Chapter 16

  Elias didn’t rest for long.

  Five minutes on the stool turned into ten hunched over the practice slate again, his fingers twitching faintly as he traced imaginary lines in the air. The room smelled of ink, stone, and old brass.

  He pulled a fresh slate closer and began sketching from memory. One by one, he listed out what he remembered.

  1. Flux (Nucleus)

  A rounded sigil, shaped like an open eye or ripple. Meant to represent motion, energy, or fluid force. Often used in spells relating to kinetic discharge, water flow, or heat transfer. Flux determined the essence of the movement—whether chaotic or smooth.

  2. Bind (Directive)

  A series of three intersecting chains, etched like links drawn tight. This rune was the enchanter’s glue—used to affix, hold, or stabilize a spell’s target. Paired poorly, it caused feedback loops. Paired well, it was foundational in armorwork and item durability spells.

  3. Ember (Nucleus)

  A sharp sigil, slanted to resemble a burning brand. Represented elemental heat—not just fire, but the latent energy waiting to be released. Extremely sensitive to directive placement. Pairing it with Expand caused conflagration. Pairing it with Contain resulted in slowburn cores.

  4. Sever (Directive)

  Appeared like a crescent blade turned sideways. When used in enchantments, it told the nucleus to cut or nullify its own effect—used in counterspell constructs, silencing enchantments, or temporary effects that removed themselves after a trigger.

  5. Trace (Conditional)

  Thin, spidery lines arranged like a skeletal tree. Often used to create mana ‘sensors’—effects that only triggered when something passed through or touched a field. Alone, Trace did nothing. Paired with Project and Light, for instance, it made detection wards.

  He stopped, flexing the stiffness from his wrist.

  All this was starting to make a strange kind of sense. Not just as symbols, but as a philosophy.

  You couldn’t just think in terms of “this rune equals this effect.” You had to think narratively. Structurally. Each symbol was a verb, noun, or modifier—but meaning shifted depending on arrangement. Runes didn’t cast spells—they built statements.

  Lee’s earlier comment echoed back: Runes don’t exist in isolation. They merge.

  Elias exhaled slowly and studied one of the etched practice tiles again. It held three runes in sequence: Flux, Project, and When Anchored.

  A standard launch statement—move something forward, but only while it was braced or tied down. Used often in grapple cables or arcane tethers.

  But… what if he swapped Flux and Project?

  Then it became a directive-led formation. The spell would try to project first—launching the target without fully identifying what was being moved. Likely to backfire unless stabilized by another rune.

  He frowned. The possibilities were wild. And dizzying.

  He’d barely begun scratching notes when Lee returned, two scrolls in hand and a new tile rack slung under one arm.

  “You look like you got hit by a chalk golem,” Lee muttered.

  “I’m ready,” Elias replied, standing.

  Lee snorted. “Sure you are. Let’s see.”

  He placed the tile rack on the table with a soft click. Six tiles gleamed faintly under the lamplight, each one arranged in a trio. Some combinations Elias had seen before. Others looked unfamiliar, even unstable.

  Lee didn’t give a dramatic speech.

  Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.

  “Six clusters,” he said. “Tell me which rune in each is a Nucleus, a Directive, and a Conditional. Then tell me what the effect is likely to be, based on position. Two wrong? You repeat the lesson from scratch.”

  Elias straightened, heart thudding faintly.

  His eyes dropped to the first tile.

  Cluster 1: Ember - Reinforce - Trace

  Easy. Ember was a Nucleus—elemental heat. Reinforce was a directive. Trace was a conditional.

  Effect: Strengthen latent heat only when something crosses a trigger field. Possibly used in trap cores.

  He called it out.

  Lee nodded once.

  Cluster 2: Sever - Flux - Contain

  Trickier. Directive first—volatile. Sever cut connections. Flux was motion. Contain as conditional gated excess force.

  Effect: Suppress internal kinetic reaction after triggering. Maybe a recoil nullifier?

  He explained carefully.

  Lee grunted. “Go on.”

  And so it continued—six sets, each harder than the last. One was a false combo. One used a visual variation of Anchor that Elias didn’t recognise immediately but remembered from a specific part of the book which had mentioned obscure variants.

  Elias stumbled once, hesitated twice—but caught himself before committing.

  When he finished, sweat dotted the inside of his collar.

  Lee nodded, slow and considering.

  “You didn’t fail.”

  “Yet,” Elias said.

  “You will,” Lee replied. “That’s part of it. But you didn’t today. That matters.”

  He started packing up the tiles, then paused.

  “Next session, we cover Layering. And scripting limits. You’ll hate it.”

  Elias exhaled, nodding.

  “Thanks.”

  Lee raised a brow. “For what?”

  “For taking this seriously.”

  The older man gave him a long look—then turned, muttering something about stupid kids with bright eyes and no sleep schedule.

  Elias watched him go, then sat back down.

  There was still so much to learn. But for the first time, he didn’t feel like he was just imitating his past.

  He was building his future.

  _________

  By the time Elias stepped out of the Artisan’s Guild, the afternoon sun had mellowed into a warm gold, casting long, dappled shadows across the cobbled walkways. His head throbbed lightly—not with pain, but saturation. Between the diagrams, drills, and Lee’s relentless corrections, the structure of the Runic Axis Model was beginning to settle in his thoughts like fresh-set concrete. Nucleus. Directive. Condition. The system felt clean, almost surgical in its precision.

  Too clean, in fact. Which was why Lee’s words lingered.

  “Same combination. Different result. Context is everything.”

  He rubbed his temples as he walked, mentally reviewing the example tiles: Ferrun, a basic metallic resonance rune, served as a Nucleus in most sequences. But when positioned with a temporal modifier—Delai—it didn’t just delay magnetic reaction, it created a recursive feedback loop that could invert the field’s polarity. Practical? Barely. Dangerous? Very.

  Hydrun + Elev + Thermic—one of the examples he’d seen carved into slate. At first glance, it was a basic temperature increase applied to water. But shift Thermic from a directive into a conditional and suddenly the whole array waited for ambient mana to rise before triggering. Subtle differences. Big consequences.

  The kind of thing you only really learned by getting burned. Or worse.

  He reached the small apartment above the leatherworker’s shop where he was staying—a temporary arrangement, but good enough. The room was compact, with a narrow window, a sturdy workbench, and a cot that creaked if you so much as looked at it too hard.

  Elias lit a lamp, then spread the bundle of notes and diagrams across the table. The hour Lee had given him before the test was ticking away, but his thoughts were too loud to just review flash tiles.

  He kept thinking about college. The way he used to hole up in the foundry until three in the morning, running heat-folding simulations until his goggles fogged up. The professors called him obsessive, but never told him to stop. Not when his prototype alloys held shape through three times the predicted stress curves.

  And this—this rune stuff—it scratched that same itch.

  He thumbed through his sketches again, eyes drifting to a simplified lattice: Hydrun as Nucleus, Boil as directive, Volume: Local as condition. A beginner’s array. Meant to warm a pot, not scald a room. Textbook simple.

  Elias stared at it.

  Then slowly, deliberately, he stood and walked to the corner shelf where he kept scrap materials.

  From a half-filled crate, he pulled a chunk of softwood—caro-pine, as it was labeled at the lumber shop. Spongy, light, and famously easy to carve, even with dull tools. The grain ran in smooth, shallow waves, almost inviting the knife.

  He set it down on the bench.

  Just one test.

  He sharpened his scribe, dipped it in a faint chalk-oil mix to keep the line visible, and began to carve.

  First the nucleus—Hydrun—three interlinked spirals nested inside one another, like ripples on a pond. His hands moved carefully, deliberately. The grain cut like butter. Next, the directive rune—Boil—a vertical slash intersected by six branching lines, each staggered slightly upward like steam rising from a pot. Then finally, the condition—Volumir, the rune for local containment. A tight box shape, engraved like a frame around the rest.

  He paused. Studied it.

  No major flaws. Lines were even. Depths looked right.

  He leaned in with a thin sliver of copper wire—his makeshift mana-threading tool—and pressed lightly into the grooves, whispering a soft ignition phrase to guide the channel.

  The wood warmed beneath his fingertips.

  Then brightened.

  Then—

  A sudden crack split the air like dry bone snapping.

  The entire block detonated in a flash of blue-white light.

  The bench slammed into his chest. He hit the floor sideways, ears ringing, vision smeared with static. Smoke filled the air in an acrid plume. The lamp had shattered. A scorch mark bloomed across the tabletop like a splattered sun.

  Elias blinked.

  Then blinked again.

  Blackness tugged at the edges of his mind.

  “…Oh,” he managed, as the world spun sideways.

  And then everything went dark.