Lucia felt her forehead for any sensation of a circular rune. Her skin was smooth, and she didn't notice anything odd. Without any reflective objects, Benj had to describe it and trace the circular shape with his index finger. The expression on his face said more than the trace lines, and the feeling worried her.

  "Here," Benj lifted the orange headband off his head and offered it to her. "I washed it not too long ago."

  Lucia took the rolled-up cloth in her hands and played with it nervously. "I saw you."

  Benj looked around as if astonished and pointed to himself. "Like right now? Can you still see me?"

  "No, I saw you before," she began but then cut him off before he could make another wise remark. "When I looked at your carved name, I thought I saw something, so I looked at it differently. I don't know. It felt natural. I think I saw the past. Is that normal?"

  Realization dawned on Benj, and he instinctively ran his hands through his hair. He explained how everyone's abilities were different. He pointed to the shoemaker's name and explained how he gained increased strength. He then explained that he didn't have a relic that caused him to fly; it was the ability he got from the mountain. Each person only got one, and each of them was different.

  "So I won't be able to use your relic to jump off buildings?" She asked with a look of curt realization. "And now I have a giant blue mountain rune on my forehead?"

  Benj shook his head and nodded sheepishly at her questions. "On the bright side, you might have gotten something pretty incredible. You said you saw me, right? Can you do it again?"

  Lucia shrugged and gave his scarf back. "I might take you up on this later," she said. Then, she looked around and tried to look into the past. She couldn't. So, she repeated her earlier actions and brushed her fingers across where Benj had signed his name. She gasped as she saw the same sight that she had before.

  Benj was excited to hear that it worked. He had so many ideas, but one burned its way to the forefront of his imagination; he asked her to try touching the name in the very center of the stone. Zilez Kalizar had been the first to sign his name on the flat peak of Mt. Asven. His name was central to the village's age-old tradition of climbing to the top. Finding more about him could mean unlocking Asven's secrets. It was something that tugged violently at his curiosity.

  Lucia agreed and walked to the center of the stone. Her fingertips traced across the wavy script spelling out Zilez Kalizar; she realized she recognized the name. She knew exactly where she recognized it from just as her current world blinked away with the spark of a hundred thousand sunsets.

  The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

  Les had just finished the final touches on his project. All the runes were connected to a centralized network that got energy from a single source. How he planned on powering that source was only a little theoretical. If ether could be converted into fire or lightning, why couldn't he reverse the conversion? His experiments with fire were so far inconclusive. His silver-flaked ink burned up in the fire, but it might not disintegrate if exposed to lightning.

  He had written his name at the focal point of his runic design. If he was correct, the whole design would count as a single runic sentence that would create an entirely new rune. The only problem was that he was testing too many theories at the same time. There just wasn't enough energy to test the bigger theories, and there wasn't enough energy demand otherwise. So he combined a few experiments together and hoped for the best.

  Les had been working all day. It wasn't difficult work, but it was mentally draining to draw out such a complex design on the top of the mountain in the cold. He pulled his cowl up around his ears and prepared to draw one last rune on his staff. His mind was as numb as his fingertips as he tried to remember the symbol for lightning. It was such a basic rune that he nearly laughed at himself for forgetting the fundamentals.

  "West is not water; West is fire. East is water. South should be earth, but it's not. Let's see... I need a North-East meridian," Les mumbled as he drew a circular pattern on the head of his staff before asking himself, "Which direction is North-East?"

  He plucked a map from his belt, unfolded it, and aligned it with his surroundings. "If home is that way," he oriented his map so his house was East, "Then North-East should be… this way." He made several quick lines on his staff. As soon as he finished the design, the air became dense and started lashing out with small charges.

  Les wasn't a fool. He knew the dangers of lightning. Even if he planned on converting it into ether, there would still be a risk of getting injured. So he took precautions. Around the rune that would theoretically convert lighting into ether, he had installed a lead handle so that no residual shock could hurt him. Ether and lightning had similar properties, so it was common sense that since lead blocked one, it would also block the other.

  Lucia watched the man as he held his staff in one hand and placed his other on the runic painting on the surface of the mountain. The winds swirled as fog gathered and thickened around her. She heard a great rumbling sound from above that set her nerves on edge. Then, in the blink of an eye, a loud cracking thunder erupted from all around her. Incorporeal as she was, her body reacted to the sound, and she jumped back; her world going dark.

  When she awoke, Benj was standing over her, concerned. She had fainted. She told him she was fine but just needed a moment to reorient herself.

  "I think we should leave soon," Benj suggested. "We can start heading home whenever you're ready."

  "I'm fine, I'm fine," Lucia assured him while sitting up slowly. She explained what she saw with as much detail as possible. She then described the map that she saw, which gave her an idea. "Instead of going home right away, what do you think about exploring around a little bit? I think I can find where Ziles Kalizar lived. Also, did you know he was the one who wrote my fake poetry book?"