Once Zintle was done with this batch of runework, she sent them to the grandmaster for inspection. The following day she came up to Hugo and said, “All of my runes passed his inspection, I am so glad. Thank you, Xhosa, truly. We got everything done in ten days when I was sure it would take fourteen. I can spend the rest of the day today on your stuff. What do you want to work on today? Do you have mana dart yet? We can head over to the shooting range if you are confident in your mana handling skills.”

Hugo had thought about how to respond to this question over the last few days and said, “I already have mana dart, infuse, and mana sight. I don’t know who started the weird rumors about me when I first started, but I have been preparing to be a runic mage for a while now. I am rank eight and everything. I would love to finally start inscribing some runes.”

“Really? You already have mana sight? I thought that you just learned infuse a few days ago,” Zintle said, a little surprised.

Hugo activated mana sight so she could see his eyes glow. “You know better than most that the grandmaster only selects brilliant and promising students to be his apprentices. I hear great things about you.” He had heard no such thing, but he figured the lie couldn’t hurt.

The look on her face let him know his flattery had worked. She said, “Well, you are right about that at least. Did you know that the grandmasters only choose two apprentices the year that I bid? Two. And I was one of them.”

“I certainly was lucky to get the help of one of Grandmaster Dandre’s best apprentices. What rune do you think we should start with?”

“Excellent question. Everyone always says that you should start with a light rune. There are easier runes though. Fire is pretty easy, as well as ice and gust. People are just afraid of messing those ones up. Let’s see your book he gave you.”

“He didn’t give me a book, I think he expected me to trade favors for every rune. I figure ten days of work is good enough for you to show me one rune, right? I am not afraid of messing up, give me one of the good ones.”

Zintle laughed merrily and said, “Well then, let’s start you off with gust.” She reached into the box she had near her feet and pulled out a clay tablet.”Clay is a great substrate for runework, metal just flows into it. Take a look at my book for gust and tell me what you think the upper right symbol is.”

Hugo stared gobsmacked at the page. The diagram was very different looking from the one Klaus had shown him. It was a very different schema, each letter was separated on its own and there were annotations for rotation and where it connected to the other letters. It was so much easier to understand. “Uh, that’s zine.”

“Excellent. Some people have problems recognizing the letters from the information the skill grants you. It gets easier if you raise your wisdom stat to compensate. Since you seem to have the recognition part down, let's move on to inscribing. Give me a zine on the upper left hand corner and we will discuss penmanship.”

Hugo took the clay tablet and the inscribing pen. He noticed that she had put aluminum into the pen instead of mithril. Not wasting the good stuff for practice. He quickly inscribed a zine letter into the corner. He handed her the tablet. She pushed a bit of mana into his letter and checked it with her mana vision.

“Very good! You are a natural at this. Your proportions are only a little off. The left side of your letter got a little smaller than the right. It helps if you use all four hands instead of just your uppers,” she said.

Hugo was surprised to find out he had been inscribing with just two hands instead of all four. He tried again with all four hands and that letter passed inspection. They spent the next few hours in targeted training.

Eventually, Zintle got up and stretched, “Welp. That’s all we are going to do today. You caught on pretty quickly, you are going to be making your first rune in no time. I won’t be here tomorrow or the day after. Getting done earlier with the other stuff means I get a mini vacation. I guess just make yourself look busy while I am gone?”

“Can I copy down the gust diagram before you go? I want to practice making it while you are gone,” Hugo said.

“Sure, I guess. Just don’t work yourself too hard, right? No one likes an overachiever. I like you and I would hate to see everyone mad at you for showing them up.”

Hugo agreed with her and quickly sketched down the diagram for gust with the rotation notations. He had no intention of slowing down. He was going to do his best to quickly learn inscribing, despite the whole system designed to slow him down.

He did find it interesting how much easier the diagram was than the one Klaus had shown him. He guessed that Klaus had been given a more difficult version on purpose. Some nox held on to old prejudices. It was probably the reason they weren’t supposed to share their books. The favored apprentices got the easy to understand diagrams and the rest got the jumbled messes.

The next day, Hugo got a stack of clay tablets and went back to Zintle’s workstation. He had created a few mithril rods the night before and set them on the workstation. He tucked himself into a corner and got to work. The first tablet, he filled with practice letters. He wanted to make sure he had the proportions right before he moved on to creating runes.

Mithril was easier to work with than the aluminum had been, probably because of the higher mana conductivity. His inscribe skill seemed to work better today. Still, he filled up two clay tablets to the brim before he felt good enough to start combining the letters into a rune.

It was harder than he expected. After he created the first letter, he had to create the next one halfway woven inside the first. He had to juggle the mental effort of moving the inscription pen in 3D motions along with threading the letter through the space left by the previous one. He also had to connect the letters along certain points.

As he progressed, he pushed mana into the budding rune and checked his work with mana sight. He restarted three times before he was even halfway through the first rune. The process burned through mana at a prodigious rate. At the end of the first day, he had filled twelve clay tablets and he didn’t have a single rune to test. His mithril reserves and mana were both gone.

The next day, he got back to it, doing his best to work slowly and exacting. He had gotten the hang of using all four hands and he felt that his work was much improved today. Just before lunch he finally had a complete rune. Carefully, he pushed a smidgen of mana into the rune.

Nothing happened.

He had made a mistake somewhere. He sighed and set it aside. After lunch he grabbed his used tablets and took them to the forges to recycle them. He smirked at the thought that the mithril total for this week would be a little above what they were expecting.

Refreshed, he went back to his failed rune and tried to find his mistake. It turns out there were four mistakes. The next attempt only had one, but it still failed to activate.

Towards the end of the second day, Hugo had another rune good enough to test. He hesitated before he pushed mana into the completed rune. He had spent hundreds of mana, way too many rods of mithril, and a stack of clay tablets.

Hesitantly, he pushed a bit of mana into the rune. A gust of wind blew out of the top of the rune. It was strong enough to knock over the work table he was working near and send tools and material flying up against the wall. Several of the apprentices nearby looked over to see what the commotion was about.

Hugo smiled sheepishly and said, “Nothing to worry about, I’m just a little clumsy.”

They laughed and returned to their work. Hugo laughed himself, one of pure delight. He had done it.

The work day was complete shortly after that, so he wasn’t able to continue his practice there. Unable to contain himself, he found some quartz at home and made his own gust rune.

This time, he found a better place to test out his rune, in the alley behind his family’s property. With the careful application of his mana, he sent out a huge gust of wind through the alley. The more mana he pushed into the rune, the more wind flew out of the rock in his hands. If he pushed enough mana into the stone, he was pushed backwards.

Unable to help himself, he spent the next hour playing in the alley, testing out different applications of the rune. The alley was scoured clean before he was done playing. He might have continued to play, but the rune quit working.

An examination showed that a few spots where the mithril was poking out of the stone were corroded. Hugo frowned. He had known about this issue but had forgotten about it. Usually runists covered the exposed mithril with gold so it didn’t corrode.

He shrugged and tucked the quartz away. He could always make a new one. The next day when Zintle returned, he convinced her that he gave up on creating a gust rune and wanted to try to create an ice rune instead. She smirked and showed him the diagram for ice.

As he copied it down (made easier by his earlier practice) he chatted with her. “How do runic harvesters do it? It seems like you need an apprenticeship or a school to get anything done.”

Zintle shrugged, “I don’t really know. I imagine they buy runed weapons and copy them. Of course, they can’t do that with the work we produce here.”

“Really? Why not?”

“I will show you in a few years when you can understand how clever we are,” Zintle said with a smile.

Hugo just rolled his eyes. The nox really had a thing about sharing knowledge. Even the friends he had made in the city hadn’t wanted to tell him how to make their dishwashing liquid or their curry dish. He wondered what it was like for human runic mages. He knew that by the end of their first year, most of the students could create simple runes. He bet that they were taught in a sensible manner.

Then again, a human was here so he could learn from the best. The nox probably had access to a wider knowledge of runes than most humans. He vowed to learn as much as he could as long as he was here.

...

“Hello, I am Xhosa Bandile, here for the meeting with sentinel command,” Hugo said. He was back in Reval, the afternoon of the 35th, standing in front of the sentinel main tower.

It brought back some bad memories about how his previous life had ended. He had watched the sentinels die in a pitched battle against the hedge mages here. It was only four weeks ago from his perspective. As far as anyone else was concerned, his memories were from more than seven months from now.

“Go on in, the meeting has already started,” the guard said after he checked Hugo’s credentials.

Hugo frowned. His invite had just said the afternoon, and he was here shortly after lunchtime. He shook his head and headed inside.

Once he got to the meeting hall, he felt his stomach drop. This wasn’t just a meeting with Reval sentinel command, there were sentinel colonels from six of the cities on the wheel.

“Xhosa, good of you to join us. Please take a seat,” Colonel Sebastian said.

Hugo nodded meekly and sat in the only open seat, next to the nox colonel. The man turned to him and nodded.

“We have just been discussing your claims with young Mia and Dean Artjom here. Apparently you knew them in a previous loop?” Colonel Sebastian said.

“Yes, and I am the one that warned you all of the sabotages on the walls. I assume that my warning was effective since I didn’t hear of any breaches?” Hugo said. He knew the answer of course, but he wanted to establish his credentials before they discussed his next claims.

“Yes, thank you for that. I doubt we would have found all of the spies without your intervention,” Colonel Sebastian said.

“So they were spies? We suspected they came from Deva last time, but we hadn’t verified it yet,” Hugo said.

Colonel Sebastian turned to a woman sitting at the head of the table. Hugo didn’t recognize her but her insignia seemed to indicate a higher rank. She said, “Xhosa, I am General Kallas, and I am undecided on how much to share with you. If you wouldn’t mind telling us your whole story first before we talk specifics.”

Hugo sighed. It was a reasonable request, but this was the second time he was telling this story to a bunch of sentinels. Hopefully it would be the last. He gave them the full story, starting with his first life, the explosion on the train, his second life, the sabotages on the wall, the earthquake, the attacks on the sentinel building, and the shimmer vein explosions. He tried to include every important detail, while keeping his story short.

“Have we been able to track down the ritualist the boy mentioned? Will he be joining us later?” General Kallas said.

“No, not yet. We know he lives in Tallinn, but he seems to be skittish. He hasn’t answered any of our letters and avoided our attempts to contact him,” Colonel Sebastian said.

Hugo nodded, “He is skittish, for good reason. People are out to get him. I ran into him a few days ago and he thought he was working with other ritualists. It turns out they were hedge mages, probably pumping him for information they can use in their attack. Either that or he is working with them intentionally and that was his cover.”

“We should track him down, it seems like he has valuable information either way,” Colonel Sebastian said.

“Why don’t we just leave this to the shimmer corps?” the colonel from Tallinn said, “This seems like it is more their jurisdiction.”

“Well, there is a good reason to believe the shimmer corps are compromised,” Hugo said, “We know hedge mages are the main attack force here, and hundreds of them escaped the shimmer corps notice. And as I mentioned earlier, the hedge mages used shimmer casters in their attack against the command center. That many shimmer casters had to come from the shimmer corps. We just can’t trust them.”

“How can we trust you either?” the Tallinn colonel said, “You are just a boy that wrote a letter as far as we know. How do we know you aren’t in league with Deva and a spy yourself?”

“That’s offensive,” the nox colonel from Paarl said, “Don’t judge him just because he is a nox. Most of us don’t even like those extremists from Deva.”

Hugo could sense there was some long standing rivalry between the two and interjected before it could get any further, “There are a few ways you can know that I am telling the truth. First off, I am sure you have a light mage in here somewhere, right?”

A colonel near the head of the table spoke up, “He believes he is telling the truth.”

“Thank you,” Hugo continued, “I warned you all of the spies, and I contacted Mia about something she hasn’t told anyone else about. I am sure she has already convinced you that she time traveled herself.”

“That’s a good point. Mia knew things that no one else could possibly have known. But you have just given us vague details and predictions for months away. Where is your proof today?” the Tallinn colonel said.

Hugo thought for a moment and said, “I mentioned that I have three domains earlier. The ritual that sent me back in time also allowed me to gain more than anyone I have heard of. Would proving that to you be convincing enough?”

The colonel just sat back and gestured for Hugo to go ahead. Now that he was on the spot, Hugo didn’t know if he could show off his domains quickly. He fabricated a hollow sphere of mithril and solidified a sphere barrier around it. He rolled it over to the doubtful colonel while he created a mithril rod and inscribed a runic letter into the table. He looked up and said, “Is that good enough or do you need me to complete the rune?”

The general spoke up, “That’s convincing enough for me. I can recognize inscribe when I see it. Our table has no need of extra runes. We will tell you everything we know, Xhosa.”