Morgana arranged the materials on the table with the methodical calm of a master artisan: a stick of charcoal, a piece of white chalk, a roll of twine, and three small goat bones, sanded and polished until they were as smooth as river pebbles. An arsenal of simplicity, with no ornate wands or dusty tomes. Her magic came from the earth and the things she could touch. I took my place at her left, an improvised notebook open, ready for the lesson. Today's class, announced by these humble instruments, would be on runes.
I had studied hundreds of magical systems, from the complex hand-seal-based ninjutsu that shaped chakra, to the brutal, self-devouring mathematics of Chaos magic that always consumed the caster. But there was always room for a new language, especially one that felt so fundamentally linked to the art of Qi cultivation I had practised for so many lifetimes.
"People think of magic as lightning," Morgana began, her voice low and resonant as the hum of a harp string, filling the silence of the cottage. "A flash of power, an explosion of will. And they are fundamentally wrong. Wild magic, the river we spoke of, that is lightning. It is chaotic, unpredictable, hungry. Trying to control it by force is like trying to hold a storm in your hands. You always get burnt, or you drown. I have seen powerful mages become nothing more than screaming echoes in history for believing their will was stronger than the river itself."
She paused, her violet eyes fixed on mine, ensuring I was absorbing not just the words, but the philosophy behind them.
"Magic, the magic that lasts, the magic that builds rather than just destroys is grammar," she continued. "It is the art of listening to what wild magic wants to say and giving it a language to express itself, a safe path to follow. And runes, Azra'il, are the syntax. They do not command the river. They are the riverbed that guides it. They are the vessel that holds the spell so it doesn't leak and stain everything around it with unwanted consequences."
[Analysis: the principle is analogous to the formation arrays you utilised in the cultivation realms. External structures to channel, stabilise, and optimise the flow of internal energy, your Qi. A forgotten science in most worlds.]
She drew a straight line with the chalk on a dark wooden board. "The straight line commands. It is the shortest path, will without deviation. For things that must happen, without argument. It is the language of stone and bone." She drew a soft, undulating curve beside it. "The curve persuades. It is the path of the river, flowing around obstacles rather than breaking them. For things that need to be guided, not forced. It is the language of water and wind." And finally, she drew a small, solid dot. "The dot anchors. Where power settles and from where it draws its stability. It is the language of the earth beneath our feet."
"Flow geometry," I murmured, translating it into my own terms. "The shape of the channel dictates the function and nature of the power that passes through it."
A rare, genuine smile touched Morgana's lips, one that reached her eyes for a fleeting instant, softening her perpetual melancholy. "Exactly. The basic syntax is this: an open design, like a hook, draws energy in; a closed design, like a circle, holds it within. It is the difference between an invitation and a vault."
"Let's move to the practical," she said, moving to the brick brazier where the flame danced high and rebellious. "Cooking is an act of transformation, not destruction. I don't want a flame with an ego. I want one that obeys." On the corner of the brazier stone, she drew a closed circle, anchored by three dots, with a small, curved arrow pointing to the centre. "Keyword: Stay. The rune commands the heat to concentrate here, and not to disperse uselessly."
The tall, dancing flame immediately settled, retracting, becoming a low and steady presence, a perfect orange glow hot, but controlled. Morgana looked at me. "Feel it."
I closed my eyes. Instead of pushing power, as so many immature mages do, I used my knowledge of cultivation to draw in the energy around me, like a fisherman reeling in his line. I cycled it in a quick, small loop through my Dantian, polishing its edges, removing the wild, unstable intent, and directed it gently into the rune. I felt the rune vibrate like a tuning fork, accepting the energy, drinking it in eagerly. It did the heavy lifting of containment, while I merely fed it with a thin, controlled stream, like water filling a precise mould.
[Thermal reading of the stone: stable at 180 degrees Celsius. Residual energy leakage into the environment: 0.01%. Highly efficient.]
"What did you learn?" Morgana asked, her voice pulling me from my technical analysis.
"That the symbol does the hard work. My part is to lend it breath, not force."
"Precisely." The word was spoken with a tone of deep approval.
We moved through the cottage, turning it into our own private spellbook. On the door hinge, she had me draw a half-open rune for 'calm' to silence its creak. On the window shutters, a variation of 'persuasion' to convince the wind to pass without whistling. "Ten seconds. Listen. Process. Release," she instructed as I energised each rune with a quick pulse. "Prolonged, active magic charges interest, and the interest is always higher than you think. In the form of exhaustion, headaches, or, in extreme cases, years of your life."
On the inside collar of my tunic, with a piece of consecrated chalk, she drew a rune for 'low'. "It is not invisibility," she explained, her touch gentle as she turned the fabric. "That is a noisy, flashy trick of the light. This is... irrelevance. It is a rune of persuasion that convinces the world around you that there is nothing here worthy of a second glance."
As she drew the complex pattern on the cloth, I concentrated, feeling the pattern take shape in my mind. It was a closed circle with three internal anchors. "The top anchor settles the intent not to be seen, the left one grounds you, the right one binds you to the air around you, muffling your presence," I explained to her aloud, following the logic of the rune's structure.
Morgana paused the chalk. A thick, surprised silence settled between us. She looked at me, her violet eyes wide. "You… you don't just see the shape. You see the structure."
"The language is new, but the grammar makes sense," I replied. With her tacit permission, I activated the rune. In parallel, my body began a breathing cycle I had used for meditation in another life, keeping the seal energised without conscious effort, like a secondary heartbeat.
She nodded slowly, impressed, a touch of something that looked dangerously like pride softening her eyes. "Good. Magic that relies on constant concentration is a weakness in a fight. Magic that becomes a habit, a breath, is a second skin."
We continued outside. She drove the three goat bones into the edge of the clearing, forming a triangle, and guided me in weaving a subtle mesh of 'discouragement' between them. "I prefer a perimeter that talks to one that bites," she said. "Anyone who approaches will feel a sudden, inexplicable urge to be elsewhere, without knowing why. It leaves no trace."
Back at the table, I had a question. "All of this is defensive or utilitarian. What if I need something that... responds? Without being a chaotic bolt of lightning, as you put it."
She seemed to consider, weighing the validity of my question. "Defence is rarely about hitting back. It is about creating an undesirable response to an undesirable action. Come."
She took the twine and stretched it taut between two nails on the table. "Imagine this is a trap. Most mages would put a burst of fire or ice here. Inefficient, noisy, dangerous, and it draws far too much attention. We do not. We just… complicate things." She drew a complex rune on the twine with her chalk, full of interlocking curves and spirals that closed in on themselves. "Word: Tangle."
She handed me a twig. "Try to cut the string."
I touched the twig to the twine. Instantly, I felt a sticky, stubborn force resisting. The more I pushed, the more the resistance coiled around itself, like thick honey becoming tar, creeping up the twig. It didn't hurt, it didn't explode. It just… impeded. It was incredibly exhausting to fight against.
"It doesn't harm," I observed, fascinated by the elegance of the solution.
"It doesn't need to. The intent is not to injure. It is to make the effort worthless. To make the intruder give up of their own accord, frustrated and confused, and perhaps think twice before trying again," Morgana said with quiet firmness. "Restorative justice. Even for traps."
Finally, she returned to the cottage door and, next to the complex alarm lock, drew a small, simple seal, almost like a signature. "And this is 'forgiveness'," she said, her voice losing its instructor's tone and gaining the weight of a confession. "It is the rune of unbinding. The ability to undo everything. To go back to being just wood and stone, air and silence. The hardest lesson of all, Azra'il, is knowing when to let go of your defences. To trust that you can rebuild them when you need them again."
She looked at me, and in that moment, the lesson was no longer about runes. It was about scars, about forgiveness, about moving on.
The lesson ended, but the work continued. While she prepared supper, the smell of vegetables and herbs filling the air, I sat at the table and practised. On a splinter of wood, I recreated the fire rune from the brazier but optimised it to use 4% less energy. On another, I redesigned the silence rune on the door, adding a resonance curve that made it stronger against high winds. Every rune was a puzzle, and I was adding pieces from my own vast and ancient knowledge.
"You don't just copy," Morgana observed over her shoulder as she chopped carrots. "You improve."
"It would be a waste of a good education not to try," I replied, focused on a new design in my notebook a fusion of her 'low' rune with a Qi-concealment matrix I had known for millennia. In theory, it would make the spell self-sustaining for hours, powered by one's own breath.
She stopped chopping and turned to me, wiping her hands on a cloth. Her eyes were serious. "Be careful, Azra'il. Grammar is a dangerous power. Changing a single note can turn a lullaby into a battle cry."
"Understood," I replied, looking up from my work. "No note will be played aloud until the score has been revised and approved by the conductor."
She laughed, a low, rare sound that warmed the cottage air more than the brazier. "Agreed. Now, enough spell-weaving. Time to fill plates. Supper."
That night, the cottage was the same, but different. It felt safer, quieter, more ours. Every surface was a page in our shared spellbook. Morgana's magic wasn't about power. It was about peace. About restraint. And by stitching it together with the threads of my own lifetimes, I was, for the first time, creating something that wasn't just for survival.
It was for living well.