Meanwhile in Tenorsbridge

Dalendor Per pressed down on his eyelids with his thumb and middle finger. He sighed and stretched and yawned. The tower room was cramped and dusty, but at least it wasn’t dark. Sunlight shone in through large windows.

Ashley Emberweave looked up from her side of the table. Her back was to the windows, and the backlight made her short auburn hair blaze. She was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, with her robe lying beside her on the floor, neatly folded. Outside, the spires of the city of Tenorsbridge reached towards the sky. “You can rest if you want,” she said.

“I know, I know.” Dale rose, jogged in place, and did a few squats. He then leaned on the table to take a breath.

Ash’s dark eyes were stern, but they always were. “You should exercise more. That should not wind you.”

“A proper wizard doesn’t exercise. I was fine until all my stuff stopped working,” Dale said and glanced back at the chest in the corner of the room. A robe and a conical wizard’s hat lay on top, riddled with holes in the places where the runes had burned out.

“Depending on just enchantments is risky,” Ash said and waved a hand towards the window. “Just go do some laps around the tower.”

“Maybe after we get somewhere today. Or tomorrow. Anything yet?”

Ash threw a stack of papers from her hand to the table and leaned on it with both elbows. She lowered her chin on the backs of her hands and stared at the papers. “No. Everything’s gone. It’s worse than anyone wanted to believe. No rune has kept its old meaning.”

“I’m not sure the last part is true,” Dale said, steepling his fingers before his chest. His hands resembled him in general: soft and delicate. He was clean-shaven, though Ash wasn't sure how much it mattered in Dale's case. His brown hair was parted in the manner of well-behaved upper-class boys of Tenorsbridge.

Ash took a new sheet of paper and leaned over it, quill in hand. “This isn’t one of your weird theories again? Like the one about tiny teratomes going into your nose and causing the flu?”

“Well, I guess it might be one of those, yes,” Dale said and tapped his fingertips against each other, one at a time. “But listen! Some runes are baked so deep into how everything works! You couldn’t change them without altering how reality itself is. What if the rune of death would have been scrambled? Or the rune of time? Everything dead might rise up as undead. Time itself might turn into… jelly or something.”

Ash had her head down. “No one has proven those kinds of runes exist.” She squinted at the paper for a moment and then drew a rune on it with a couple of measured strokes. “Let’s concentrate on finding what we need and leave worrying about the fabric of reality to the Janitors.”

They worked in silence for a while. It had been just weeks since the Scramble happened, and they had been cooped up in the tower ever since. The city was still in chaos, and the Per family had arranged the assignment for Dale to get him out from harms way. Ash had been dragged along as extra insurance.

Dale twirled the quill in his hand and pouted his lips. He sighed, glancing out the window. “The vaults below the city are rumoured to house many forbidden runes. If they would just let us take a look, we could try to see if everything had changed or not.”

Ash didn’t reply, but compared the rune she had drawn to one on their list. In the middle of the table was a folder full of papers, each containing dozens of runes with only slight variations from one to the next. She set a finger on the rune she had drawn and channelled a minuscule amount of mana. It felt like cold water trickling under her skin towards her fingertip and dripping out into the rune. The paper glowed blue for a moment. Suddenly it grew thicker and turned into what resembled the foam that sometimes appears on sea beaches. Then the foam burst into flames.

“What use would there be in knowing if some runes had stayed the same?” Ash asked while pressing a damp towel on top of the burning foam. They had extra thick towels always on standby for just such situations. Green smoke billowed out from under her hands, and she leaned as far away from it as she could. If it was one of the forbidden ones, we couldn't use it anyway.

Dale fanned the green smoke away from himself. “Phew, that’s rank. Guess we’ll mark that rune down as not usable for now.” He dabbed the corner of his eyes with his sleeve. “But returning to your question, if we knew that some runes had stayed the same, it might mean this whole thing was intentional instead of being just a naturally occurring event. It might be an attack on Tenorsbridge!”

“That is one of the wilder conspiracy theories I have heard in a while,” Ash said. “And it’s above our paygrade, anyway. We just need to find any runes on the priority list.”

“Fine, fine.” Dale took up a fistful of papers and crumpled them up. “But this method is not working. The ratio of useful to outright dangerous runes seems to be much worse than anyone wanted to think. One to thousands. Maybe to millions.”

Ash shrugged. “That’s why we’re careful.”

“That’s not the point! I just think it’s a waste of time and effort,” Dale said, waving his hand in a wide circle around the room. “We could be here for years and never find a single usable rune.”

Ash set down the pen on the table and fixed Dale with her gaze. “What do you suggest, then?”

“We get out there! Find some magic that still works. Maybe there’s something completely new out there. We find it, extract the runes and we don’t have to risk turning ourselves into slag or filling the room with poison or summoning a demon or something.” Dale swung his hand towards the window and the world waiting outside it.

“Too dangerous. Bandits know that using magic is forbidden at the moment. They attack people coming from the city with abandon.”

“We wouldn’t need to go out in pointy hats and bathrobes! We’d go incognito. Pretend to be some poor wanderers or something.” Dale’s eyes practically sparkled as he talked. He walked around the room, arms swinging, miming them walking up hills and pushing branches out of their way in a forest.

“And where do you think we would find any runes? It’s not like they grow on trees. Except in the elven forest, but even you’re not suggesting that.”

Dale sighed and sat back down in his chair. He breathed out and seemed to deflate. “There is that, yeah. It’s just that I really think that we won’t get anywhere here either.”

“I hear what you’re saying. But running randomly around the countryside is just even less likely to give us anything.” Ash threw the towel off the table and picked up her quill. “It’s only much more likely to get us killed.”

Dale glanced at the desk that had a wide black circle burnt into its top where the towel had been.

Ash followed his gaze. “Well, maybe not much more likely, but you get my point. At the very least, your family would object. Start scribing.”

Dale sighed and took a blank paper from the stack. He dipped his quill into the inkpot but let it rest above the paper while gazing towards the window, frowning.

Ash read the rune list for a moment, but then looked up at Dale. She groaned and laid down her quill. “If we hear anything promising, we’ll consider looking into it. Ok?”

A smile lit up Dale’s face. He crossed over the rune Ash had drawn earlier and squinted at the next one. “Well then, until that, here goes experiment number 176,” he said and started drawing the next rune.