Solo A Question of Scrollwork

[Alses]

Timestamp: 1st Day of Spring, 513 A.V.

It might have been the first flush of Spring, and most of the snow which had swaddled Lhavit throughout the Winter might have melted and gushed from the gargoyles lining the skyglass bridges, poured through balustrades and railings and out into space, and gone roaring down the valleys of the Misty Peaks – causing some flood damage to the terraced farms which surrounded the celestial city – but there were still patchy remnants hiding in the sheltered lees of Lhavit's imposing buildings, and the cool mountain air, especially in the evenings, was still flecked with tiny flakes of ice and snow. It served as a reminder that Winter was dying slowly, hanging on for grim death in the high mountains of Kalea where, in truth, it never really went away.

In Alses' cosy little room, however, the considerations of the weather and the flooding at the base of the mountain peaks which had put the pathway to Port Tranquil more-or-less out of action simply did not signify. There was plenty of pale nokkochi wood in her fireside scuttle and the flames leapt and danced merrily in the grate, throwing out heat and light and releasing a subtle fragrance into the air, mixing and commingling with the smell of attar of roses and the indefinable, paper-and-ink melange of books.

That was all Alses really needed to be, well, if not happy, then at least content with her lot. She wasn't one of those students complaining when cherries jubilee was taken off the menu due to lack of supplies, for instance; Syna's infinite radiance was more than enough to sustain her, and Her influence was growing infinitesimally greater as the days lengthened slowly, something which also pleased Her Synaborn devotees; more time to spend in perfection, and less chained to a mortal seeming.

Yes, as long as their was wood for her fire and books to fuel her mind, she was happy.

Tonight – for the turning of the planet had brought the cloak of night sweeping majestically over the city a bell or so earlier - she'd decided to attempt something a little more ambitious for her glyphing practice than simply writing up her auristic observations in runes. She'd learned the glyphic arts alongside the mundane style of writing, since her mentor had believed it a valuable discipline, and one which would enable her works to be read by any wizard the world over, should she desire it to be so. It was also the only way to really convey all the shades and nuances of meaning necessary for the full understanding of Nader-canoch in writing, which made the skill doubly useful. After a fair amount of practice with the most common runes in this wise – and some much-needed direct magical application during her work for the Patriarch of House Dusk, she felt confident enough to try making one of the more visible magical items – at least, to the masses of Mizahar.

Scrolls.

She'd held off on even attempting their construction for quite a while; the theory was perfectly simple – focus, barrier and trigger – but it was the assembly that was the tricky bit, especially for a novice, since if there was even one mistake it would rendered, to all intents and purposes, a bit of paper with some funny symbols written onto it, rather than anything actually useful.

Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained, and besides, with the unsettling events of the Exigent Gathering still prominent, she had a nasty little inkling in the back of her mind that every possible scrap of preparedness could only help, a thought which had squirrelcaged around the quiet vaults of her brain after the Change, chasing away the tentative tendrils of sleep and driving her to pick up quill and ink.

Alses wasn't about to use one of her precious pieces of paper straight off the bat, however – she was well aware that her glyphs and circles and diagrams usually contained some oversight or other that rendered them unstable, at best – at least on the first pass, and it was for this reason she had a slab of fine slate and a stick of charcoal to hand, along with a water-soaked rag. She could draw, re-draw, re-think, draw, erase, draw again, get distracted and doodle, erase and draw and plan for as long as she liked on the slate, refining her design step-by step until it was perfect and therefore ready to be transferred to ink and paper, a much more long-lasting and permanent final medium, perfect for the creation of scrolls, in other words. Lightweight – who'd want to lug around chunks of stone or metal? - easily stored and indelible, paper-and-ink scrolls were simply the best general-purpose glyphic medium available.

First things first, though.

With practiced hand, Alses pulled out her book of observations, now quite full and bulging with knowledge and accumulated experience, flipping it open to one of the remaining blank pages.

'Creating an Auristic Scroll,' she inscribed carefully, quill moving in elegant loops over the paper. She still preferred quills to Lhavit's own favoured method: the brush.

Creating an Auristic Scroll

Any glyphed scroll is comprised of three equally-important components:

1.) The Focus, the central sigil which contains the actual magical effect to be released,
2.) The Barrier, a sequence of control and restriction glyphs connected to the third component, preventing the Focus from instantly releasing the effect.
3.) The Trigger, a sigil detailing a command to deactivate the Barrier component and so release the Focus-stored magical effect.

In some applications of the scrollmaking technique, the Trigger can be omitted. Obviously, this results in a much narrower range of options to release the effect from the focus; the Barrier glyphs must be broken in some way – either by mechanical action or physical obliteration (paint, chisel) in order to effect the release of the Focus-stored magic. Nonetheless, it does save time and is therefore a viable technique in desperation, or potentially when the glyph is used as a rough-and-ready trap.

In the main, however, a Trigger adds a great deal of functionality and flexibility (dependent on a wizard's skill) to a scroll or sigil collection.

Further refinements can be added to a scroll to enhance its effects or even to merge several different Foci together, but the basic scroll is comprised of the above three components and is the most common sort encountered in Mizahar.

With a satisfied sigh, Alses sat back and contemplated her handiwork. It had taken her some considerable time, reaching back through the mists of time to dimly-remembered books and lessons in Zeltiva, coupled with a few personal observations and experience from her travels across the face of the planet from said city to Lhavit.

Still, that was the basics noted down, for her own future reference.

[Alses]

Brilliant green eyes narrowed in concentration, Alses began to plot out what she'd need. First, of course, a focus, a reaching receptacle begging for directed djed to perfuse every ornate, curling strand of it. Focuses were almost infinitely variable; she'd seen ones that were veritable works of art that tugged at the eye with the fractal beauty of their lines and their mind-boggling intricacy, and ones that were little more than a couple of lines and a dot.

It all depended on the creating wizard, on how they saw the world, how they perceived the djed they worked, and, to a certain extent, on what the effect they wished to achieve actually was. For instance, a minor cantrip could generally be expected to have a more minimalist focus glyph than, say, a full-fledged firestorm. Transmutation paradigms from the Morpher's discipline, especially those with an offensive bent, they had what Alses considered to be the most complex of all focus glyphs, and indeed there were often many of them comprising a single scroll, a stunningly complex interleaving array of focus glyphs, pathing and relay runes crawling across the acres of parchment to yet more foci, all strung together with thousands of tiny, painstakingly-inscribed trigger runes, all bent and detailed towards one singular, spectacular purpose – like turning someone into, for all intents and purposes, a stone statue.

So...curving arcs – Alses was much better at a graceful curve than a straight line, for some reason she'd never been able to fathom – broad, simple strokes, the fundamental outline which would provide structure to her later additions, thick lines of black charcoal making their mark on the bluish slate tablet she'd borrowed from the Respite's stores, smooth and practised. The basic outlines were never really a problem, with blips only if someone interrupted her; the delicate, fiddly detail work, the fine control over the djed the focus would contain, that was where the problems generally lay.

Face set, a mask of determination – she would get this right – she began to very carefully sketch out the boss at the centre of the focus glyph. As ever, the temptation was for light, hesitant strokes that overlapped one another, fuzzing and obscuring one another until they arrived at a line by consensus rather than design. That would never do; everything had to be elegant and directed, there could be no extraneity to dilute and bleed off the precious power she'd be imbuing into the glyph further down the line. Strong, bold delineation, to contain and corral and – when the time was right - release and allow the magic to howl out into the world, that was at the core of glyphing. Confidence and precision, to get everything exactly right first time and make it look effortless, that was a master glypher's lot.

Alses, needless to say, was a very long way indeed from that sort of thing. Tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth as she concentrated, gripping so hard that the charcoal left thick black stains on her corpse-pale skin, she inscribed the four cardinal points of her focus boss. This complex subglyph, almost, was the central point of her sigil that would accept the energies she pulsed into it, trapping them in recursive curls and whorls and loops of tangling glyphery. It served as a guide, of sorts, taking the djed as it poured from her and directing it along the sharp, angular points and into the much more intricate, more complex and branching djed-holding portion of her focus where it would be contained, squirrelcaging around the djed currents, forever baffled and routed and looped back in upon itself by the glyphic lines and curves, a complex interaction that was almost mirror-like to her mind's all-seeing eye, able to capture and reflect the magic cast at it.

Shifting grip, rotating the charcoal to bring a fresh, narrower side down onto the slate, Alses set to with a delicate touch, marking out the ever-decreasing spirals and organically-branching principal curves, fleshing them out with flourish and curlicue, all the little touches which marked this as her focus, her work, and no-one else's. The aesthete in her was never satisfied with anything other than beauty; she strove for it in everything around her, which was possibly one reason why auristics had appealed so much, and why she had such an aptitude for the art.

With the framework completed to her initial satisfaction, Alses sat back in her chair with a crackle of bone from her spine and contemplated her handiwork, checking and double-checking her symmetry and the cleanliness of the lines, rubbing at several feathered sections with the wet rag, ruthlessly refining the charcoal marks into a simple, singular form that snaked, serpentine, through all of her curls and angles, hungry and ready to accept her magic – at least, to the unaided eye.

Now was the time to put it to a more thorough test than that which vision alone could provide.

The room was hot, cosily snug thanks to the skyglass breathing warmth from the walls and the cheery fire snapping and crackling in the well-used grate, gobbling down log after log to feed its rapacious, never-satisfied hunger. The neat piles of books on every available surface lent their gentle perfume – paper and ink, and the merest hint of decay – to the air, where it mingled with the scent of roses and nokkochi wood. To Alses, that admixture of smells all combined to be quintessentially home, speaking to the deepest, most buried parts of her, letting her relax. Here was safety, here was security, here was hers. Oh, admittedly the place was actually just a rented room at the Towers Respite, but it had been hers for several seasons now, and she'd had time to press her personality into the stones, she knew every nook and cranny of it intimately and regarded it fondly, battered furniture and all.

Needless to say, the auras of her bastion were as well-known to her as her own impression on the world, instantly explicable and completely understood, unwinding all around her in shades of homely caramel and cream, touched with thrilling topnotes of fresh ink, drifting on phantom breezes breathing from the tomes all around. There was the ubiquitous aura of skyglass, too, but that hardly signified, hardly registered to her senses now, so used was she to inverting and excluding that serenely static wash of turquoise, purple and a tight shiver of gold from her aurist's senses, open wide to the world and its mysteries.

In...out. In...out. Gentle, slow breaths, flowing over her tongue and stealing moisture from her mouth, filling the secret darkness inside her before flowing gently out once more, a simple and instinctual expansion and contraction that calmed the body and focused the mind.

Comfort and familiarity made it all so much easier, of course, centring and stabilising her even as the world drowned in a melting melange of colour and sound and smell. With fresh eyes – make that fresh senses, rather, she turned her scrutiny towards the template glyph on the slate tablet, examining the curving djed conduits she'd painstakingly inscribed, checking for unforeseen interactions, sparkling collisions of antithetical djed that wasted their energy on contact and weakened the whole, for feathered conduits that led to confusion and misdirection, for anything which deviated and damaged.

As ever, there were mistakes – the curve of a line was perhaps too jagged, causing the djed to split and craze and curl back in on itself, there was some feathering she hadn't noticed, and a downright dangerous harmonic interaction building where two antithetic djed flows nearly crossed one another, but they were lesser and fewer than when she'd first begun to glyph on a regular basis once more, probably spurred in no small part, much though she was loath to admit it, by madam instructor and her questions after the glyphing debacle.

Alses scowled blackly as the memories came flooding back from that incident.

[Alses]

Shaking her head to clear it of those unwelcome thoughts, Alses bent her physical and mental prowess to the task in hand once more.

Swift work with pointed charcoal stick and wet rag eradicated those irritating mistakes and imperfections which still dogged her work , leaving her glorious focus glyph free and complete, the currents and whorls of the djed of the world bent and shaped to her will, a yawning pit for djed just waiting to be filled to bursting, a hungry mirror for magic.

Careful not to touch it, not to inadvertently smudge its lines or imbue it with unwanted power, Alses left her focus glyph alone – mentally making a note to complete it last next time – and turned to the next component – the barrier system.

Barriers were nice and simple, at least once one got one's eye in, so to speak. Once there was a perfect template glyph to simply copy, every curve and jag and angle faithfully reproduced and linked to the others with glimmering path-lines of runes inked with infinite care, ringing in the impatient mirror of the focus glyph, giving it control, containment and direction, so that the focus mirror didn't reflect all and everything instantly and continually, then it was easy.

It was, as ever, getting to that stage which caused the difficulty, where all the effort lay.

Whippy, thin strokes, they were the basis for a barrier glyph, an interlinking meshwork of conduits that baffled and reflected, capable of deflecting and constraining a focus glyph's exuberant reflection and turning it effortlessly back upon itself, keeping everything in and dormant until its protective circle was broken, the latticework of runes unravelling in an instant, djed conduits corroding and disjuncting, freeing the focus to unleash its stored magic.

Entropy and corruption had to be built in, of course, but they had to be constrained and bound about with reinforcing conduits, only releasing when the time was right. Consistency, too, that was essential; a barrier was a repeating set of glyphs, lined with miniscule paths, that supported one another, their natural djedic synergy making the whole greater than the sum of its parts, and the easiest way to make sure they supported and synergised efficiently was by making them the same. More advanced glyphers could include sub-circles with greater specificity, using djedic switch glyphs to shape and mould their barriers more efficiently, but for a novice, that sort of advanced work was beyond her skill.

So. Small three-quarter circles – she was getting much better at free-drawing, what with all the glyphing practice she'd been putting in, but reliably drawing very large glyphs was still beyond her – to form the outer shell of the glyph. The lines had to be absolutely smooth and uniform, to bring about the mirroring strength she was aiming to imbue them with, the capability to subdue the focus glyph and keep it dormant until the time was right. Time and again, the charcoal skittered and danced away from her, curves became to arced or too straight, there was feathering and overlap – with a disgruntled sigh, Alses picked up her wet rag and vengefully scrubbed at the unyielding slate, smearing her painstaking barrier glyphs into oblivion, all that she had to show for a good half-bell's work a black smear on the cloth.

'Deep breaths, Alse,' she reminded herself, forcing a calmer state. Nothing useful was accomplished by getting angry and erasing things which didn't work. 'Treat it as a learning exercise,' the wiser, older voice in her head admonished, 'Rather than going bananas and wiping out everything.'

She breathed in deeply, hands bloodless white on her cleaning cloth- although there, at least, there wasn't much of a visible difference – filling her nose with all the calming, subtle scents of home – books and paper, ink and attar of roses, the faint whiff of woodsmoke hanging lazily in the air.

Centred once more, earthed and grounded, she picked up her charcoal once more and, as an afterthought, almost, sliced its tip far finer than it had been with two quick strokes of her knife, fracturing the brittle material into thinner, sharper shards.

Ah. That was better, the new shards drawing far thinner, more easily-controlled lines on the smooth slate. Curves came easily, now, with a practiced flick of the hand easily drawing swooping arcs of black around her focus glyph, each one almost touching the next until, to a casual eye, it was as if a ring of pearls surrounded the central sigil.

No time to stop and admire the handiwork now, though – the next step was to prepare the protected disjunction. Protected so the barrier didn't crumble and fail the instant it was activated, but with that entropy lurking there, a dark and rotten heart usefully turned to productive purpose.

A triangular glyph was the simplest form of protection, a buttressed construction that was dissonant, rather than resonant with, the pointed star-glyph that would be the recipient of the trigger glyph's command and so could easily contain it, right up until the wave of disjunction from the trigger glyph's activation washed over it and through the gap in her pearl-circle reflecting line. It had to be strong, in order to contain the lashing interactions she'd purposefully build into the entropic subglyph, but not so strong it could resist the trigger.

Hmm. So how thick should the lines actually be? What angles should she use? Should the triangle touch the pearl-circle line of the outer barrier and so partake of some of its strength, or be separate and entire on its own?

She pondered these questions for several long chimes. 'Standard angles for an equilateral triangle, I think,' she decided, after some consideration. 'To give it strength and resiliency, since touching it to the outer barrier lines might give it greater power than I want or need.'

That annoying sensation, thirst, prickled her throat as she worked, with quick and confident strokes this time. Straight lines were easy, and triangles only slightly more difficult. By marking the corner points before drawing the full lines, it was possible – indeed, advisable – to visualise the final triangle and so adjust the shape and the angles before painstakingly drawing the entire glyph of constraint. It saved time, in the long run. Time and energy.

Finally, for her barrier glyph, there came the trigger subglyph. In a way, this was the most complicated portion of it, with many crisscrossing lines, interactions and sharp kinking angles that had to be exactly placed in order to achieve the desired effect, otherwise the dissolution would fizzle and embarrassingly fail. That had happened often enough in the past, often enough that Alses had once spent an entire day drawing and redrawing just this simple little subglyph, until she could write it out perfectly, every angle and sharp, jagged line perfectly placed so that function would successfully follow form.

Now, however, she was a bit rusty, her skills having gone unsharpened for some time, focused as she had been on her auristic endeavours. The commission for the Dusk Tower's Patriarch, and her embarrassing failure with the charged water there, had spurred her glyphic practices once more, hampered slightly by the lack of instructional tomes in the Dusk Tower's specialised library. Still, she was improving, albeit slowly, refining her understanding of paths and barriers and focuses and improving on her ability to actually draw them, too.

Thinking back upon it, Alses had a nasty suspicion she knew exactly what had gone wrong with her charging procedure. Had she been able to just contain water in the circle, somehow, it would probably have functioned perfectly, but she'd had it in a stone jar, a solid, unyielding stone jar which hadn't, crucially, been accounted for in her circle's construction. She'd created perfect glyphs that worked exactly as they should, but the instructions imbued into their creation had been fundamentally flawed, not accounting for the elemental solidity and semi-crystalline nature of the stone jar and so her glyphs, confused by the admixture of water and stone (as they saw it) had signally failed, or – perhaps – had lumped the jar and water together as one object and found the properties they embodied already impressed upon it.

If that were so – and Alses had a sneaking suspicion she was right – she'd been an utter idiot. What wizard worth their salt would forget such a basic, elementary lesson in the art of glyphery? Define everything, even if only to say 'this is not important'.

What an idiot.

[Alses]

No time to dwell on that now, however; the trigger receiver and then the actual trigger sigil itself still had to be planned out and then painstakingly drawn and redrawn on her slate before she would feel ready to commit herself to ink and paper.

Alses' Trigger technique was a newer one, utilising a glyph of dissolution and dissipation – a spiky, self-tangling nightmare of sixteen points that reeked of discord and chaotic change to any aurist worth their salt – close-linked to a representative barrier glyph, so that when the appropriate trigger word was spoken the dissolution glyph's surge of chaotic energy evaporated the barrier sigil, causing the focus to release its captured magic.

Older scrolls, preserved for whatever reason, made use of a concept called 'the standard redundancy'. Dissolution glyphs either weren't understood or were considered too dangerous and unpredictable for common use at the time of their construction, and thus the lesser, unfocused version - an inverted glyph of resonance – had to be used instead. This was linked, via minuscule Paths, to about half the barrier glyphs, so that when the trigger condition was satisfied the inverted glyph would activate and nullify the barrier runes it was attached to, allowing the focus to release. That method was more time-consuming and less efficient, and scrolls thus required greater expertise to make, but with the advent of the six-sixteen rule, they became more commonplace.

Six-sixteen was an odd rule in magic, and one that no-one quite understood, and had expended thousands of words in saying so. Certain shapes, for whatever reason, were dissonant or resonant with one another, and the dissonant reaction of six-pointed shapes with sixteen-pointed shapes was one of the strongest and most recognizable – at least, to those mages whose fields encompassed such things; glyphers (and by extension magecrafters, more often than not) and summoners, although Alses herself had no clue about the latter.

Alses' current build of scrollwork glyphery was double-redundancy for extra reliability, since she was still something of a novice. The hope was that if one release system failed, for whatever reason, the secondary would still function and the scroll would work, rather than simply crumbling away in a rather anticlimactic fashion.

Hard, almost angry slashes made up the majority of the dissolution glyph; no gentle curves and organic flourishes here, just hard and fast imposition on the djed of the world, forcing rather than cajoling, resulting in purposeful rebellion and antithetical interaction that would, by virtue of the glyph's very instability and innate strength, expand across the scroll when the trigger word was spoken and – hopefully – activate the scroll.

At the same time as the glyph was angry and self-destructive, it had to be clear. There could be no smudges or feathers to detract from the principal djed flows – they had to be hard and fast to provide maximal reaction when they tangled and met one another, otherwise the wave of disjuncting djed which would flow across the scroll when activated would instead mute out into a rather pathetic wave that would be useless for its intended function.

The palms of Alses' hands were black from all the charcoal by the time she'd finished painstakingly inscribing the last of the sixteen points and the thicket of connections at the centre of the glyph, and her correction rag wasn't looking much better, either. At the start of proceedings, it had been a dull off-white colour, and now...well, it was more approximating midnight. Fortunately, her receiver glyph was a very simple six-pointed star-shape, easy enough to create with a nice economy of strokes, but it still took her several depressing tries and a few more smears of black on her hands and cleaning rag before it was anything like acceptable. Now...what to use for a trigger word?

''Trigger' itself, perhaps? No, that's too common; it might go off if someone happened to mention the word. In fact, to be on the safe side, it would probably be a better and safer option to select a Nader-canoch word, especially since almost no-one actually speaks that language any more.'

So what word to pick?

'Beauty?' Alses frowned, trying to remember the word, and then gave up with a sigh, wishing for the umpteenth time she had had the foresight to pack a Nader-canoch lexicon when she left Zeltiva. So beauty – whatever it was – was out, which was a shame.

After some thought, she settled on a compound word: 'Yomi-canoch', or 'the precious word'. It was unlikely that anyone would combine the two in casual or even intellectual conversation, and so that would serve perfectly well as a trigger

In a fusillade of protesting cracks from her vertebrae, Alses rose and made her way awkwardly over to the washbasin, taking almost theatrical care not to touch or bump into anything; she was filthy, after all, and avoidable cleaning was something Alses hated to do. In truth, cleaning full stop wasn't up there as one of her favourite activities, which was probably why she'd pursued gardening and philtering around the Respite with such fervour – anything to escape having to wield brush and mop in a never-ending symphony of thankless, worthless drudgery.

Golden fire – or water: in actual fact the visual representation of her djed in her own mind wavered somewhere between the two, with properties of both and neither at the same time – and pondering that generally left her with a headache and a desire to stick her head in the nearest water-butt – rose in shimmering waves through her body, sure and swift now, so habituated to her desires that it barely needed conscious prompting to spill out into the world and paint it with all her senses, rolling forth in clouds of brilliant blue djed conduits, the rich gold and caramel of home, the raying thermal spires of the fire which set goosebumps to prickling her pale skin and much else besides. There was warmth on the crisp smell of paper and ink that were her books, the sign of the sun which had gilded them with its gentle heat and light for long bells, a gentle sense of heat winding its way through the gentle, sedate auras that made up her overall impression of 'home'.

The main part of her focus, however, was directed and channelled towards the smugly self-satisfied glyphs carefully inscribed onto the slate tablet, a reaching synchrony to force them to give up their secrets, to flay the obscured djed conduits and reveal any weakness, ambiguity, vagueness of purpose before she committed herself fully to its reproduction in ink. Nothing could detract from the geometrical perfection of her runes or else efficacy would be severely reduced or, at worst, nonexistent.

So, first, the barriers, washes of pale quicksilver to her sight, cargoed with purpose – and that was a strange thing to see, uncoiling in the colour-drenched world of Sight beyond sight in clouds of wavering feeling and concept. She scrutinized every curve of the outer shells, seeing the djed conduits glowing healthily, just waiting to be primed with a final touch, then the triangular subglyphs of constraint holding back the entropic six-star that would resonate with the trigger when it was set off.

She might have been getting better with her talents, but watching djed expenditure was still a prime concern, especially when dealing with such complex things as glyphs which rewrote the djed of the world on a fundamental level, their powerful auras needing depth of synchrony as well as finesse to investigate fully, following the curves of charcoal that were the surface representation of the altered and changed djed currents, searching for the flaws and the weaknesses, anything that might corrupt the whole. Any mage worth their salt – or at least, any mage aiming for the stars – had to be self-critical, always willing to look and correct and accept correction when offered, too. The latter still caused Alses some problems, at least when she didn't get on with the offerer, but the former was no problem at all.

[Alses]

Finally, all had been prepared to her satisfaction and it was now time to actually attempt to craft her scroll, to transform the draft version scored in charcoal on slate into elegant inked lines on creamy paper, a painstaking undertaking to be sure and a task that would require all her reserves of patience and pedantry.

In the meditative quiet of the night, illuminated by the warring glow of bright candles and the sullen red glare of her banked fire, Alses took a deep breath and peeled one precious sheet of paper out from her dwindling store of the stuff and laid it carefully, carefully flat on her battle-scarred desk.

The ink shimmered with reflective light, belying the absolute abyssal black it would leave in her quill's wake as she carefully dipped then blotted the nib, hopefully leaving enough ink in its hollow shaft to complete the first outline. It was an art, judging the amount one would need, and not something Alses was particularly adept or practised at, which sometimes resulted in several failed attempts before she got it right.

She considered the ink-laden quill once more, pensively biting her lower lip even as her eyes flicked from her scale diagram in charcoal to the inkpot and then back again. 'Will that be enough?' she asked herself fretfully, trying to judge just how much it'd all need. 'Maybe just a little more ink...'

After several rounds of fastidious faffing in such a manner, Alses quashed the irrational butterflies dancing in her stomach – no-one else would ever see if this was a failure, so why worry? - and set quill to paper at last, a slow and graceful curving stroke, razor-sharp and clear, that would delineate the outermost limit of her focus glyph. The feathers on the leading edge of the quill tickled her flesh as she continued the arc, always with a weather eye on the curvature of the line and the imaginary centre of her circle. A lopsided circle would not only be useless, but embarrassing, if only from the standpoint of her own pride.

It seemed that this time, at least, Qualaya was on her side, and it was with no small relief that she seamlessly melded the beginning and end of her circle together, laying the quill aside and rolling her wrist to relieve the mild cramping that was already beginning to set in from the unaccustomed angles she'd been bending her hand at.

Still, it was done, blackly gleaming and perfect, the first step – of many, admittedly – towards a functioning scroll.

No rest for congratulations, though – Alses had the bit between her teeth and now it was time to etch the barrier glyphs, sixteen reflecting horseshoes, almost, filled with emphatic triangle containment subglyphs protecting a six-pointed resonant glyph that would react – intentionally badly – with the trigger glyph, destroying the barrier protecting the focus and allowing the release of its stored magic.

Smaller glyphs were easier, in a way; movements were smaller and much more precisely controlled. Squinting furiously, continually consulting her diagram, she made a set of barely-visible marks on her forming scroll, guides for her strokes that would ensure the symmetry and spacing of her glyphs, a harmonious formation rather than something disjointed and lopsided, with all the concomitant problems that brought.

As she curved the three-quarters circles around the circumference of the focus sigil, the focus was on consistency, making sure the lines were exactly the same as one another, or at least, as much as was possible, the rigid tip of her quill skating smoothly over the creamy paper even as she filled her brain with geometry and reflection, the djed conduits in the wake of her pen mirror-smooth and shimmering pale silver to her auristic vision, whispering clear and bell-like to her ears.

The sound of success, in other words.

She couldn't help the smile which stretched her lips as she worked, sharp flicks of her quill to delineate the containment glyphs, calculating the angles to the best of her ability to ensure the continuity and strength of the bounding lines.

They felt powerful, their weight pressing onto her skin, thin lines of phantom force paling her fire-opal skin – which was just as it should be, necessary to contain the unstable glyph inside of them until the trigger word sent a wave of inimical djed washing over the scroll and the sympathetic reaction blasted containment and barrier glyph alike into nothingness.

Anathemaic djed crawled across her skin like a foul cloak, prickling her fingers with its touch as her poison pen raced and swirled across the paper, making a curling morass of purposeful connections and intersections where oppositional djed currents would meet and clash with one another, writing chaos and dissolution into the djed of the world, imprinting an altogether nastier layer of pathways onto the simple framework of the paper.

Normally, the feeling of such an aura, spiky and inherently unstable, subtly wrong to her augmented senses, would put her on edge, cautious and careful, but here and now, that was what she wanted, the feeling she was looking for. It meant her glyph was shaping admirably, and with every twisting stroke that skewed the djed of the world to unnatural forms that sensation grew stronger, oddly beautiful in its own sort of way, like the paintings of cataclysmic destruction found in the halls of the wealthy and mildly insane often tended to be.

It couldn't be too strong, though; it had to be linked to the trigger word itself, the focus and release of the entire glyph, which would grant the crucial control of the scroll, without which it was essentially useless, save for in a few very specialised fields.

Eventually, the sixteen-pointed shape was complete and entire, the centre blank and waiting for the final runic script that would encode the trigger word, all of it linked carefully to the rest of the glyph and indeed the scroll as a whole.

In the event, it was something of an anticlimax, writing the complex curling runes for 'Yomi-canoch' in the gap, being careful not to smudge or otherwise mar the stark perfection of the lines all around. Nothing happened when she removed the tip of her quill from the now-completed trigger setup, and she let out a breath she'd been unconsciously holding. It took time to dry to satisfaction, especially since Alses was a little suspicious of using drying sand which, knowing her luck, would end up scattered all across her room and then she'd be tipping vast, eerily never-diminishing quantities of it out of her bedclothes for half a season.

Resolutely, Alses pushed all thoughts of drying sand and the crevices it could get stuck in and turned her attention back to slightly more mundane matters of the arcane scroll before her, just awaiting the final infusion of magic into the focus glyph before all was prepared and she - hopefully - had a functioning scroll on her hands.

[Alses]

Her heartbeat thundered loud in her ears as she sank herself into a meditative state, her breathing steady and even. An ache struck up through her backside from the hardness of the chair – she made a note to acquire a cushion of some sort, or at least bundle her eiderdown into an impromptu pad before starting a long work again – an she strove to ignore it, to focus on the numinous. However much she might have preferred to deny it, that was something far easier in the day, her mortal seeming anchored much more firmly to Mizahar than her celestial form, adrift amongst the Ukalas' dreaming firmament more often than not.

Alses' left hand rested, almost companionably, in the very centre of her focus glyph, the point where she would pour her djed into its hungry, reaching curves and whorls. Centred and calmed by familiar surroundings, and spurred by the knowledge that her task was almost done, in short order the mantle of light and colour and sound and smell and phantom touch which covered everything she sensed in a faint corona was swelling to the synchronised crescendo of her djed, conducted with a light and expert mental hand, cajoling and suggesting rather than roughly commanding.

Deeper expression unfurled before her as the subtler nuances of the world's auras wrote and painted themselves into greater and more glittering prominence, all clamouring for her attention, teasing with flashes of deeper meaning and greater understanding. Alses may have laughed, flying on wings of pluripotent djed that saturated the world in beauty, near-drunk on the impressions flooding into her senses, open on all sides and greedily drinking in everything that could be known about her surrounds – she felt the rough, vegetatively solid texture of the cypress roof-beams overhead, the absolute contentment of the djed-reflecting skyglass, ever-present in Lhavit, the smooth leather of book bindings and, oddly, the impression of the outdoors and grass from the same source and much else besides even as she gathered her djed once more and dove deeper, further from the shallow, surface world that most people experienced, pursuing glittering skeins of diaphanous meaning and impression down until they resolved themselves into clarity before her burning eyes.

Faster and faster it happened, each time she reached for the power, quicker and surer and easier, more polished and slick, as though as much as she was getting used to the discipline, the djed of the world she gazed at in wonder – and, admittedly, sometimes revulsion - was getting used to her, and to the gentle synchrony her own djed drove. Even the slight corona every object bore these days seemed to grow richer and fuller to her senses, and where once she'd have had to focus hard and burn vast amounts of her personal djed to perceive anything of significance, now sometimes information arrived without any form conscious effort, materialising in her brain as her Sight drank in the world.

It was most noticeable, in crowds, or where there was any significant, complex gathering of auras, she'd found recently – although it was by no means reliable or constant, that particular ability; she could stare right at something for a good five chimes and learn almost nothing about it – without sinking herself deeper into synchrony, that was – whilst the rock next to it could be unfurling its life-story on the inside of her brain.

Regardless, walking through crowds now had a new dimension of oddity to it, flickering feathers of hundreds of auras brushing across her with her head being filled by split-second impressions of people on all sides – 'Hungry', 'Happy', 'Cold'; whichever butterfly emotion or physical state was most dominant at the time her reaching, though passive, auristic talent took notice and latched on, hungry to feed her information. Small wonder some of the more advanced aurists at the Tower looked abstracted and half-there, if they had to deal with the constant welter of often-inconsequential information flooding in on a regular basis.

Perhaps that was why their quarters, what little she'd seen of them, were so spartan, favouring large washes of exposed skyglass and a minimalist style. It made sense, removing as many auras as possible from immediate perception, in order to allow a tired aurist to simply relax at the end of a hard block of work.

Alses pulled a face at the thought, noting the warmly cluttered expanse of her own room at the Respite. She liked intricacy and ornate objets d'art, and had ever since her Fall, perhaps inspired to some degree by her mentor's own tastes. Were Alses given a fortune and carte blanche to redesign the Respite, it would most definitely have been decidedly more opulent, with mosaic-work designs of surpassing complexity, fine painting and breathtaking sculpture of such mastery as to appear almost living, caught in a singular instant by the sculptor's preternatural skill.

Sumptuous grandeur generally meant complexity, the bane of a tired aurist, so perhaps it was for the best Alses didn't hold the artistic reins of the Respite; it was certainly to the benefit of the place's budget.

'Listen to me, wandering all over the place when I should be focusing,' she thought with a scowl, corralling the tangents ruthlessly and bending her intellect back to the task in hand.

It was a deeply odd experience, being so deep in the world and watching your own reserves of djed go spiralling off into a hungry trapping glyph, thick strands of golden self leaching to the surface of her arm and pouring in thick, ropy conduits into the bright and many-leaved shape of her focus, pulled by some unknowable force out from the depths of her soul and, blinking, out into the shallow constraints of a forming scroll.

As much as it was odd, the experience and the sensations it brought with it – a draining tug, a phantom, throbbing warmth and a bone-deep ache on her left arm – were also fascinating, watching how the focus caught and channelled the thick, undirected synchronising djed along the sharp points of her focus boss, twisting and ravelling and refining the fundamental energy into thinner and thinner strands that swirled and kinked in the hollows and voids between lines, brilliant coruscating arcs of djed flashing between one inked conduit and the next, brighter and brighter as more and more of her precious reserves bled off and spiralled into glyphic quiescence.

Being a sorceress of the cautious – and therefore sane and alive – kind, Alses kept a weather eye on her own reserves, even as the bright star of her scroll greedily suckling at her hand drew her eye and her intellect both. It was simply hard to look away; indeed, it was the joyful carillon of the city bells, pealing and pealing for long moments as different methods of timekeeping presented their consensus on the current bell of the day, that startled her and pulled her away from that most profound of synchrony, the basso profundo peal of the largest bells on the Koten Temple shattering the air with their blunt thunder counterpointed by the rising scale of notes from all the other bells in the city – the bronze and brass ones of the Sun Temple, ringing out joyously, the odd silvery notes from Leth's Temple, and many more.

Another anticlimax was forthcoming as Alses raised her fingers away from the inked swirls and junctions of her focus glyph; there was no spark of djed, no suggestion of arcane fire running down the black ink highways – it looked exactly the same as it had before she'd charged it with the greater part of her reserves. Only to an aurist would it have appeared any different, chock-full of her own auristic power, happily contained by the barrier glyphs, silver mirrors that perfectly reflected any premature release or escape attempt.

With a satisfied sigh, Alses rose from her chair, rolling her neck to work out the kinks and thinking happily of bed.

Tomorrow, she'd find someone to test the scroll for her. It'd be a shame to see all that work expended, but if it functioned as she expected, then at least she had the precise procedure – and a scale diagram in her notebook – down pat; replicating it again would be easier, surely.

With a monumental yawn, shedding clothes without a care for where they landed, Alses more-or-less fell into bed and was gloriously, comfortably asleep almost as soon as her head touched the pillow.

END

[Elysium]

Alses

XP:
Glyphing +5
Auristics +3
Observation +4
Drawing +3

Lore:
How to Create an Auristic Scroll
Glyphing: The Focus Glyph
Glyphing: Sub-Glyphs
Glyphing: Barrier Glyphs
The Golden Rule, “Define Everything”
Glyphing: The Trigger Glyph
The Six-Sixteen Rule
Glyphing: Djed Transfer

Notes: Once more, wonderful job. This was incredibly thorough! If I missed anything, please let me know.

and so, the journey continues...