Angela tromped across the stone bridge, turning east and heading down the path into the Druid Grove. With every step, the smells of the city were replaced by the rich scents of a forest after rain.

“Man, I did not think I’d be back here again so soon,” she said, looking around her.

“I still don’t get why ya didn’t do this when you was here this morning,” Leonard grumbled from his perch on her shoulder.

She turned to glare at the grouchy squirrel face hovering centimetres from her nose. “Because, like I said before, I didn’t know I needed a mistletoe stylus for rune magic until Naomi told me. There isn’t a manual for this stuff. And would you please spend some time on my other shoulder? You’re going to throw my back out.”

“But I like it here.”

“In that case, get on a diet.”

“Other shoulder it is,” he said, stepping across her back. He only managed to get one paw caught in her hair, which, for Leonard, counted as a display of agility and grace.

Angela sighed and continued walking through the forest as she scoured the trees with her eyes, searching for any sight of mistletoe within the branches.

The grove was weird. Beautiful, but weird. It wasn’t like the forests she’d passed through on her way to Palmyre or even the ones she was used to back in SoCal. It wasn’t even a forest at all, really. More of an accumulation of different trees from different parts of the world, somehow living in harmony despite their origins in vastly different climates. It made it a great place to take a walk, but a terrible place to look for a specific kind of tree.

“How the hell am I going to find an oak tree in this place,” she muttered, putting voice to her thoughts.

Leonard gave her a whack upside the head. “What a gavoon. You got a squirrel sittin’ on your shoulder dat was raised in these here woods—you think I don’t know where the oak trees is at?”

Angela got a considering look. “Huh. I guess that’s true. Can you show me to an oak tree, then?”

Leonard followed up his whack to the head with a poke in the ear. “No, I ain’t gonna do that ’cause what you want is a hawthorn, not an oak.” He shook his head. “Honestly, how’d you get to be a druid without even knowin’ what trees are best for findin’ mistletoe?”

Angela gritted her teeth. “Fine. Then find me a hawthorn tree. I don’t care what it is, just so long as it has mistletoe.”

The rotund squirrel cupped his ear with one paw. “Sorry, but you cut out at the end there. Didn’t catch the last little bit.”

She sighed. “Please.”

“There we go,” he said, hopping to the ground. “Follow me. It ain’t far.”

Leonard scrambled through the bush with Angela in tow. It wasn’t the most direct path—he ran them through a surprising number of brambles, which Angela suspected was on purpose—but he was true to his word. The hawthorn tree he led her to was huge, with gigantic clumps of mistletoe hanging from its many branches. Not the scraggly stuff she’d found on her way to Palmyre, either. This was the long-stemmed variety that most people thought of when they pictured mistletoe, with clusters of white berries nestled together at the joints of sprigs boasting oblong, oar-shaped leaves that looked straight out of a Christmas catalogue.

“Alright, let’s do this,” Angela said. Heading straight for the lowest hanging specimen she could find, she stopped.

It was way out of her reach.

Son of a bitch. Angela shuddered with the memory of her last attempt at climbing for mistletoe. Leonard sensed her trepidation and gave her a friendly punch in the leg.

“Don’t worry, lady. I’ll hook you up.”

Darting over to the tree, Angela’s familiar scrambled up the trunk and out onto the limb above her head. He headed slightly past the clump of mistletoe, then lay down on his stomach and wrapped his arms tightly around the branch.

“Alright, lady. You fire up that trick of mine, and we’ll take care a’ business here, capeesh?”

Angela stared at him for a moment, trying to work out what he meant. Then she smiled.

“Leonard, you’re smarter than you look.”

“That’s a helluva compliment, ’cause I look fantastic,” he said. “Now get a move on, toots.”

Angela nodded and triggered Cannon Ball, causing the branch to sag as Leonard’s weight shot up, pulling the mass of mistletoe down to her. She still had to reach up to get at it, but at least this time she wasn’t broken and helpless on the ground, cutting it off the branch with her teeth.

Uh oh.

“Urp…” she said.

“Urp? What da hell does ‘urp’ mean?”

“It means I don’t have anything to cut this with.”

Leonard stared at her. “What da hell, lady! Ya didn’t bring a knife?”

“Druids can’t use knives!”

“Who told you dat?”

“Darius, the blacksmith.”

Leonard banged his forehead against the tree branch. “You can’t use metal, that don’t mean you can’t use a knife. You just need one with a different blade.”

That actually did make a lot of sense.

“Well, shit. I don’t have a blade, so what do I do? I still need to get that mistletoe.”

“I don’t know! Go find a sharp rock!”

She stared at him incredulously. “Seriously?”

“Yeah, why not?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe because we’re in a forest at the end of a river in what is probably a floodplain? If that doesn’t scream ‘sharp rocks,’ I don’t know what does. This place must be littered with them. In fact, I’ll bet that all I need to do is turn around and—Oh. There’s one right there.” She bent down and picked up the dull grey, wickedly sharp rock that definitely hadn’t been there ten seconds ago.

Angela glanced at the sky. She wasn’t sure if Ennàd was helping her or messing with her, but neither possibility stopped Leonard from claiming victory.

“Ha! There ya go, lady. Now grab some of this stuff and we can get outta here. I think that Cannon Ball thing is wearin’ off, and I don’t know how long it’ll take before we can use it again.”

Shoot.

Angela reached up and began cutting off hunks of mistletoe as quickly as possible. Which turned out to be quite quick. The rock may have been an improvised tool, but it was surprisingly effective. By the time Leonard’s Ability ended, she had a decent pile of mistletoe at her feet.

“Kay, I’m lettin’ go,” Leonard said.

Angela stepped away from the branch just as her familiar swung down onto her shoulder.

“Hell yeah, toots, we bossed that,” Leonard said, holding up his little fist for her to bump. Pointing at the wad of mistletoe in her hand, he said, “Why’d you get so much? I thought all you needed was a sprig.”

“For drawing runes, yes,” she answered. “But when I was casting heal spells on the way here, I needed mistletoe as a spell component or else I’d vomit everywhere. I don’t know if mistletoe is standard for all healing spells, but it can’t hurt to have some just in case.”

“Makes sense,” he said as she walked away from the hawthorn tree, looking for a flat patch of ground. “So, whatcha gonna do first?”

She chuckled. “That’s the million-dollar question, isn’t it?” Sitting down, she pulled up her Runes slab and stared at the contents.

Every rune was a 6-sided hexagon. Hexes were nothing new to a gamer, but when it came to actual magic, she had a ton of questions. For instance, each rune had 6 sides. That meant 6 different attachment points. Did the attachment she used matter? What about using multiple runes? Would it matter if runes were on adjacent sides or opposite sides? It would have been great if Naomi could have simply given her the answers, but there were differences in how mages and druids used runes. Not large differences, but big enough that it made any advice from Naomi suspect. Boo-urns.

Angela traced the lines of one rune with her finger. While the Chaos rune’s sigils touched every edge of the hexagon, the sigils on the other runes in her Tome only touched two edges, always on opposite sides of the hex. Additionally, when different runes had their edges aligned, the patterns of the runes lined up. To her way of thinking, that meant that runes could only be connected in a lattice if the sigils on their edges flowed together correctly. Hopefully that was true, because it reduced the number of combinations significantly.

“Kay, just gonna assume that’s the case,” she mumbled to herself.

So, what had Naomi been able to tell her?

First off, every spell had to start with the same two runes in the same order: Dhá Chumhacht and Anord—also known as Power II and Chaos. That meant there were six total possibilities, assuming three things were true: Dhá Chumhacht could power up to two runes in total, she could duplicate runes within a lattice, and switching the order of runes would influence the final outcome.

Materializing her Tome stylus, Angela jotted down the potential rune combinations:

Power II – Chaos – Ithreach

Power II – Chaos – Beatha

Power II – Chaos – Ithreach – Beatha

Power II – Chaos – Beatha – Ithreach

Power II – Chaos – Ithreach – Ithreach

Power II – Chaos – Beatha – Beatha

The obvious question was, “What the hell are Ithreach and Beatha?” If she could figure that out, her Tome would probably update and she could stop referring to them with words she didn’t understand.

“Ithreach first?” she asked Leonard.

“Six in one, half dozen the other,” he said with a shrug.

“True enough.”

Angela picked up the pile of mistletoe and plucked out a sprig whose stem was long enough to hold like a pen, leaving the leaves and berries poking out the back like a feather quill. Taking care not to cut herself, she used the edge of the rock she’d found to sharpen the tip of her mistletoe into a point. She did a piss-poor job of it, but that was okay. She was trying to make a writing tool, not kill Baldur.

When Angela was done, she looked at her new tool appreciatively. Naomi had referred to the stylus as a “runemarker.” Angela had immediately asked what druids did if they lost their runemarker, but all Naomi had said was that it never seemed to happen. Which was a terrible answer because Angela was pretty sure it would end up happening to her

She held the mangled twig up to Leonard. “What do you think?”

“Eh, I’ve seen worse,” he said.

“Really?”

He patted her on the shoulder. “Nah.”

“You’re a good friend, Leonard,” she deadpanned. He started to say something else, but she pressed a finger against his fuzzy squirrel lips. “Shh. Mommy’s working.”

Angela had chosen a flat, clear spot to sit so she could scratch the runes into the ground with her new runemarker. It was something she’d already tried in their backyard with a twig, but this time she was using…well, a different twig. But a better twig!

As she settled in to draw the rune, Angela felt a kind of hum in her hand. A feeling of connection with her runemarker that made it clear this wasn’t just a matter of twigs. That feeling was reinforced when she actually started drawing out the power rune. This wasn’t scratching runes in soil. This was etching them into the fabric of reality. Every stroke of her stylus left a twisting rainbow light in its wake that was eerily reminiscent of the lines on Mark’s staff.

With every line and curve, Angela felt a wild power building within the two circles at the centre of the power rune. Not wild like nature, though. Nature had rules. This was beyond that, and with each stroke of her runemarker she could feel the power growing into a—

“You sure you wanna finish that?” Leonard said, interrupting her work.

Angela gritted her teeth and blew the hair out of her eyes.

“Of course I do! I’ve been waiting forever to draw runes!” she snapped back.

He shrugged. “Okay, you’re the boss.”

Shaking her head, she turned her focus back towards the rune.

She paused.

“Incidentally, why would I not want to finish this?”

The squirrel pointed at what she was drawing. “Eh, I just figured after everythin’ that Naomi hottie was sayin’ about the power runes bein’ stuffed full of Chaos, you might wanna, I dunno, start with that Chaos rune thingy first?”

“Uh, no. Naomi said it goes Power II, then Chaos, then whatever runes I’m powering up. I was paying attention, you know.”

Leonard nodded. “Yeah, cool, whatever.” He took a couple steps farther away from her.

Angela sighed. “Come on, spit it out. You’ve clearly got something to say.”

The squirrel raised his paws. “Nah, fuggedaboudit. I ain’t here ta tell ya how to run your business. I was just sayin’ that, y’know, they gotta be in that order when you cast the spell, but nobody says you gotta draw ’em in that order. And seein’ how that there Chaos rune is the thing that keeps the whole deal from goin’ kablooie….”

Angela looked back down at the power rune and the twisting magical force lurking below the surface, just waiting for her to connect the final line.

“Fuck me,” she said when she realized what she had been about to do.

“Yeah, I’m gonna pass.”

Angela glared at her familiar and made a stabbing motion with her stylus.

Leonard stepped back and raised his paws to his chest in an exaggerated pantomime of affront. “Oh, really? Hey, hands up everyone who just stopped their druid from messin’ themselves up somethin’ fierce, eh?” He raised his paw in the air and looked around dramatically, as though searching for other hands in the air.

Angela couldn’t help but laugh at the sight. “You know what? You’re totally right. You stopped me from making a huge mistake.”

“’Course I did. I’m da best.”

“I wouldn’t go that far, but I don’t have much basis for comparison,” she said, turning her attention back to the nearly finished rune. “How do I erase this thing?”

“Can ya wipe it out?”

She shrugged. “Worth a try.” Using her left hand, she wiped away the rune she’d gouged into the earth. It worked surprisingly well, causing the rune to vanish immediately. It also felt like she’d jammed her hand into a bucket of murder hornets.

“OW!” she shouted, yanking her hand back and swearing a blue streak as her fingers convulsed involuntarily. It was a blinding agony, but it was also a fast-burning flame that tapered off quickly, vanishing in seconds. Her adrenaline remained high, though, leaving her heart thumping in her chest.

“Holy shit, you think that happens every time I erase a rune?” she asked Leonard.

“Yeah, probably,” her familiar said. “Way I see it, most mistakes get punished one way or another. Don’t see why magic would be any different.”

Shaking out her hand, Angela sighed. The little rodent had a point.