The work Denval expected from Caleb was boring.
That was not unexpected for him.
The rules had to be written clearly, without ambiguity, without room for interpretation that could be blamed on the game rather than the player. They had to be teachable, repeatable, defensible. They had to survive being copied by people who did not understand why they worked.
Caleb spent his mornings on that.
He wrote, erased, rewrote. Defined turn structures. Clarified movement constraints. Removed edge cases that encouraged clever abuse. When something could be misunderstood, he assumed it would be.
Occasionally, an officer sat in the room while he worked.
They did not interrupt him. They observed.
Some of them asked questions afterward — precise ones on a certain game position. Others stayed silent, but came back the next day anyway. Caleb learned to tell the difference between curiosity and evaluation.
By the end of the week, Tarnen had an official form.
Not perfect. But stable and clear.
That was enough for Denval.
The real work began afterward.
Caleb waited until the household quieted, until the movement of the peoples became predictable and the guards settled into long routines. Then he cleared his desk and brought out the pieces he had kept separate.
They looked ordinary.
Wood, bone, stone. Carved cleanly, without ornamentation. The same shapes Tarnen had always used.
But the underside of each piece was unfinished.
That was where he started.
He did not begin with spells.
He began with symbols.
Simple ones, copied carefully from old manuals and marginal notes he had gathered over the past week. Markings that most mages considered beneath them to notice — preparatory signs, alignment guides, containment glyphs.
The kind of things no one bothered to explain in detail, because everyone "felt" how they worked and kind of knew how it would turn out when they made it.
Caleb did not trust that interpretation. If nobody had questionned gravity, science wouldnt have advanced as much as it did. If nobody studied the obvious that everyone took as natural then the world would never progress.
He engraved one symbol into the base of a pawn.
Nothing happened.
He placed it on the board. Moved it forward one square. Nothing.
He removed it, turned it, placed it again.
Still nothing.
Good.
He engraved a second symbol, smaller, offset.
This time, when the pawn was placed on the board, it warmed slightly under his fingers. Not really heat. More like touching something that had just been held by another person.
Caleb froze.
He did not move the piece for several seconds.
The sensation faded on its own.
He wrote it down immediately.
Condition: placement
Effect: transient resonance
Duration: short
Intensity: minimal
He repeated the process.
Same symbols. Same piece. Same board.
Same result.
Reproducible.
That was enough for Denval.
Over the following nights, he expanded cautiously.
He added no more than one symbol at a time. He never combined markings unless he had already observed them independently. When something behaved inconsistently, he removed it entirely.
Most experiments failed.
Some failed silently without him knowing why. Others failed in ways that felt… wrong. A symbol that reacted before the piece touched the board. Another that lingered too long after removal.
Those went into a separate box.
He focused on what behaved predictably.
Position mattered.
Orientation mattered.
Proximity mattered.
A pawn engraved with a simple trigger symbol reacted differently when placed next to another engraved piece. Not stronger. Not weaker. Just… differently.
Caleb leaned back in his chair, staring at the board.
"So you're not reacting to the piece," he murmured. "You're reacting to the state."
He tested the idea.
He removed one piece and replaced it with an unmarked one.
The reaction disappeared.
State change. Not identity.
He smiled faintly.
The first time a piece moved on its own, it startled him.
Not because it was dramatic — it wasn't — but because it was subtle.
He had engraved a directional constraint into the base of a knight. Nothing complex. Just a symbol that, according to the margin notes he'd copied it from, "encouraged alignment."
When he placed the knight slightly off-center on a square, it shifted.
Barely a finger's width.
Enough to correct itself.
Caleb stared at it for a long moment.
Then he pushed it again.
It corrected itself again.
"That's not intentinal," he whispered. "It doesnt have self awareness. It just follow his instructions..."
Just execution.
He did not sleep that night.
By the second week, he had stopped thinking in terms of spells.
He thought in terms of triggers. For him that came from a world where mysticisme was completely absent, thinking about anything surnaturel was not something he could immediately be accustomed to. It was more natural to see them as juste... instructions.
If this, then that.
If placed, then glow.
If adjacent, then react.
If isolated, then fade.
Some effects stacked. Others cancelled each other out entirely.
One combination produced nothing at all — not because it failed, but because the symbols resolved into a neutral state.
That one fascinated him.
He copied it three times to be sure.
Each time, the result was the same.
"This is clearly a subtraction," he muttered, writing quickly. "It dosent oppose it. It removes it."
He began sketching diagrams instead of sentences.
Relationships. Dependencies. Boundaries.
The board was no longer a game surface.
It was a test environment.
During the day, officers continued to play Tarnen.
Caleb watched when he could.
He noticed something new.
Players reacted to the enchanted pieces even when they did not know why.
They hesitated before moving a piece that glowed faintly. They trusted positions that felt "stable." They avoided configurations that produced irregular responses, even when those positions were objectively strong.
The game was teaching them something they did not realize they were learning.
Feedback mattered.
Not power. Not outcome.
Feedback.
Caleb made a note of that too.
The first mage noticed on the fifteenth day.
She did not announce herself. She stood at the edge of the room while a game was in progress, eyes unfocused, attention clearly elsewhere.
Caleb felt it before he saw her. She had a kind of strange aura that make the peoples in the room notice her. He didn't really believe in that kind of mystical thing but he was forced to admit that there was something happening here.
The pieces reacted differently.
Not really stronger than usual. Just… quicker.
After the game ended, she approached the board slowly.
"This isn't a spell," she said.
Caleb looked up and smiled. "No. Not really"
"It behaves like one," she replied. "But it doesn't originate anywhere ."
Caleb looked at here bit really understanding her point. It's not exactly as if he had received any kind of magical training. He didn't knew what she was talking about.
She picked up a pawn, turned it over, frowned at the markings.
"This is scaffolding," she said. "Why is this here?"
Caleb considered lying.
He decided not to.
"Because it makes the reaction of the pieces consistent," he said.
She looked at him sharply. "Magic isn't consistent."
"It can be," Caleb replied. "If you stop asking it to mean something."
The mage stared at him for a long moment.
Then she laughed, quietly.
"Oh," she said. "You're dangerous."
She left without another word.
Caleb wrote what she told him down too. Anything was worth researching.
That night, he tested something new.
He engraved the same symbol onto three different pieces.
Placed them in three different positions.
The effect triggered in all three cases.
Not identically — position still mattered — but according to the same internal logic.
Caleb closed his eyes.
It wasn't intuition.
It wasn't talent.
It was structure.
Magic did not care who cast it.
It cared how it was defined.
He opened his notebook and wrote a single line at the top of a fresh page:
Magic executes instruction.
He sat there for a long time after that, staring at the board.
Tarnen lay between his hands, while unchanged in appearance, greatly changed it's internal working.
This wasn't about games anymore.
This was about what the peoples in this world called magic.
And Caleb understood, with a clarity that unsettled him, that once he began designing a system based on something like this…
It would not remain confined to a board.
Not for long.