Chapter 30: Chapter 30. Impractical Magic

I woke up a little later after dreaming about, of all things, a short little vacation a buddy and I had taken to a candy shop in Australia, where we had learned how to make cut candies, and chocolates. In the dream I kept working at the puller, shaping, prodding, and folding the heavy confection into rolls and creating long rolls of decorative candy into tiny rolls that you could cut off with a knife, only to have the little cartoon shape you were working on displayed on both sides of each tiny round piece.

I had cut dozens of little pieces of hit candy off with my bronze butcher knife and was letting them cool, each one displaying a different shape of a piece of an incomplete knot, and each one having little words that were just too small to read, when suddenly I was aware of the faint light that my darksight and Mae’s slender hand on my shoulder, gently shaking me awake.

“Wash?” I asked in plain, obvious common, looking up at her.

“You were speaking in your sleep, you keep repeating the same twelve words over and over again.”

“Not in…” I started.

“No,” she interrupted. “They were in draconic. kerro, bek, triska, srera, fatru, muurt, trarg, shokas, brul, brakkt, druum, and yorgu.

I nodded, “What do they mean?”

Mae looked thoughtful. “Kerro means pushing and pulling, or like, moving, with a modifying ending like Kerroayk, which, I think means go away. And Yorgu means to twist or change, but the rest I don’t really understand except that they are parts of other words like shokastrarg is what they use to describe the breaths of some dragons, and Bekshokasillidruum is supposed to detail the entire complicated process they use to create Dragonsteel. Dragons are so smart that often they can say a single word that means entire books to each other, and I have seen two dragons resolve entire philosophical debates, with the accompanying violence and destruction, with the word grokay.”

She sighed and shook her head, “I don’t actually speak Draconic, but where I come from, dragons are considered lesser divine messengers and signs of fortune and luck. I have seen them more than once, and sometimes they fight in the skies. They are revered and given offerings, and don’t often attack civilized folks when they are kept appeased.”

There was something familiar about those words, tied to the dreams, I seemed to have a connection between those and the candies with knot fragments on them.

“Oh, and you grew. A lot. You are like Cassie’s height now, and your shirt is getting a little tight.” she added.

I was starving, really starving. I still had two of the rolls left and I quickly ate one, which helped.

Mnemosyne? I thought.

Yes, I think that unlocking the keystone evolution might have also unlocked a connection between our Runic knotwork and Magical Crafting. Each type of crossing curve on the runes means something, and your sleeping mind kept pulling the meaning together with the knot type and how it would be rendered in three dimensions.

Three dimensions?

Yes, normal runework is two-dimensional, although there can be runes at different depths, creating vastly more complicated and possibly incomprehensible designs without actually taking the enchanted object apart, layer by layer.

That makes it ideal for simple two-dimensional enchantments, which can be either imbued for permanence with a core or briefly charged by someone with the appropriate essence or channeling to create the essence. That’s one of the reasons dungeon cores are so popular, not only do they tend to provide nearly endless essence, they can conform to nearly any essence type and charge it. A staff, for example, that is designed to accept holy mana by a priest, that has a dungeon core attached to it could provide that healing to anyone with any sort of energy charging it, from fatigue to death magic… or it could simply be allowed to charge from ambient energy and used even by those with no external essence at all.

Your knotwork, on the other hand, can exist in three dimensions. That’s why you have had to use repeating patterns of the same knots… with your two-dimensional representation, barely a fraction of the available energy assumes the proper configuration, so you have to keep repeating it again and again in order to improve the strength and hold more energy.

So, if I made knotwork that was embedded in something, it could hold, and charge, a lot more energy? Greater magical effects?

Yes. But you, personally, cannot hold much energy. Energy aspects would allow you to channel dramatically more, but as you mentioned, it would be noticed, and make you a huge target for anyone with magical sensing whenever you used it. Most Mages, however, have energy or its AO equivalent in the double or triple digits. That’s how much essence you can contain at any one time. If you created even a single fully 3-dimensional knotwork concept, especially for a passive improvement, you would have to spend days charging it, again and again, to simply give it enough energy to work.

Active effects are much cheaper, but they are also expandable. A knot to make your dagger return after throwing it, for example, might only take a single session to charge, but each time you used it, you would have to recharge it and drain most of your energy, much like when you use your tail.

Your physical attributes have improved with your size and evolution, but not your energy or social ones.

I took a look at my new, doctored-up character listing

 

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