“Where would I have met this sister?”
“No one is going to ask you that.” She sighed. “But you’re right to ask. Say she was at the school’s recruitment tent outside the tower. No one will think to check. Now go.”
Her tone didn’t brook any argument. She sat back down, moving to her default position, waiting for the next student. I left the room, walking hurriedly back to my dorm.
***
The first thing I did when I got back to my room was try to write down the runes that I’d seen on the box in her drawer. I’d only had a few moments to look at them, but I thought I had a pretty good recollection of what some of them looked like.
My basic rune book was no help, but Advanced Artifice had some clues.
The central rune was something called a “containment” rune, and it was used for storing things inside a container that were larger than the container itself. I’d heard of things like that before — bags that were used to store large numbers of items, for example. There were diagrams for the runes for making exactly that type of bag, but while the central rune matched that design, nothing else did.
I came close to identifying one of the other runes, the one just to the left of center. It looked similar to a rune designed for governing range for teleportation spells, but the bottom section was drawn differently.
The one on the far right? I was pretty sure I’d either remembered it wrong or it was just a bunch of squiggles someone had made while they were bored.
I still didn’t know enough to understand what the whole thing was supposed to do, but I could tell this kind of thing was powerful. The kinds of runes I saw in the introductory runes book had “mana values” in the single digits. The most similar teleportation range rune I could find was classified at Citrine-level and required air mana and transference mana in the hundreds.
There were a number of other runes on the box that I couldn’t remember as well, and ones I couldn’t make out at all from my angle.
I really wanted one. Maybe I could convince her to let me take a look at it in more detail later?
I also wanted to know why she’d whispered before opening the drawer. Was she unlocking the drawer, or maybe disabling a trap?
I sighed. It didn’t matter. The box, as interesting as it was, wasn’t what I had to work with.
She’d told me to take precautions, so that was the next thing on my agenda. What could I do with the resources I had on hand? I had my handful of crystals, a few silver sigils and some bronze ones, and whatever she’d put in that pouch.
I checked the bag, fully expecting it to contain more wealth than I’d seen in my entire life. It didn’t. Just a half dozen extra silver sigils... and, more interestingly, a single finger-sized transparent crystal.
I’d have to figure out how to identify crystals at a glance at some point.
In the meantime, I packed the crystal away with my others and flipped open the basic runes book. I managed to locate a couple of the runes I’d seen the professor drawing on the wall, and I wondered how she’d been doing it without crystals in hand. Was she powering the runes herself? If so, how many attunements did she have?
The one on the left was “silence”, a simple rune for blocking noise. The other one was “blindness”, which blocked vision. Drawing them on walls wouldn’t do anything on its own, though.
Some of her runes must have been to tie the runes to the wall as an area of effect, then to focus them outward, preventing people outside from seeing or hearing what was within. Predictably, I couldn’t find those runes in the basic book, even though they were the most important.
And I still didn’t have the materials to power any of those runes, even if I knew them.
Maybe I was thinking too much in terms of runes. I still hadn’t even tried to make one yet, so it was probably a little too soon to be formulating my defense plan around them. There were simpler ways to protect myself, at least until I’d taken a few days of classes and made some test runes.
It didn’t take me long to purchase a few mundane supplies at a nearby store. I also checked the school rules for modifying the interior of the room — I could make some basic alterations as long as I fixed them before I left.
Good.
Nailing my door shut at night wasn’t exactly elegant, but it was a pretty effective deterrent. Much more than a simple lock, which undoubtedly any number of spells — or even mundane tricks — could remove. It would be pretty tough to dislodge a board nailed to the wall without anyone noticing.
Eventually, I’d get a silence rune so that people didn’t hear me nailing a board over my door every night.
I considered setting traps, but in a small enclosed space I doubted I’d be able to make them any more of a threat to an intruder than they were to me.
My room only had one entrance, the door. That was fortunate. I didn’t know how I’d handle anything as vulnerable as a window.
I also bought chalk. I’d place a small chip in the hinge of the door when I was about to leave. If I came back and found it crushed, it would imply that someone had been in my room while I’d been gone.
With some effort, I switched around the configuration of my room, putting my bed on the opposite side. If someone was going to blast straight in from the doorway, I’d be out of their line of attack.
My preparations felt woefully insufficient to handle any real threat, but most of the other options I considered were either too expensive (lining the walls with anti-magic materials), logistically infeasible (sleep somewhere other than my dorm room), or outside of my current capabilities (warding the walls).
I didn’t sleep much that night, but I felt some comfort from the sword cradled in my arms and the aura of frost seeping through the scabbard and provided a reassuring chill.
***
Tashday, the first day of classes.