Edge Cases - 154 - Book 3: Chapter 19: Reveal

“Two new glyphs!” Clyde’s voice was incredulous. He hissed out the words as if speaking softly would somehow protect them from the enormous crowd of people just outside his inn. It was essentially just very powerful inn magic that kept all of them out, though he’d refused to explain what exactly ‘inn magic’ was.

The crowd had gone silent the moment mana began to gather; at most, there were quiet whispers slowly spreading through them, as if they weren’t quite sure what they were looking at. It wasn’t until the air rippled faintly and a series of images formed in the air — each one depicting a different moment from Vex’s show — that those whispers erupted into excited murmurs, and then a roar of thunderous applause as fragments of a new glyph began to form from those images.

Vex had looked utterly overwhelmed. It was Clyde that reacted first, surprisingly — he darted in and physically shielded the lizardkin from the crowd, practically dragging him back to his inn. Belle and Elliot both acted as impromptu bodyguards while Misa and Sev both struggled to make their way through the crowd to rejoin their friend.

Derivan, on the other hand, had somehow managed to slip away in the chaos and find Vex before either of the two of them. They managed to meet up just before slipping into Clyde’s inn, at least, and a full ten minutes before the crowd managed to find them once again.

“Do you have any idea how incredible this is.” It wasn’t even a question. Clyde buried his face in his hands and groaned, gesturing at the door; a flicker of magic shut off the cacophony of noise from the crowd outside, presumably yet another application of his inn magic. “It’s not supposed to be this easy to make glyphs. Especially now, when magic is dedicating itself to keeping this universe alive. It doesn’t recognize people like that. Not anymore.”

“And yet,” Belle said. She seemed significantly more calm than her husband — only the brightly-glowing eyes indicated that she was experiencing any amount of stress.

“Can’t say I didn’t expect something like this to happen, honestly.” Elliot spoke mildly. He was the most relaxed of the three, except for the way his eyes kept occasionally darting to the door, like he was worried that someone would break through. “I tried to tell ’em.”

“Shut up,” Clyde grumbled. “Are you sure you’re not hiding anything else? Seriously, what you’re doing is — I don’t think you understand how big it is.”

“We’re not?” Sev looked around, as if questioning his own answer. No one contradicted him. “I mean, as far as we know, we’re not.”

“Right.” Clyde buried his face in his hands. “The worst part is I believe you.

“You need to understand — you might be in an echo, but you still have to play by our rules,” he said. “The rules of the echo universe you’re in. Magic isn’t exactly dead here, but everything it can do is focused on keeping this universe alive. It’s essentially life support. The fact that you’ve created something new not once but twice…”

Clyde sighed.

“What do we do now?” Vex asked, finally speaking up. He seemed a little nervous, but not nearly as much as he would have a month or two ago — he glanced at the door in a way that was almost contemplative, rather than afraid. “We still need to do the Glyph presentation, right?”

“It’s a little delayed because of all this, but yes.” Clyde frowned. “I spoke to the mayor for a bit. He’s more excited than anything, and he’s hoping you’ll do a joint presentation on the effects of the new glyphs.”

“We don’t even know what the new glyphs do yet,” Misa pointed out.

“Well, you’ve got about an hour to find out,” Clyde said dryly. “That’s about as long as we can delay. Think you can do it?”

Vex glanced at Derivan, who nodded at him. “We can try,” he said.

It took, all in all, an hour and a half. The extra half hour was wrung from the mayor by a very apologetic Clyde, much to the ever-increasing restlessness of the crowd, which had by and large retreated back to the Festival grounds. They’d accepted they weren’t all going to get a one-on-one with the two new glyphmakers, and so decided to celebrate instead that yet another glyph had been created.

Now Vex and Derivan stood side by side on stage. This presentation would be nothing like Vex’s earlier one — it wasn’t a performance. It was a celebration of an achievement, of a growth in magic.

It was a celebration of change.

…Maybe a little bit of a performance.

Derivan started first. He drew the new glyph in the air, taking full advantage of his height to weave a sigil that was taller than even he was; it stood at nearly twice of Vex’s height, towering over the lizardkin and making him look small in comparison — not that standing next to Derivan didn’t do the same. Mana began to gather even before the symbol was complete as if it was eager and excited. It danced around the edges of the glyph, and it took coaxing to prevent it from just pouring in and activating the spell.

All that mana dove into the glyph the moment the last stroke was drawn, and the entire thing pulsed.

The glyph was a little more complex than it needed to be — Derivan had added a number of embellishments to bring it closer to the original piece he’d drawn. It didn’t need to be exact in order to trigger a reaction from the mana, and as the creator of the glyph, the closer he got to the original, the more powerful the effect was.

The final glyph was the bold image of a cuirass, glowing softly in the night; it was the image of several of the other species that Derivan had seen and met in his journey, abstracted into silhouettes, and arranged in such a way that they were not unlike wings. They were the draconic sort, even, with two points at the very tips that were not unlike the points on Derivan’s armor; the wings were drawn like they were mid-flight, supporting the cuirass and being supported in turn.

The spell held for a moment, the etheral image washing over them; even without being cast, the crowd could feel the power embedded in it, and a soft murmur rippled through them.

Derivan didn’t cast it, not yet; he allowed the mana to gather, and then knelt, holding a hand out to Vex.

Vex used the outstretched hand and Derivan’s knee as support to climb up onto the armor’s shoulders. He wobbled a little as Derivan stood, but stayed steady, using his tail to balance himself — and then their plan became clear. At this height, Vex had access to the very top of the glyph, though he had to stretch to reach it; there, he used his dagger to cut his own glyph into the air.

The image he drew looked vaguely like a clock dressed in a traveler’s cloak, the impression of travel and of time running past — of a journey taken. This wasn’t a change to his Sign, unlike what had happened with Derivan. It was just a new glyph, a new meaning imprinted onto the mana.

The new glyph was drawn smaller, but it certainly wasn’t any less powerful for it. Once again, mana gathered; this time, there was almost a battle between the two glyphs, as magical energy traveled between them. They grappled for a moment for dominance before equalizing suddenly, both symbols pulsing with radiant strength.

Vex cast his mind one more time over the notes his Sign had given him about their two glyphs.

Glyph of Change

Life has a funny way of making you look back. Vex Ashion’s realization of how much has changed since the beginning, his understanding of the journey he has taken, embeds itself into the ritual that spawned this glyph.

Mark a desired change, and then accelerate time to achieve this change. The mana cost required grows depending on the degree of change.

And then there was Derivan’s.

Glyph of Solidity

As Derivan’s understanding of the world grew, so did his desire to protect it, and to experience everything it had to offer. Though the core of that desire exists because of his friends, it has grown into something greater — and has room to grow still.

Solidify in a range that increases as more mana is placed into the glyph.

There was a reason it had taken so much longer to understand what Derivan’s glyph did compared to Vex’s — the effect was much more subtle, and the amount of mana required was enormous, though it seemed to go down with practice; the first time they had needed to spend a reality shard on the casting to understand what the glyph did at all.

Solidify. It was almost the opposite of Vex’s glyph, though that would be too much of a simplification. The glyph anchored things, making it harder for reality to change, for things to be lost; something under the effect was nearly impossible to Shift, Derivan claimed.

Applied strongly enough, with the assistance of a reality shard, the glyph could even stop system skills in their tracks — an effect entirely new to them, and one that spawned no small amount of errors. They’d hurriedly stopped that experiment when it began to drain Misa’s reality anchor, but the fact of the matter was that they now had a tool that no one else had.

What they wanted to do in this demonstration was different, though.

The spell they cast came in two stages.

First was Vex’s glyph. Magic rippled out across the stage and over their audience, marking the ground with change. At first, nothing happened — but as time went by, the magic accelerated, and the first shoots of green appeared from the ground, breaking through the stone.

The flowers that sprung up from the ground had complicated, interwoven petals, shimmering with two-toned colors and each with a drop of precious mana held within the center. Appreciative murmurs turned to quiet gasps; this was far beyond a growth spell, if the plants it could create were magical.

But they weren’t done.

Next came Derivan’s magic.

What it did wasn’t nearly so visible — nothing in the field seemed to change. But many of the shadow elementals that were native to Mundane suddenly froze, staring in disbelief at the field of flowers.

Mundane was a template; it was static, boring, and unremarkable on the outside, as a means for magic to apply change. Vex’s spell was an application of change, but the Glyph of Solidity did something more fundamental.

It altered the template, and changed the meaning of what ‘baseline’ was.

Derivan had asked for permission first, of course. The mayor had snorted, not particularly believing that he could, but telling him to go ahead — bringing some color and life into the town would do wonders for the people there. It was just something they’d never been able to do.

And yet here was the evidence in full — the Glyph of Stability would let them change Mundane to be as expressive as they wanted without harming magic’s ability to sustain reality.

There was a small, collective loosening of tension — the realization that they had just a little bit more freedom in their lives, now. The glyph could be used by any one of them, after all; Derivan was the most effective caster, but anyone had access to the spell.

Derivan and Vex saw it as a small kindness. They saw it as a way of returning to the town of Mundane some of the help that had been given to them.

It was only when the applause started ringing — when a man near the front of the crowd wept openly, and others ran off to start painting the glyph on all their Festival decorations — that they understood that they’d done something much greater, at least to the people here.

“Damn.” Clyde’s words were soft, somewhere behind them; Vex hopped off of Derivan’s shoulders, and they both glanced back. “You guys actually did it.”

“It’s not bad, is it?” Vex asked, looking just a little worried. Clyde laughed.

“I know I said it doesn’t really bother us,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean this doesn’t mean a hell of a lot to us. So… thank you.”