Just a Bystander

Venting

Ambrose signed us into the compound, but this time he led me to one of the smaller chambers. It was a dome, like the big chamber we had first used, but with a total floor space that was just a little larger than the Ka'atus Room. Only a single tier of seats ran around the circumference.

'Not that I don't want to learn new things,' I said warily as Ambrose strode in and gestured at me to stand opposite him, 'but I'm overdrawn and feeling it.'

He nodded. 'I know. And that last stunt you pulled can't have helped. But this is the best time to do it.'

'Exactly what are we doing?' It occurred to me that if Ambrose wanted some payback for what I had done, this would be the perfect place to do it. I was overdrawn, and there was no one around to stop him. I felt my heartbeat quicken.

'Improving your arcanic control by an order of magnitude.'

I took in a deep breath to calm my nerves. 'Is there a reason we're doing it in a duelling chamber?'

He blinked, apparently only just realising how threatening the situation seemed. A slow smile spread across his face. 'Don't worry, I'm not going to hurt you. But we need some privacy because I can't share this with the others yet. So, how much do you know about overdrawing?'

He didn't seem like he was going to do anything terrible, and the line of his questioning looked like it was venturing into something less combat-oriented and more sedentary. I relaxed a little.

'It's something that happens when we use too much of our auric arcana,' I replied. 'Short-term symptoms include headaches, lightheadedness-'

'Okay, no need for the whole textbook!' Ambrose laughed. 'Can you tell how much you've overdrawn?'

'I guess so? You just go by how bad the symptoms are. Most people have the same progression.'

Ambrose pursed his lips. 'Most, but not all. If you experience symptoms a little differently from others, you may end up overdrawing more than you mean to.'

'So you're saying there's a way to check how overdrawn you are?'

He raised an eyebrow. 'Common artefacts do that so they don't kill people, don't they?'

I slapped a hand to my forehead. It was such an ingrained part of life that I hadn't given it a second thought, but he was right. Fatal overdrawing almost never happened, even among laypeople, because common artefacts had safety clauses written into the glyphs. They simply wouldn't activate if the user was overdrawn. And any arcanist worth their salt wouldn't fatally overdraw because they were educated enough to know about the symptoms. It was such a rarity that dying by overdraw was newsworthy, and usually involved accidents with artefact experimentation.

'I just need to know the glyphs, then?'

He nodded. 'That's one way. The common artefacts use a pretty elegant glyph sequence. For arcanists there's a faster way, but we do need to look at the glyphs first.'

With a gesture, he conjured a sequence of glyphs off to the side where we could both read them. Instead of being arranged as a string, it was actually laid out in three concentric circles. 'This is the usual sequence.'

I did recall seeing this on various artefacts, but I had never really paid much attention to it, mostly because I had until recently only known the Basic Set. Now that we had been given study materials and had to learn an even greater range of glyphs, I realised I could pick out some things.

And Ambrose was right. Elegant was the word.

It was almost like poetry. Not only was each concentric circle a clause on its own, they had all been arranged in such a way that they also formed clauses that went from the innermost to the outermost circle. The glyphs had been scribed in different sizes across the circles to facilitate the cross-circle clauses. The more I studied it, the more I saw layers and layers of meaning packed into this dense formation of glyphs.