Chapter 495 – Spell Poetry

The obvious word was time, but Sophia didn’t think she’d seen it in the projection. Maybe it wasn’t specific enough? Something like slow or delay or perhaps even speed might be better words for it. She’d have to look. 

After a couple of hours, Sophia’s new direction seemed to be bearing fruit. She’d found all of the words she thought might be used several times; she’d even found the word time twice. They seemed to be arranged in sequences that gave a feeling rather than making sense, almost like broken poetry, but they were there.

Drift through time unending on a vessel of contemplation

Darkness waits as the world speeds by

Slow, plodding steps delay the future into the past

A slow blanket shields those within 

The poetry reminded Sophia of a ritual more than a runescript, but it had to be a runescript; a ritual was a process, often with physical aids, while a runescript was entirely physical. This was engraved in the walls of the temple. Sophia could see that for certain; the script clearly outlined the walls and left both doorways and windows open in a large pyramidal structure. It was far larger than the “Temple of Memory” they saw in the branches of the World Tree, but it was probably the structure that temple was meant to evoke.

Probably. Sophia really couldn’t be certain. It sure sounded like it based on the note that was probably from the Guide.

What she could be sure of was that this wasn’t a ritual. There were no instructions on what to do, simply a magical engraving in a wall of words and lines. That was a runescript, not a ritual, even if the words were more about Intent the way a ritual’s might be, without the precision Sophia was used to.

The lines were something else. Sophia hadn’t figured them out yet. Why was blanket connected to waits or darkness tied to shields? 

“Sophia? You should eat something.” Dav set two bowls down in front of Sophia. When did he enter the room?

The first bowl held some spiced meat that was usually eaten with bread or crackers and sometimes with a sharp cheese for contrast, all of which were in the second bowl. It smelled delicious, spicy and savory at the same time. “You haven’t had anything all day and you have to be hungry.”

Sophia’s stomach growled at the smell of the food. Sophia flushed as she realized how worried Dav must have been to get dinner and bring it up to her. “You could have called me. I’d have come down to dinner.”

Dav chuckled and shook his head. “I tried. You didn’t hear me any more than you heard me enter right now. I’m just glad I got your attention this time.”

“Right, uh.” Sophia grabbed a cracker and scooped up some of the meat. It was piping hot and spicy, just the way she liked it. 

Before she knew it, the excuse to not answer Dav turned into a pair of empty bowls and a full tummy. “Thanks again for the food.”

Dav chuckled. “You’d do the same. Heck, you have done the same. Come on, let’s head downstairs and work the kinks out.”

It wasn’t much of a practice session, but Dav was right; it was nice to move and even nicer to use her feathers. Four days shut in her room with only a few short breaks for meals and to greet Xin’ri and Jax when they returned to Arcatiz was entirely too long. At least Xin’ri could come visit; that was how she knew they were back, after all. Jax couldn’t reach above the second branch of the Moonlit Branches until he decided to take on the World Tree’s Challenges.

The next day, Dav talked Sophia into spending some more time out and about before she settled in for a long study session. The day after that, he talked her into an evening in the Gardens with Xin’ri and Jax. 

That was the day Leo returned from his latest trip to the Roots with Arvinn and Reko. He was excited that they’d get to search for the Inchoate Mountains until he found out that they had to wait until Sophia had some idea how to not just bypass but disable a runescript she didn’t understand without harming them or the people inside. He knew enough to know that wouldn’t be quick.

It left Sophia with a new dilemma: did she take him with her or not? She could leave him at the World Tree relatively safely if he’d stay but she wasn’t sure he would. At the same time, if she managed to get stuck in temporal stasis, it would be nice to have someone on the outside who could ask for help. Leo was the only other person on Arcatiz who could speak Bridge.

Maybe he could help her decipher the bead?

The next day, Sophia found out that Leo could help … in short doses. He wasn’t willing to spend more than a couple of hours examining the runescript, but he did notice something Sophia hadn’t: the time-related words were all clustered together in one area. The rest of the runescript was dominated by other themes.

It took days to puzzle them out, but in the end Sophia was fairly confident there were five main sections, one for each face of the pyramid and one that filled the ceiling space where each level stepped inwards from the next level down. The floor seemed to be a mess of lines with only a few words that all seemed to relate to binding or mana, so Sophia guessed it wasn’t really a sixth section and probably had more to do with maintaining the runescript itself than creating a separate function.

The ‘slow’ section was the one on the ceilings. The four walls focused on protection, distance, clarity, and luck. Sophia was fairly confident in four of the five, but the one that was about clarity could just as easily have been about thought or maybe even creativity; she was trying to interpret poems and it wasn’t as clear as the others, which seemed innately amusing: clarity wasn’t obvious.

The spell didn’t seem to ward the building in any way but it also didn’t have any obvious way to turn it off; it was like the spell wasn’t supposed to be turned off once it was activated. That made exactly no sense for a stasis spell, so all Sophia could think was that it had to be in the scribbled mess of the floor section. 

A scribbled mess she couldn’t read. It didn’t have words and Sophia didn’t recognize the runic system that had to underlie it. She needed help.

It was enough to make her wish her father was present, which sent her to her notebook to check if there was a new letter from Xavier. There was, so she carefully copied as much of the mess down as she could along with a description of what she’d figured out and sent it off. Maybe she’d get help or maybe she wouldn’t, but at least she’d remembered to ask this time. 

The next note arrived two days later with bad news: she hadn’t copied down enough for her father to solve the problem for her. Even if she did, he wasn’t sure it would survive the transit; she’d have to copy enough to be almost a spell and that was all too likely to get warped. The best Serenity could offer was the knowledge that some of the traces looked like they were designed to carry significant amounts of mana and others didn’t. One of them even had a mana gathering spiral, or at least that was Serenity’s guess.

When Sophia looked closely, she could see that the ones her father called “power traces” had small feathery markings on them that seemed almost like the lines blurred at the edges, while the others were thinner and sharper, often with strong arrow-shaped marks cut into them like directional markers. It was something she hadn’t known before but it still didn’t let her figure out how to turn the thing off, especially without entering the dilation.

She sent another letter off, but she really needed to get help that could actually see the bead.

The next few days were spent hunting for someone who knew enough about this specific form of runic magic to help figure out what she was looking at. She bounced from teacher to teacher to professional spellcaster and then to a grocer who used the magic to better display his goods. He referred her over to a professional enchanter whose business focused on the small practice area that could be found on the fourth and fifth branches; he was particularly good at magic that let someone “use their Abilities” without causing the sort of widespread destruction they normally would.

None of them had any ideas what the scribbles were about and none of them could read Bridge. The last enchanter did use a script-based enchanting method that was somewhere between the material-based methods Sophia was familiar with and the word-based enchantments of the bead, but it used glyphs that were more like images. They reminded Sophia of hieroglyphs, which made her think of the Temple of Memory in the World Tree. Maybe that was where the World Tree got its idea for what the space should look like?

The enchanter referred her again, but this time it was to someone she already knew: the Eidolon. Sophia remembered her from the Maze. She’d intended to visit the Night Market when they came to the World Tree, but somehow it never happened. 

Visiting the Night Market in the World Tree turned out to be astonishingly simple. There were several districts that held Night Markets. Which one they used was important … if they didn’t have a key to a specific market like Sophia’s multi-use token. Without a token, there was a fee that varied depending on which one you went to that would let you enter the Night Market in that particular location, but with a token you would enter the one your token led to without the fee, whether or not it was in that exact spot or even otherwise open that night.

The Eidolon’s Market was apparently open that evening; the streets held a number of other visitors. It made the place seem more alive; in retrospect, the empty streets of their first visit seemed almost creepy. The crowd noise was a welcome backdrop.

“You bear a token given to you specifically, yet I do not know you,” an amused woman’s voice stated softly from a small distance away.

Sophia turned towards the voice with a smile. If she was right about who that was, this would be even easier than she expected. 

The woman looked like she was made of stars, with glowing eyes and long hair. She looked more real than the shopkeepers, which meant she had to be the Eidolon, but she didn’t glow the way the Eidolon Sophia met back in the Maze did and she wore different clothing, a long robe instead of the short one. The hilt of a sword peeked out at her hip, though the blade was hidden by the billows of the robe.

Sophia felt her smile falter. “Eidolon? You don’t look quite the same. I wasn’t expecting a sword?”

“Clothes make the person,” the Eidolon answered without losing her smile, “and while the sword will not be used, I find it useful to set the stage. Who are you and how do you bear my token?”

Answering that question was easy but it still took several hours, especially when Sophia demonstrated the same spellforms she’d shown the Eidolon in the Maze. This Eidolon was equally interested.

Leo, Xin’ri,  and Dav were not. They disappeared into the Night Market to explore. Dav was the last to go, and he checked in regularly, only to leave again when it was clear Sophia hadn’t started explaining the new problem yet. The fourth time he stopped by, Sophia gestured for him to stay; she was ready to start the explanation, but waited for his return.