The watchtower is covered with dust and loose pebbles, which the Dungeon Core happily licks up as I point out new areas in need of tidying.

  While the tower comfortably fits within the Core’s area of influence, prior to today I’d only ever visited it through the Dungeon Core’s interface. The stairs in this tower, along with the other four watchtowers, had partially or fully collapsed, so it hadn’t been high on my to-do list before some harpies began investigating the open windows toward the top. That was when the spell circles were discovered.

  They’d slipped past my attention before now as all their spell circuits had been broken by cracks in the rock. I still have dozens of lines connected to the throne that lead nowhere, the veins of magically conductive ore terminating before they reach any spells. Since all of these broken lines are somewhere underground, the only way for me to find where the break is, and what it maybe should be connected to, would be to use the Dungeon Core to mentally go scouring through the stone. Once found, repairing the lines themselves won’t be much of an issue. However, I’d like to search out the spells they’re designed to control first. I don’t accidentally want to turn on any of the Fortress’s functions before knowing what they’re designed to do. Especially given the city was never originally designed to float kilometers above the ground.

  “The second landing is blocked,” Mirzayael tells me from below. She’d probably have no problem scaling the tower from the outside herself, but she’s accompanying the crew of researchers we’ve brought to start deciphering the spell circles.

  “One moment.” I direct the Dungeon Core to start rebuilding the staircase and fixing any other structural damage we can find. This task takes much of my oversight and concentration (the Core really has no concept of structural integrity) so I pause, closing my eyes, as I set about the task.

  “This place is amazing!” Dizzi says. I can hear her running a hand over the floor, where the enormous, room-sized spell circle is inlaid. “Every day is something new! Do you suppose there’s even more buried underground somewhere no one would ever see?”

  “That sounds like a headache for future-me,” I say. The Core has eaten all the rubble that was blocking the second landing, and now I’m getting it to reinforce the ceiling that had caved in. Switching to the Map interface, I can see seven markers on that floor begin to move up the steps: two arachnoids, three felis, and two dwarves. I know there should be at least two more dracid and one harpy joining us on this excavation, but none of them appear on my map. It’s odd to know there’s people there but not be able to see them. I smile faintly. Ghosts of the Map Interface.

  “What’s weird is that the spell circles in each tower don’t appear to be the same,” Dizzy continues. “At least, from what I can make out. But why would all of them be different? You’d think you’d want the same functionality to be spread symmetrically around the city.”

  “Unless each is capable of acting over the entire city anyway,” I say, still focusing on fixing the lower floors of the tower. “Maybe each one builds on the other in some way.”

  “That would kind of suck, given the tower we lost,” Dizzi remarks.

  Yes, it might pose an issue. We’d lost the fifth watchtower when the Fortress first ascended. Though without knowing what spell might have been carved there before it was reduced to rubble (and eaten by the Dungeon Core without my permission, I might add, otherwise I might have been able to rebuild it like a bunch of jigsaw pieces,) there’s no sense in moaning about it. We’ve got four other towers to work through already.

  It takes five minutes for me to finish repairing the tower, and another ten for the researchers to make it to the top. Everyone but Mirzayael and the one harpy is breathing heavily by the time they reach the top floor. One of the dwarfs collapses against the wall.

  “We’re going to need to do something about that climb,” a felis says between breaths.

  The harpy who isn’t catching their breath—or rather, doing a good job at disguising it—is Salvia, a young guard and the child of Hetlanir that Mizayael had pointed out to me before. Their feathers are as white as snow, and their eyes an intense, bright blue, as if they were cut from an iceberg. Salvia catches my gaze and I smile. They return it with a curt nod, then turn away to survey the room, all business. I’m starting to understand why Mirzayael favors them.

  “Alright!” Dizzi claps her hands, and one of the felis’s ears flick in irritation. “Everyone excited to do some science?”

  This is met with a varying chorus of affirmations and groans.

  It’s a patchwork crew. No one is really technically a researcher, though I suppose Dizzi and I are the ones who come closest. But Chert, one of the dwarfs, has recently been volunteering assistance with Dizzi on her fireworks, since he has a stone affinity, and the two dracid worked under Torim to help build the temporary water holding system. I suspect these three would have flourished in some sort of academic environment. The rest are volunteers with at least a passing proficiency in the arcane, but I certainly don’t hold that against them; their interest in helping already speaks to their potential.

  Neither Fyreneth’s Keep nor the Lost Colony had extensive documentation on spellwork—most of that knowledge had decayed in Fyreneth’s library over the centuries—but between the two colonies, Dizzi was able to compile a fairly impressive list of known runes and their natures. I myself haven’t had much of a chance to dig into rune theory, but as I understand it, the symbols can be combined in various ways to create spell circles from scratch. Or in this case, help determine what an already designed circle might have been meant for.

  Conceptually, I’m enamored with this branch of magic. It reminds me very much of functions and code blocks. If I had more time to dedicate to the subject, I’m certain I’d have already lost weeks to its study. Maybe one day, when we’re no longer rushing to do everything at once, I’ll have an hour or two of free time in my days again. Isn’t that a nice thought?

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  “Let’s start with what we do know,” I say, gesturing to the spell circle inscribed on the floor. There are dozens of cracks running through it, though otherwise it is largely intact. I’ll have to work with Dizzi and the others to make sure that when I repair the cracks, the parts that intersect runes are properly reconstructed. Even so, this circle will be very simple to fix and activate, once we feel safe doing so. The spell circles we discovered in the other towers are more damaged, so this one will be good to start the researchers on. A practice excavation, if you will.

  I crouch, running a hand over a section of runes. I recognize a couple from spell circles I’d excavated with Dizzi when we were preparing the Fortress for its flight. Beckoning the researchers over to crowd around me, I gesture to a section of the floor. “Does anyone know the meaning of this? Besides Dizzi,” I add as she eagerly opens her mouth to answer.

  The room is silent for a moment, and I’m abruptly thrown back to similar onboarding meetings with new engineers too nervous and self-conscious to ask questions that might expose their ignorance.

  “Or the meaning of any of the runes?” I amend. I tap one of the squiggles cut into the stone. “I’m still learning myself, so whatever insight you have is valuable to me. This one, I think, is a logic rune. It connects the meaning of nearby runes to one another.”

  “Ah...” Chert makes a noise like he’d like to say something, but he clearly lost his nerve.

  I gesture to him anyway. “What can you tell me about it?”

  The dwarf pales at being put on the spot, but Dizzi snorts at his hesitation. “Oh, come on, Chert! I know you know it. It’s not like she’s going to bite your head off.”

  Dizzi’s helpful encouragement summons a deep shade of red to Chert’s complexion. Goodness, he’s the exact opposite of her, isn’t he?

  “It’s called ‘ko,’” Chert says, staring at the rune so as to avoid making eye contact with me. Ah, I remember such a time. “And it does connect the meaning of adjacent runes. Specifically, it designates the function of the rune in the negative direction to the subject of the rune in the positive direction.”

  Positive and negative referring to counter-clockwise and clockwise, respectively, I’d been delighted to learn. It was rather like the terminology used in physics. Some concepts seem to be universal.

  “Excellent,” I say. “I didn’t realize this rune was directional. That’s good to know. How about this one?” I point to another rune, one I know I’ve seen before in the spell circles Torim had helped work on for the water system.

  On a hunch, I pick out one of dracid. “What can you tell me about it?”

  “That rune is called ‘zie,’” she immediately replies. “It’s used to specify an area of effect.”

  Aha, so they do know more than they’re letting on.

  A felis jumps in next, volunteering another rune without me having to prompt anyone for it, and with that the ice finally seems to shatter. The group crowds closer, anyone who recognizes anything pointing out the rune and sharing what they know about it. Excluding Dizzi, they can collectively identify about half the runes in the circle. At that point I was going to finally let Dizzi jump in, who I can tell is about ready to explode from being excluded for so long, but then something remarkable happens. They begin to guess at meanings of the unknown runes from the context of their surroundings.

  That was precisely the next step I had been hoping to guide them to, and they’d gotten there on their own. I step back to watch the young researchers work, filled with pride. When you’re a parent, your goal is to prepare your kid for the world well enough such that you become obsolete. It’s a counterintuitive feeling for a mark of success to be that you’re no longer needed.

  Something about that idea snags on the back of my mind. It feels related to my Role Requirement, which is also contradictory, on the surface. The better I protect the kingdom, the further I’m able to go from it. But to leave it behind is to leave it more exposed, which should in turn make it less protected and reduce my range.

  Which itself should be a self-defeating feedback loop. Yet, that doesn’t seem right. I don’t have the full picture. There’s some other angle to this Role I haven’t yet fully grasped.

  After the group gets stuck on one section of the circle, I wave for Dizzi to join in.

  “Finally!” she cries. “Okay, so, first you guys were wrong about this one. It’s called ‘petu’ and you were close when you thought it was another connective rune, though it would be more accurate to say it’s a modifier…”

  I step back as Dizzi eagerly drowns the new recruits in a deluge of rune theory of which I’m sure they’ll only be able to remember a fraction.

  “It seems to be going well,” Mirzayael notes as Dizzi continues her lecture.

  “Better than I could have hoped,” I agree. “Solving this spell circle will boost their confidence going into the more damaged and difficult ones. At this rate, we might get all of them repaired before the week is out.”

  “Will you know what all of them do at that time?” she asks.

  “Theoretically,” I say. “It would be unwise to replace missing runes without knowing what should have been there in the first place. And to know what should have gone there in the first place, we need to understand what the circle was designed to do. We do that by reading the runes… many of which are damaged.”

  “That sounds circular,” Mirzayael remarks.

  I smile. “It is. But that’s why we have all these people here to work through it together. Different perspectives, different ideas, tackling things from different angles…” My mind drifts back to my Role Requirement.

  “What is it?” she asks, noting my troubled thoughts.

  “I wish I could say,” I admit. “It’s this Role Requirement and the Role Range. Why have a requirement to keep something safe, but the reward is to allow me to leave the very thing I’m supposed to protect?”

  “Maybe it’s not a reward,” Mirzayael suggests. “But rather a consequence.”

  I glance up at her. “What do you mean?”

  “You’re not being rewarded with a greater distance the more the Fortress is protected,” she says. “The more the Fortress is protected, the further you can leave it while exposing it to the same level of threat.”

  That’s when it all clicks into place for me. “Yes! Of course. You’re a genius.”

  Mirzayael snorts out loud, which causes one of the researchers to glance her way. “That’s a first.”

  “But I believe you’re right,” I insist. “The Range is a reflection of how well-protected the Fortress is. The more the Fortress becomes self-sufficient, the less this ‘Needs Protection’ factor is reliant on my proximity. So effectively, once the range has expanded so far as to encompass the world, my abilities will be a moot point because the city will have more power than anything I’m individually capable of.”

  Though I wonder… Even if I’m able to make my protection factor pale in comparison to the city’s ability to protect itself, will my value ever reach zero, or just become very small? Because if it’s non zero, and the city ever does come under attack, then it might activate my Role Requirement and punishing Sanity Stat regardless.

  Hmmm. A conundrum. But one I don’t need to be puzzling over now. And indeed, I won’t be able to answer this hypothetical without more data. For now, deciphering these spell circles and hooking them back up to the throne is more than enough to worry about.

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