Riloth 19th the 696th

Let's go back to the day of the initial kidnapping. After I'd sent Barion on his way, I went back to the library to read up further on ensouled artifacts. The information I sought resided on Deckard's, and I could have recalled it by accessing the memories through you in my mental vault, but that is not a very pleasant way to study.

Just because life gives you a magic spellbook, it doesn't mean you're too good to dirty your hands with the regular old mundane variety. I brushed up on the topic of non-discrete ensouled artifacts. This means an artifact that can be broken down, separated, or create additional parts, all of which remain part of the whole.

Famous examples include a bow that produced magic arrows that persisted until willed away, an easel which produces its own canvas, paint, and brushes, and a scale mail chest piece which could send out razor scales offensively.

Each item could produce parts of itself that could be removed, but still remained a part of it. The bearers each had varying levels of control over the objects. The bow wielder could alter the course of the arrows when they were away from the bow, and he could cause them to phase through objects and vanish into nothingness with a thought.

The paintings produced by the easel could be altered by the artist no matter where they went. It caused quite the scandal when the artist went through a more abstract phase and painted over all her commissioned portraits with strange blocky representations of the lords that were the subjects of her work.

The scale mail could send scales out at enemies like throwing knives, and the wearer could call upon the fallen ones to stand on end, creating razors on the ground.

All three required the bearer to touch the object to alter the detached parts, but the easel’s owner discovered something the others had not. Rita Bluelilly was the halfling daughter of a wealthy halfling house. She'd been trained in wizardry from a young age, but found she had no love for the art. To her parent's dismay, she instead chose to pursue a life of art.

This meant she had a mental vault. She found that her vault contained an 'icon' of her easel, and when she stood before it in her vault, anything she painted in her mind appeared on the canvas. This was how she was able to alter her completed works.

Many wizards created ensouled artifacts and recorded their interactions. They each found that they could interact with their magical objects at range, depending on its function. For instance, an animated crow statue allowed its owner to look through its eyes while in their vault.

Range only appeared to be a factor for those who bound the ensouled artifact created by another, and even that faded when they formed a complete Bond.

Before I left the library, I took a stack of loose paper out of you, leaving you nearly an empty book, removed the pages of Deckard's from its binding, replaced those pages with yours, and stuck Deckard's contents into you.

I could have copied the pages rather quickly, but I'd yet to read the whole book and didn't want to have to come back here anytime soon.

Back in the Dahn, after checking in on Barion, I went to Levar to share my findings. When I went to pull Deckard's pages out of you, I found my first pleasant surprise.

"Spellbook absorbed the pages!" I shouted in triumph.

Levar was contemplative a moment before asking, "I thought you'd tried that before near the start of the resets."

"I had, but I must not have been very bound to it at the time."

Deckard's pages were now fully integrated into you, and I could banish them, or duplicate them as I could any other words I'd written. I could even cause specific passages to appear simply by thinking about them.

"I'm going to need to absorb the entirety of the Parlor's library and your shop."

Levar's shop had a very extensive collection, but very little of his own books were missing from the library. He'd gotten into the practice of purchasing two copies of each book and selling the other to Jarreth. If he didn't, Jarreth would buy his only copy. I could have read Deckard's there in hindsight, but there was just something about a library that made me feel at home—even if I had been killed in it.

I would spend every subsequent reset in which I returned to town methodically shoving books into your pages, but I won't bore you with the list. You should know, right?

After exploring the possibilities of this new discovery, Levar moved on to showing me what he’d found out.

“Your spellbook can output about one-hundred fifty grains of Will, and it recovers it in about six hours. I’d need a Will meter to nail that number down for certain, but I’m fairly confident in the estimate.”

He walked over to his work table and clapped his hands together once excitedly.

“Now, let me show you what I’ve come up with.”

Arrayed on the table sat a neat grid of rune covered sheets. He went through each in turn, explaining what they did.

The first was a page runed so that one edge was razor sharp. It wasn’t very useful, the page had to be held taut for it to work, but it was a neat idea. The next was more useful, and had heating runes. To demonstrate, he placed a pot of it, and we watched as it began to boil... eventually. It still took about five minutes. The next was a light rune that glowed as brightly as the runes that lined the walls of the Dahn and the Kituh.

The last was a more creative application. He called them Bond strips, but we aren't married to that name. He’d drawn on both sides. One side bore runes of adhesion that drew upon the Font of Bonds. The other side had reinforcement runes. The paper was much stronger than mundane paper, but it could still be destroyed with enough effort. It was closer to the strength of wood than paper, but far from steel. Reinforced with runes though allowed the paper to withstand great forces. At least until the runes failed. Paper and ink—magical may they both be—is an imperfect medium for runes, and, like all runes, degrades from the imperfections. As the runes draw upon the Font, the Will within them tries to follow the ideal rune form, and in the process drags the structure of the rune to that pattern. While you’d think it would slowly cause the rune to correct itself, you’d be wrong. The end result is a piece of paper with a lot of loose ink upon it that blows away with the slightest breeze.

Back to the sticky paper. Levar demonstrated its uses by using it to secure two boards together. It wasn’t a great bond, but nothing I did could pull them apart until eventually the adhesion runes failed.

“The problem is,” he said after showing me all his work. “I can’t think of a way to turn the runes on and off. As soon as the transference rune is completed, the runes become active.”

I tried to Will the runes to stop receiving power, but I could not. I could unlink the sheet from you, and it would quickly lose its Will and taper out, but I couldn’t recreate that link.

I pulled a fresh sheet from you, laid it on the table and pictured the Light rune page Levar had labeled “Light rune 12” and the page appeared before me active and glowing.

“That doesn’t seem like too much of an issue,” I said.

Levar went back to tinkering, and I began to meditate. I sat in my mental vault, in front of your icon, flipping through all I’d ever written. I went to the back where the pages Levar was working on were, and saw as his sketches appeared on the spectral sheets.

I scribbled over one with my finger, and dimly heard Levar shout, “Hey! Stop that!”

With a thought, I erased the scribble and wrote “experimental success” before erasing that as well.

I reached out to some of the blank pages in the room, and made the Light runes appear, and heard Levar confirm the success. From the vault, I could control you and your disparate parts as if I held you.

Next, I took a piece of paper, and tried to do the same, willing effects onto other removed pages, but it did not work. All I could do from an already removed sheet was cause a twinned sheet to appear within your pages.

We broke for lunch—or dinner?—after a few hours. Time and specific meals had lost a lot of their significance. After we returned, Levar idly began to fold paper into a triangular shape.

“What are you doing?” I asked.

“Experimenting,” he replied, and then through the triangle. It sailed through the air with a shallow angle of descent and traveled across the whole room before crashing into a bookshelf.

He then repeated the test, but this time with a runed piece of paper. When the folding was complete, he added the finishing touch to the transference rune, and through it. This glider hit the same bookshelf a foot higher, and stuck on impact. We walked over to see that the tip of the glider had cut shallowly into the spine of a book and remained lodged.

Triumphantly, Levar said, “I added a cutting rune.”

“Why?”

“I, uh, am not sure. I ran out of ideas,” he said, a little deflated.

We then proceeded to see which runes could be used to make a glider travel further, which admittedly was not the best use of our time. By the time we were done, the work table was covered in the paper contraptions. I banished them all with a thought, and then had an idea.

Levar saw the look on my face and gained an eager expression of his own.

“What did you think of?”

Instead of answering, I began to fold another glider. Once it was complete, I placed it on top of your open pages, and closed the cover. When I opened you again, the glider was gone. I pulled a sheet out, picturing the glider as I did. The sheet pulled free, and in less than a breath had folded itself into an exact replica of the glider that had just vanished.

“What does this mean?” Levar asked.

“I’m not sure.”

Riloth 19th the 698th-719th

The weeks of Barion’s initial captivity passed with intermittent innovations by Levar. Once we’d discovered I could replicate origami pages, he’d gone to work with Dagmar redesigning the Will detector to work on a paper cube instead of a round disk. It took a few days, mostly working out a way to filter out our combined Will from the sensor, but in the end, I was able to produce new detectors with but a thought.

Dagmar let out a relieved groan when she saw it had worked.

“Thank the Wardens.”

She’d surprised me in her willingness to “suffer” through Levar’s “yammering” to work side by side with him on runes—she still complained about it, but she’d done it. Despite her newfound dedication to becoming more adept at rune smithing, she’d not enjoyed the need to spend a few hours each morning crafting a new set of Will detectors.

Levar continued to work as I resumed my searching. One day he surprised me by presenting a crudely forged black dagger.

“Here, try this!”

The weight of the object took me by surprise, it was near weightless. Upon further inspection, it was not a metal dagger at all, but a paper one. The black was actually incredibly densely packed runes.

“Give it a go!” he encouraged.

I walked over to a table, and gingerly shaved a sliver off of the corner. The small splinter came off easily, but after a few inches the blade lost its edge, and then its structural soundness shortly thereafter. The paper dagger got stuck, and then crumbled.

“It still needs some work,” Levar said, dully looking down. “The runes are crude. It's hard to draw them so small and remain accurate.”

“It's amazing! You made a dagger out of paper. How did you do it?

He turned his head up to see a wide smile on my face as I inspected the remnants of his dagger.

The dagger comprised of three runes, cutting, reinforcement, and force. The cutting runes lay on the edge, and allowed the space before the edge to cut like a razor. The reinforcement runes allowed it to maintain its shape, and the force runes created an invisible rod around the paper weapon. The idea being that the paper only required enough rigidity to support the rune structure. It was essentially a rod of force with a cutting edge.

It worked great, for about thirty seconds.

"I can't get the runes accurately drawn at this size," Levar said, venting his frustration.

"What if you drew them large and I shrunk the sheets?"

Eagerly he ran off to his desk shouting, "That might work!"

He began on the methodical task of perfecting each rune at a grand scale, having me twin it, test it, and then produce another copy for him to modify.

As he perfected them, I made copies by the hundreds, and he meticulously laid them out on the table.

"Mend this," he demanded in the abrupt and commanding tone he used when totally absorbed in a project.

"That won't work," I protested. "Mend can only restore things to how they were."

"Just try it. Picture the scraps forming together as if they had once been one."

I did as he said, not expecting it to work.

The tears between the sheets vanished, that disparate scraps formed a new hole.

Dumbfounded, I asked, “How did that work?”

Levar shrugged, and said less abrasively, “Ensouled artifacts tend to bend the rules of magic. This didn’t seem like much of a stretch.”

I proceeded to be his Mend monkey for the rest of the day, making whole the oddly shaped sheets Levar had laid out. When I was done, he began folding. And folding. And fold.

“Best if you come back tomorrow,” he advised.

The next day saw me searching, and the day after that I returned to the Dahn with a dozen more books stuck inside your pages. I’d made sure to get Levar’s giant book of horrible potion side effects. That seemed like a useful one to have. When I returned, I found a very proud Levar waiting, staring at a black dagger with eyes full of admiration.

“Put this into Spellbook!” he demanded excitedly as I entered the fourth floor study.

In our working together, he’d slowly shifted from referring to you as “your spellbook” to “Spellbook,” capital S and all.

Before I could touch the dagger, he yelled, “Don’t pick it up! If you stress the runes, you will degrade them.”

I stopped with my hand a few inches away, and instead Conjured you into my open palm. I opened you, spine pointing to the ceiling, and pages dangling below, and began to slowly lower you, all the while willing you to absorb the blade. As soon as the first sheet made contact, the dagger disappeared, sucked up with a flutter of riffling sheets.

Without further ado, I grabbed a blank sheet, and pulled, picturing the dagger as I did so. Unlike with the paper glider, where the single sheet folded into the desired shape, this was a bit more dramatic.

Bits and scraps of runed paper flew out of your pages, swirling together around my hand before forming into sheets that then neatly folded themselves into dagger form. All in all it took only three seconds, but was a very impressive three seconds.

“Well, that’s pretty neat,” I observed. “Not subtle at all, but very impressive.”

I took the dagger and examined it. If I tapped the back edge, I could feel the solid effect of the force runes keeping my fingers away from the paper within. A quick pass over my arm sliced off the hairs there in the way only the finest razor could replicate. We moved our testing outside, and I found that the dagger could do anything a mundane, dagger could, only better—and for about five minutes. Eventually the runes, improved though they had been, failed, and the magical paper weapon became a mundane origami dagger with runny ink that stained your hands.

“Try again!” Levar encouraged.

I did so, and we took turns playing it until I finally pulled out a knife that didn’t work.

“Looks like six is the limit,” Levar observed, as the knife noticeably lacked the force rune effect that gave it substance. “Each one must consume about twenty-five Will before failing. I might be able to reduce that if I can remove some extraneous runes and improve the rune quality. But I will need some time to do that.”

“Take all the time you need. This is pretty incredible.”

I activated my Willsight to examine the paper dagger for the first time. I never used it in the Dahn any longer, for the intensity of the Dahn’s aura drowned out anything else and rendered the vision worthless. Plus, it gave me a massive headache.

The dagger glowed with our combined aura as any sheet would, and I couldn’t make out any sign of the lack of Will. I did, however, notice something else of import. The door to the Dahn was no longer a solid sky blue. It had the silvery blue of Daulf’s aura streaked through it, like silvery stratus clouds in a bright sky.

“DAULF!” I yelled, and ran into the Dahn.