Sylas actually failed on his first attempt, something that he hadn’t expected. He thought that the moment he understood the purpose of the challenge, this would just be a simple matter of completing it.
This time, it wasn’t a matter of control. The trial didn’t ask him to complete the lock, per se. It only asked him to deduce it. The pieces of the lock would then form on their own. So the only person that Sylas could blame was himself for coming up with the wrong result.
‘No… my answer should be correct, but I’m still missing something. What is it…?’
Sylas didn’t immediately try again. He watched as the pieces of the lock disassembled themselves, lost in his own thoughts.
For some reason, his thoughts flashed to the scene he had witnessed the first time he laid eyes on Earth’s Runes. They were twisted, chained, and in some cases, they had cancer-like growths on them that looked unnatural. Even without having seen Runes before, Sylas was still certain that there was nothing about what he was witnessing that was good.
Sylas shook his head. He didn’t feel like these things were related, except for the fact that he had an innate desire to understand more about Runes if for no other reason than to understand what had been done to Earth.
‘Done to…’
Sylas’ gaze flashed.
He thought of those cancerous growths and found them interesting.
If someone messed with Earth’s Runes, it made sense for them to be chained, or even incomplete, but the growths… that seemed odd. It was almost as though Earth’s Runes had been poisoned or had become diseased. It was like they were…
‘Living?’
A realization overcame Sylas and he realized something. Had he been too precise?
After some thought, Sylas applied his solutions again, but this time, he increased the degree of freedom and loosened his precision.
As expected, this time, the task was cleared. In fact, it wasn’t just the task, but the entire third door disappeared and Sylas found himself back on the path once again.
‘Interesting… I don’t actually think that that’s the lesson the door wanted to teach me…’
The problem with Sylas’ first answer was that it was too good. It didn’t allow for the Rune to “breathe” and treated it like a real key with precise dimensions that could only work for equally as precise locks.
But he was treating Runes too mechanically. No two trees were identical, no two blades of grass, no two creatures, no two rocks. Nature had patterns, but even within those patterns, there was a degree of variation.
Runes were the same. No two Runes were perfectly identical, and even within a closed system of a single Rune, there would be variation as it interacted with the world.
Sylas felt that he had touched on something profound.
‘If I create Runes with this in mind, the pressure on my mind will lessen considerably. My Rune construction doesn’t need to be perfect and stringent. It’s like writing. So long as it’s legible, it will work… within reason.’
This within reason, of course, referred to the pieces that fit together to form the Rune. If Rune forging was like writing, then the form of writing it was had to be cursive. The letters linked together, and if one was too far bent out of shape, it wouldn’t be able to accommodate the others.
‘Truly fascinating…’
Sylas found himself becoming endlessly interested in this world of Runes. If he was correct, and Runes were like aspects of nature, then wasn’t controlling them similar to controlling the building blocks of life? Just how far could you take such a thing?
Too eager to dismiss those thoughts, Sylas hurried forward and entered the fourth door. It had been a long while since something had caught his attention like this, and when he found something to be curious about, it was unlikely that he would stop until he had exhausted it to the greatest extent.
With the foundation laid, the fourth door began to truly train Sylas. It taught him the most common building blocks of Runes and he began to learn their formal names.
It turned out that his casual naming of the building blocks of the Ice-Poison Rune weren’t entirely off-base, but they weren’t entirely correct.
He thought that the Ice-Poison Rune was formed by 12 Runes, when in reality, it was actually over 30. This wasn’t because Sylas had missed some, but rather because he had grouped them together in groups that were too large.
The foundations of Runes were known as Strokes. These Strokes came together to form Foundations. And only these Foundations could come together to form Runes.
No matter the Rune Language, all Strokes were ubiquitous. However, there would be some variations in the Foundation. Still, if you understood the Strokes well enough, it was theoretically possible to comprehend all Rune Languages.
It was just that… there were far too many Strokes.
Just this fourth door required Sylas to memorize three dozen of them. And just when he thought he was finished, the fifth door had him memorize three sets of a hundred. Finally, the sixth door actually asked him to memorize three sets of a thousand.
In the end, just this one alone taught him 3336 Strokes.
That said, Sylas wasn’t disheartened at all because the Strokes were truly fascinating in their own right.
The Ice-Poison Rune was made up of 32 Foundations and 127 Strokes.
What was interesting about Strokes was that they had power too. Not as much power as Runes, of course. But they were also far easier to use.
However, Sylas didn’t look into using Strokes in battle much. The ratio of the effort he would put in versus what he would get out certainly wasn’t worth it. At least not for now.
Sylas moved on and entered the seventh door.
Whether it was the seventh, the eighth, or the ninth doors, they all did the same thing: test his proficiency.
Seeing this, Sylas immediately lost interest. There was nothing left to learn. It could be said that the moment he finished with the sixth door, he had gained everything there was to gain here.
