Hermes followed his dormmates to the lesson room and, in a move that earned him several bewildered looks, walked straight past the back rows and seated himself in the front.
Teacher's pet. Unashamedly.
The others filed in behind him and filled the room with the low murmur of students who would rather be anywhere else. Nobody sat next to him. He was, as usual, an island.
That was fine. He was used to it.
Then the professor entered and the murmur died.
He was a tall man, broad across the shoulders, with a shaved head that shined like a spotlight. He had the face of someone who had long ago decided that unnecessary expressions were a waste of effort. He moved to the front of the room without hurry, set down nothing, and looked at the class with the flat patience of a man who had seen every variety of student foolishness and been impressed by none of it.
The room was very quiet.
"Rune dictionary. Clay tablet. Now."
The student beside Hermes — an empty seat between them, a buffer maintained with quiet deliberateness — lifted the surface of his desk. It hinged upward like a lid, revealing a hollow interior fitted with two books and a small metal stylus the size of a pencil. Hermes blinked at it for a moment then opened his own. Same contents. He retrieved everything and set it on the desk.
The rest of the class had already risen and were moving toward a cupboard at the back of the room. Hermes joined the queue, collected a clay tablet, and returned to his seat.
The professor surveyed them.
"Last week you learned the fire rune and produced a basic fireball. Today you will learn to direct it. You have thirty minutes for your mental and mana exercises. Begin."
The room went silent in a way that felt almost deliberate — not the silence of absence but the silence of focused effort. All around him students closed their eyes and settled into what looked like meditation, their expressions smoothing into careful concentration.
When in Rome.
Hermes closed his eyes and attempted the same.
He lasted about two minutes before his thoughts started wandering and he decided this was not a productive use of his time. He opened his eyes, glanced around to confirm that everyone was still suitably absorbed, and reached for the first book.
The Rune Dictionary.
It was not a large volume. Each page displayed a rune — clean, precise, geometric — alongside three or more interpretations with no apparent connection between them. The rune for ice also meant delay, stillness, and inaction. The rune for water also meant flow and ebb. The rune for stone also meant permanence, resistance, and memory.
He moved through the dictionary quickly. His aspect and attributes made memorisation trivially easy — the runes arranged themselves in his memory as he committed them all and set the dictionary aside.
The second book was more interesting.
It explained the mechanics of runecraft with the careful thoroughness of something written for people who had never considered that language could be physical. After carving a rune you placed your palm against the inscription and felt it through your skin.
Then you solidified your intent and poured soul essence into it the way you'd pour metal into a mould, letting it fill the carved lines and bring the name to life.
The intent was the critical part. The water rune could mean flow, or ebb, or the summoning of water itself — and without a clear visualisation of what you wanted, the rune would either do nothing or do something you hadn't planned for. You had to see it clearly in your mind before the soul essence touched it.
So that's what everyone else is doing.
The book also explained what runes actually were. Not symbols invented arbitrarily but encoded true names — the same names that ancient sorcerers had once spoken aloud to invoke power over things. Writing had changed everything. A true name that was impossible to speak could be inscribed.
A true name that would vanish the moment it left your lips could be bound permanently to a physical object. Runes were the written form of that language.
Hermes read that passage and thought about it for a moment.
Runes were like maths, he decided. Not something the book said — just a thought that occurred to him as he turned the idea over. Maths was said to be the language of the universe but the universe wasn't literally made of numbers and equations. Maths was simply the framework through which its laws could be understood and interacted with.
Runes were the same. Not the things themselves — not fire, not ice, not stone — but the language precise enough to reach into the nature of those things and do something with them.
He set the book down and closed his eyes.
He pulled up the first rune in his mind. The water rune. Held it there, clear and stable, until it felt solid. Then he practiced his intent — he imagined water flowing, clear and unhurried, filling the shape of the rune with purpose. That was easy enough. But then he tried to imagine flow without water. Or ebb. And those felt slippery, harder to hold, concepts without obvious imagery to anchor them to.
Maybe those meanings need other runes to make sense, he thought. Paired with something else to give them context.
He let the water rune go and moved to the next. The fire rune. Then ice. Then stone.
One by one, methodically, working through every rune he had memorised, holding each one clearly and practicing a basic intent for each before moving on.
Then he started again. This time he held two at once. Then three. Then four. Incrementing slowly, adding one each time, seeing how many he could hold simultaneously without any of them becoming blurry or indistinct.
Eventually all of them hung suspended in his mind at once like stars in a private constellation.
Then, because he could, he made them move.
They shifted and rearranged, trading positions. He made them do tricks. He made the fire rune spin. He made the water rune chase the ice rune around and around. He organised them into patterns and then dissolved the patterns and made new ones.
Hehehe.
Eventually he got bored and opened his eyes.
But that was useful, he noted. More useful than it looked.
If complex spells required multiple runes working in concert — and from what the book implied, they did — then holding many runes in his mind simultaneously without losing clarity on any of them was not a trivial skill. It was probably the skill. The mental architecture that separated someone who could manage three runes at once from someone who could manage thirty.
He filed that away and turned his thoughts to the more immediate problem.
The process as the book described it was deeply time consuming. Carve the rune. Place your palm. Solidify intent. Pour soul essence. That was one rune. For a simple spell involving three or four that was already a significant investment of time.
Enemies don't wait, he thought. Neither does time.
And it wasn't just combat spells he was thinking about. Memories and echoes would require far more runes working in precise harmony — the book gave him no indication of how you even managed to pour soul essence into multiple runes simultaneously.
Both hands? That got you two at best. What happened when you needed ten? Twenty?
Maybe they covered that in later years.
Maybe there was a technique he hadn't encountered yet.
He had one day left before the trial ended.
Not ideal.
"Alright."
The professor's voice cut across the room and thirty students surfaced from their meditation simultaneously.
"You've had more than enough time."