on it in motion for just long enough to lunge and - Void, unravel me feet first - swing up onto one of the other scything axes, feet braced above where the blade widens. That whole sequence takes twenty-seven tenths of a second, according to the Visor’s interface, and she’s out of sight as soon as she leaps off of the axe she’s riding at its apex.

I have nothing better to do, so I’m back to studying the runework scribed into the notional stone on this side of the doorway. I’m not as concerned with the storage bit anymore, now that I know how it works, but even knowing how the charge-discharge square wave works in theory doesn’t mean that there aren’t more details to puzzle out. It’s a warmth in my gut and a soaring feeling when I get the last piece of the trick; everything is flowing through the storage glyph.

I’d already figured out that the fractal has an input limitation through the trunk, where the ambient-mana collector feeds power in via something that’s like a capacitance system or fill-valve, something that very elegantly converts the very slightly - very very slightly, the Visor was almost not sensitive enough to detect the downstream effects of it - variable sinusoidal heartbeat into a square wave of power. But that power flow isn’t bypassing the storage glyph, now that the draw is active; it’s streaming through it, it is being pulled through it, pulling power from the basically-infinitesimal points in spacetime that anchor the manifold in which the power is actually stored.

That power isn’t a steady draw, but even at its lowest it’s higher than the top-end of the charging draw. No surprise there, but it does mean that the storage glyph acts as yet another modulation-conversion mechanism, along with all of its other functions. It also means this rune wasn’t just a one-and-done like a summoning rune, not that I can’t tell that from the fact that it’s still running and not a scorched impression on the wall. I could - no. I stop myself and take a step away from the wall.

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I am not going to attempt to disable the room full of traps by cutting off the flow of power out of the storage unit. The number of ways that’s a bad idea isn’t even short. One, it’s disrespectful to Amber’s abilities, being a statement that she can’t do it alone. Two, it might get her killed, because things will stop behaving predictably. Three, there could be failsafes. Four, there might be backlash. Five, okay, I can’t think of a fifth one off the top of my head, but that’s four-nothing.

I stay that added distance from the rune anyway. No sense in courting the temptation to do the experiment.

That’s about when the whole thing grinds to a halt, anyway. I’m watching the last glyph in the four-glyph sequence of the rune - collector, converter, storage, and mystery glyph - when it happens, and it goes dark, the power running down towards it from the fractal branches of the storage glyph heading back into the storage manifolds.

I dismiss my visor. Interesting. Amber’s footsteps are audible, the metal in her boots beating a pattern against the floor in what has to be on purpose, given how silent she usually moves. I don’t know why she’s doing it, but it lets me be looking in the right place when she hops over something I hadn’t even realized was a half-height wall about two meters - six feet, I tell myself - above the floor. She pops out of the featureless blackness, hanging perfectly balanced by one hand for a sec while she glances down, and then she drops the nine or so feet down.

Her knees bend when she lands, but that’s all the respect she gives the height. She’s grinning, and I’m grinning at her, and she’s sweaty and beautiful, and I kiss her without a second thought. She breaks the kiss to grab the bandolier of cleansing charms she’d left behind, sighing as it presumably starts to clear the sweat, and kisses me again.

“Anything good?”

“Two scrolls, a potion, and an undersized buckler.” She grimaces. “Brought them all. I may ask you to tutor me in… runework more seriously than I’d intended.”

I blink at her twice, and then break into a grin. “Great! I mean, wow. What was the second half like, with… huh.” I’m distracted almost immediately, swiping both of my hands outwards and then rotating them halfway and turning them for a second to find what I’m looking for. “I was going to say three rewards, but the rune on the outside looks more like it was a two-reward room.”

She nods in that sort of exaggerated way she’s started doing when I’ve got the Visor up. “The buckler, and the others.”

“Huh. Can I… no. Rooms, then loot.” It’s a twist of will, a burst of mana, and a shift in attitude to dismiss the Visor. My vision’s clear again. “Oh, starfire. I should have kept the Visor up long enough to check the scrolls. Unless you were able to read them? They hardly count as checking the loot, if one of us can just read them.” I add that last bit belatedly, knowing that she’s trained enough to recognize most of the basic ones and some of the common, more-complex ones.

She’s giving me a funny look. “No, Adam. Hence, the tutoring.”

“Oh.” I blink. “Oh! Because. Oh.” The scrolls are in my hand, so I guess she handed them to me while I was confused. “Aw, well. I’ve seen these before. Putty, I call this one, conjures a kind of paste, hardens after a few minutes. I don’t know its System name.”

“Caulk.”

“What?” I stare at her. “Non sequitur much?”

“C-a-u-l-k.” She spells it for me, and I start laughing. She stops holding her own laughter in, or finds my laughter funny or whatever, and we’re laughing together. “What? That’s what it’s called. We use it for weather-proofing, mostly.”

“Okay, okay.” I take a few deep breaths, calming down, and take a look at the other scroll again, just to be sure I recognize it. “This one’s more interesting. It’s a Stabilize variant. It’s got an extra collection-storage glyph, the scroll kind without an ambient mana hookup, and a dispersal glyph. I think maybe Mass Stabilize, or Cone of Stabilization, or something like that, but I haven’t seen the glyph in action more than two times, so I don’t know how it does its... dispersal thing. Knowing what these other glyphs do, I think I’ll be able to figure it out if I’m Visored for this one.”

“Two times? Safaran’s eyes, two times?”

“What?” I slide the scrolls into the pouches at my belt, one each into the left and right pouches.

“It only took you - Adam, how did those fit?”

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