Rune mage

Chapter 61: Shaken

The stones were keeping me awake.

Or maybe it was the fort.

I hadn't had a good nights sleep in weeks, even with the healer and Jess working together with tea and magic.

Levi didn't fare much better, the poor lad.

So it was almost a relief when the land began to shake one night as we sat eating dinner.

The fort's distress was visual and auditory, creaks and glowing runes. Everything shook... pots and pans and books fell from shelves. At least one jar jumped off a counter and shattered.

"Is it an attack?" Archer asked.

Levi and I both shook our heads. "It is not," I said, and then ran to a bucket to be ill.

Levi wasn't far behind me. I made it to the bucket whereas he aimed for a cleaning rune and didn't quite make it.

This caused poor Jess to have to run for a bucket. She hadn't said anything to anyone but I knew it wouldn't be long before either she or Archer made an announcement about the new heart that beat within her.

The shaking stopped briefly.

But it returned.

And returned.

And returned. For days the land shook.

The healer had to sedate Levi more than once as he cried hysterically that he was being torn in two.

I wished I could sedate the fort. It was screeching and shivering with each shake.

I felt runes break as walls cracked despite all my protections and strengthening runes. The release of the broken runes was pain upon pain, each one feeling like I was holding a red hot whip.

I couldn't eat or sleep until everything was repaired. I just vomited up anything I ate, and sleeping couldn't happen safely with all the power breaking out of runes and out of the fort.

I pulled power from entire sections, and held it away while my men worked to correct cracks. When he wasn't sedated, Levi applied his stone magic to repair walls, adding stones and smoothing them into place. I would manage a small snippet of sleep and then the land would shake and new repairs would be needed.

I now was carrying more power than ever, pulling from the fort so that if more cracks happened it wouldn't explode anything important. We had lost the western most battlement to a power surge and resultant blast. I couldn't let it happen again.

It was like walking around holding onto fire. It was worse that holding onto hot rocks, because it was my own power broiling as it reached overflow.

I created more power stones and more beads and filled them but it was like using a ladle to empty the lake. I had so many beads in my hair I clinked when I walked, carried so much power my runes perpetually glowed.

I was so sleep deprived I was beginning to have discussions with the illusions without realizing or remember they weren't real. I was so overwhelmed I couldn't solve even the smallest of problems. For half a day, I wore only one boot because I couldn't find the other.

As I neared my overflow point, two of my simple runes exploded when I tried to power them- I held so much power I overflowed everything.

Then one night the mountain seemed to dance from dusk to dawn, giant heaving shakes that sent the sound of cracks echoing across the mountains and wounded the land. I sent wave after wave of power into strength and wellness runes to the land around our fort and in our fort. I poured as much power as I could as fast as I could and still did not exhaust my reserves.

By dawn however, the shakes were less. And with the sunrise I could see that the fort was now the tallest peak in all the area. The other peaks had collapsed and avalanched into the valleys. I suspected only my runes and power had allowed us to stand.

I could not release all of my power and reengage the runes until I knew there were no broken runes.

I knew where the broken runes where.

I was just too exhausted, beyond exhausted, to repair them.

Levi at least had come through the night no worse for wear. In fact, he seemed happy now.

He used his power to smooth over runes that were broken so that I could at least give power back to the fort's walls. There would be blank places where no illusions wandered and no cleaning runes were in place, at least until I could get the runes replaced.

But at long last I could release the power.

I sent it at first as a trickle. At least that was my intent.

The fort grabbed at my magic and pulled. I might have been terrified if it didn't feel so good to not carry all the power of the fort inside of me.

I was on my knees, weeping because I was relieved but also scared because I wasn't really in control of the power and also because I hadn't done more than doze in weeks.

And then I was screaming because I was in pain.

I knew this feeling. I was being drained.

"Stop fort stop!" I shouted. "You'll kill me. I will be dead and you will lose all this power."

It stopped pulling and I collapsed.

"Will he live?" Archer asked the healer as they picked me up.

"He will, because I am here and we are all here and the fort won't want him to die. Every one of the wellness runes powered up the moment he said he would die." The healer replied as they took me to the healer's hall.

"How long can a man go without food, without sleep?" Archer asked.

"He has lasted longer than I thought possible," the healer said.

I had survived almost dying before. I knew I could survive this.

But I was as weak as a kitten. I could only eat broth. I sweat and shook and cried in pain as my body and magic healed.

Healing isn't always painless.

It took weeks to regain my strength.

In those weeks my mage students took turns learning from me the knowledge they would have been asked to learn from books, if they were at the school. I told them knowledge the way a bard tells tales, and asked questions that made them think. It was a pleasant way to pass the time while I was too weak to stand.

They were all trained to fight. Even the girl water mage. She was a very beginner, and the men took great care to train her well. Which mean she wasn't in the dirt all the time, only some of the time.

I worried.

I worried that the enemy might come while I was weak. I worried that the runes across the land were disrupted- a few I could tell were. Most were just shifted or buried.

The fort wouldn't let me leave, when I finally got to my feet and wanted to repair runes.

That was not a good day for anyone, as my irritation was evident.

I sat at the dinner table and looked around. No one wanted to meet my eyes. I had snapped at pretty much everyone.

I counted them, because if they were all in place, at least one part of the day was good.

Eight men, five boys, one girl, one wife, one babe.

I hadn't meant to say it out loud, but I evidently did because they all looked to Jess who laughed.

Archer laughed too. "I had a bet you would already know," he chuckled. "I owe her a foot rub."

The men congratulated the parents to be and I listened as everyone told stories from their childhood. If their intent was to embolden Archer and Jess, I think they failed. Tales of misadventure and close calls seemed to be making them nervous.

I cleared my throat.