The Tower: Book One of the Legend of the Artificer

Chapter 11

"So, the circle is the will of the caster," the holkind explained as he gestured to the two rings of the circle with the runes floating in the middle. "For the smaller charms, you can get away with just a single solid line, but for a high level enchantment like this, you need the inner circle and runes. Each rune denotes what your intentions are for the spell, and as such, change the nature of it. Elements are the building blocks of static spells, like all magic, but when you're working on pure will like this, they aren't involved for this part of it. So, since this spell is directed towards me, these are its intentions for me, and how it feels about me. So you have ambition here, strength, protectiveness, imagination, creativity, ingenuity, knowledge, spiritual growth, and intellect. The strength of the spell lies in the circle, so if I can figure out where the sequence starts, I can figure out how to break it. Once the holding circle is broken, the spell is released."

"So, I recognize all of those runes, but what is this one?" Angel asked and reached up to point at the single blazing green symbol, and the holkind paused, because he didn't know how to answer that in a way that made sense.

"That's the symbol of it," he settled on. "It's not really found in most enchantments, or a general part of the alphabet, but think of it like... a signature. That symbol is... it."

"It being your teacher?"

"... It being the bird," he confirmed carefully, because it wasn't his teacher, not really, but he didn't know how to begin to explain it. He didn't worship it, it wasn't his god, he wasn't even sure if it was a god. It was just... it. "I suppose it's less of a teacher and more of a patron."

"Huh. Okay, so you have to separate the ring from... this." Angel gestured vaguely at the sluggishly moving infinity circle. "Why is that?"

"Okay, so this is where the actual building blocks reside," he explained and pointed to each point. "It's running on a cosmic sequence, which is incredibly complicated. The problem with it is I have to figure out what rune I have to take out and when I have to take it out. The runes are more concentrated here, because it's running an equation. So you have the symbol for space here with wistful for... there's not a word for it, but it's a concept, and an emotion, and earth with more earth for foundation, and sun with knowledge for the concept of enlightenment, and sun and planets for orbit, but in this context with the rest means pull and push, and fold with bend here for spatial displacement, generally a teleportation rune, but in this context means fixed with the way they're stacked, so it's like, anti-teleportation, meaning I can't warp out, it's very weird, and here is target, loosely translated as wishful thinker, kind of means dreamer, in a way, and youth, or, with this embellishment, zygote, which is right in the center and fixed, because that's who it's directed on, me, the learner. The letters rearrange themselves at random intervals, and I have to figure out the pattern to it, which I haven't yet, which adds another level of complexity to it all."

"And how does it all work with the door?" Angel asked while Grim simply stared at it all in dismay.

"See the clicking cogs and gears?" he asked as he came to his feet and walked through the light to point at each gear. "The splines all have runes engraved into them, right? Occasionally, they shift out of focus and reappear somewhere else. I've mostly matched up each one and layered an active charm on them to keep track of them so they appear on the image I project. If I hadn't figured out how to copy the enchantment itself, I wouldn't have been able to work it out."

"Oh, I get it," Angel said as he came to his feet. "Sort of. You have better ears than humans and can hear magic, so I'm guessing you can hear each frequency?"