The next few days were, in a word, boring. Pun intended. Because Sen needed something to laugh at, since he was too tired for happiness. When he wasn’t cutting glyphs into stones, practicing several of the new enchantments Murdin had taught him, or refreshing himself on the old ones to guarantee he understood them perfectly, he was training in combat. In the mornings, Sen sparred with Murdin. In the later afternoons, before the days end, Murdin had Sen running all through the town.
Luckily for Murdin, it also served an excellent opportunity to finish delivering the remainder of his completed warm stone stocks, as well as deliver news that Murdin would not be taking any more commissions for the foreseeable future.
By the time he made it home each day, Sen found himself ready to collapse. The morning spars left him tired and sore, and the demanding focus of engraving enchantments left him mentally ready for a break after only a few hours. It was all the more draining because the work had slowly begun to lose its luster once Sen acquainted himself with all the new patterns.
The real pain, however, was the nearly endless amount of wardstone pieces he needed to churn through. When he’d asked Murdin for a specific number, the man had simply told him to make more, and he’d say when it was enough.
He also said to expect to keep that pace up for at least another week or two.
It wasn’t all bad - Sen took joy from noticing the small gains he made in each area. His familiarity with engraving had grown leaps and bounds. He cut now with confidence, and his speed was increasing. It was gratifying to see the change, no matter how small it might be.
The same was true of his physical ability. Running had increased his stamina noticeably despite that it had only been a few days, allowing him to hold his own just a bit longer in their morning spars. Thankfully, Sen finally managed to make some minor progress against Murdin. The man was incredibly skilled, but Sen felt like he might become at least an annoyance to the experienced warrior before much longer.
Actually winning was a far off dream, for now, but maybe if he deluded himself into believing it was possible, a miracle would happen.
It wasn’t long before Murdin called Sen into the shop from the cold stone slab set outside where Sen liked to sit and work. When he walked in, Murdin gestured to a set of wardstone pieces on a table. “Watch closely, Tane. I am going to create a wardstone.”
That was all the warning Sen got before Murdin started. He watched diligently as Murdin began to scour the surface of each stone with glyphs, starting with several large, arcing enchantments that covered large sections of the cylindrical objects, before moving to the broken edges where he would merge the pieces into a larger whole. The order didn’t seem to matter too much, so long as all the requisite pieces were in place before activating the central enchantment. That wasn’t unusual, but his experience with runes - an unknown magic, here - had taught him to expect a specific order to fill out the piece. That habit hadn’t changed, even working in an entirely new magical tradition.
Murdin worked quickly, at a pace that surprised Sen, and one he doubted he could hope to emulate any time soon. Murdin’s strokes were sure and precise, spending only a few moments on a cut. Sen thought it would take him several minutes to ensure the same quality.
It took most of an afternoon for the work to be finished, and at Murdin’s speed, that meant Sen would take at least a day or two per each wardstone. Halfway through, Murdin connected the separated pieces. He activated the enchantment with a simple slash connecting several parts, and slowly the end of each piece seemed to turn to a viscous sludge. Quickly, he stuffed the pieces together, then smudged the overflow together, and removed any extra. Sen realized the edges had a large margin of open space left over, where Murdin had left it blank.
Murdin held the pieces together, and after only a minute or so, each piece melded together without even a seam. It was, frankly, unimpressive on its own, but Sen saw the minor enchantment and found in himself a small spark of satisfaction. This magic held untold numbers of opportunities for him, if he just had the creativity to figure out how to put it all together. He had watched the many glyphs Murdin used, and he had recognized - well, only a number of them. Glyphs used a system closer to an alphabet than anything else, with certain glyphs working together to form ‘word’-like clusters of larger glyphs that allowed different functions on an object, or as a way to shunt power from the object to separate areas, allowing the enchantment to feed off specific parts of an object.
There were a ton of small tricks that could be used. Knives, swords, spears, anything with an edge used the small trick that it fed off the edge itself, creating a self-repairing blade that removed any damage to the blade by using those parts for energy. It gradually caused the blade to disappear, but it would keep the piece whole for more than long enough to deal with an enemy.
Sen had a couple ideas for interesting projects he could attempt, eventually. He couldn’t wait.
For now, though, his work was focused on nothing so interesting as building or designing his own enchantments. Murdin sat a number of papers down before him. The enchantments needed to build a wardstone. Sen had learned a lot while watching Murdin, but it was no replacement for the actual recipe, and he drank it in as quickly as he could.
“I want you to start working on actually creating wardstones. We’ll still need to make some more components, but for now, we have enough to work toward a few finished stones to begin repairing the net.” Murdin took the finished wardstone, and began pointing to different parts of it. “I recommend forming the separate pieces into a single whole, first…” he started to explain, going point by point until both the mage and Sen felt that he had a good understanding to build from. Any further questions would be best paired with the experience of actually doing the work.
Sen began only a short time later, and soon enough found himself scurrying back and forth between his own work area and Murdin’s to ask questions. Sen might have decided to work in the same room, but while the room seemed large enough to fit them both, Murdin liked to sprawl out his work, taking up most of the room and tables. The mage’s habits left Sen with little room to himself, and he didn’t want to potentially slow Murdin down by getting in his way.
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His first finished wardstone took four days. Murdin had a surprisingly useful way to test the enchantment, a small flower that revealed its inner leaves in average ambient mana levels, but quickly closed its bud when the ambient mana lowered too much. Simply setting a wardstone nearby served to test the enchantment in only a few minutes, without causing any harm to the flower as the enchantment pulled the mana from the air nearby. It didn’t seem to cause any damage to the flower, and a few minutes without a nearby wardstone allowed the ambient mana to recover enough for the flower to bloom again.
Murdin’s eyes widened in surprise to find that Sen’s wardstone worked as intended. His face shown that he hadn’t been entirely confident it would, but he let out a sigh of relief as he realized that it hadn’t been a failure. “I expected your first attempt to not only not work, but to take a few more days,” Murdin chuckled. “Great work, Tane,” the mage said.
Sen felt a mixture of pride and accomplishment at the compliment, small though it was, and a smile came upon his face. “Thank you,” he said.
It didn’t take long for the two of them to get back to work. The day was cool, the coldest it had been yet. The chill made the world seem a bit crisper, the colors brighter, and the air richer. A knock sounded from the front of the house, and moments later he heard Murdin’s voice greeting someone.
His hand held a chisel, about to add another line to his next wardstone when Murdin called him from inside. Taking a deep breath, he set his work aside and entered the building.
Inside stood the mayor, Metra, and her assistant, Tudan. “Hello, Tane,” she said to him with a light smile and a wave. He copied the gesture, though his smile was a bit less politic than hers.
“So,” Murdin began, “to what do we owe the pleasure?”
The mayor frowned at his tone, but let it be. She eyed him before speaking, as if trying to find the best wording. “I have completed my own investigation into recent events.”
When she didn’t continue immediately, Murdin prompted her, instead. “..And?” He asked her, lined face searching her troubled expression.
“Not only have there been more attacks lately, the frequency of attacks is increasing far more than is normal,” she finally said. “Even in just the past week, there have been three separate attacks, in random directions from the village. Usually, three attacks over the course of a year is the norm.”
Murdin nodded slowly at that, a grimace showing his thoughts. “And you’ve come because there’s no clear answer,” he said.
“No,” she said, sighing. “There is not. However…”
Murdin looked at her curiously.
“Lately, I’ve had rumors running around.”
“I was not aware you put much stock in rumors, mayor.”
The mayor sighed. “I call them rumors, but they come from reports of actual activity that I cannot just ignore. My guardsmen have reported odd activity out in the forest during the nights, lately. Not every night, but more than should be happening.”
“I see,” Murdin said, tone clearly showing that he didn’t.
“For now, just keep me informed. I’m only here to see if you had any further information. For now, there’s not much to be done.”
“Has Tered had any more information for you?” Murdin asked.
“No,” the mayor replied, shaking her head. “Why?”
“Priest Tered’s oracle was vague, nearly useless. It only suggested something is coming.” Metra nodded as Murdin spoke. “Tered’s god rarely acts with such vague information. I fear,” Murdin said, crossing his arms, “that this means we face the work of another god.”
For once, Sen noticed even Tudan had a reaction to that. Always, the man had acted like a stone, showing no emotion. Now, though, even he paled slightly.
It was a fair reaction. Even now, Sen could hardly bear the thought of remembering the day where the sky was eaten, and his world ended. Even simply thinking about it, he could feel his heartbeat increasing, his hands clamming up. The nightmares he had every night flashed into his mind, and it took all of his willpower to prevent anything from showing on his face.
The conversation continued without him for a short time, as Sen focused on the little box in the back of his mind. It still sat there, locked up, waiting for him. He almost wanted to look inside. To confront the memories, the moment of… But, no, it was too much, for now. It would have to wait.
Until Sen was stronger - and not just physically or magically. When that day would come, Sen wasn’t sure, but that day was not today.
“…Then what can we do?” Mayor Metra asked nobody in particular.
Tadun spoke, a soft but chilling voice in the otherwise silent room, an eerie contrast to the chirping songbirds outside. “Perhaps all we can do is hope to weather this storm.”
Everyone looked at him. Murdin with a hard face, and Metra with a look of frustration.
“Tadun is right,” Murdin said. “Tane and I will continue repairing the wardstone net. That should be enough to keep most creatures away, but in case something strong enough to work its way past comes along, then I recommend recruiting from the guilds to find warriors who can protect the town.”
“You know that the guilds have almost no presence here, Murdin. There aren’t usually enough monsters for anyone to find consistent work.”
“Be that as it may,” he sighed, “you need people who can fight monsters. Guardsmen can try, but it’s not the same as dealing with the local drunks or a simple thief. Tane is coming along well,” the mage said as he looked toward Sen, “but even with him, there are only two of us. There are limits,” he finished with a heavy breath.
Their conversation continued in a pattern like that for a while, until the mayor either determined she had extracted all the information she could, or had met some other objective.
Sen wasn’t sure why Murdin had felt the need to call him in for this, but shrugged it off. Despite the reminders of his own existential dread, it was a nice distraction from the work waiting for him outside.
It was an odd feeling to love the work he did, and yet realize that same work was beginning to grate on him. He chafed under the need to systematically repeat himself, creating first simple glyphs, then wardstones. Only when he had a free moment to spare was he able to work on the combat enchantments that Murdin had taught him, but those, too, were simplistic and, ultimately, boring.
After the two had left, Sen turned to Murdin. “Was there something you needed from me?” he asked.
“I apologize,” he said after thinking for a moment. “You need to learn how to interact with town leadership eventually, but I should not have pulled you into this specific conversation without a need, and without telling you the purpose.”
“No need,” Sen said. “It was a nice break. Wardstones…” he trailed off, sighing, and Murdin chuckled.
“I understand,” he said. “We still have some time, today. Why don’t we go and replace some of the damaged wardstones? A break will do both of us good, I think.”
