Chapter 2: The Runes
"Jim, why do you always manage to kick that rock when you come here?"
"Grrr…"
Liemann rolled his eyes. "Come on, you're smarter than that. Can't you see that you could've just walked to the left and avoided stubbing your toe against that for the 205th time?"
"Groan…"
"Stupid Jim"
Suddenly, Liemann conjured a small rune and generated some wind to push a zombie to the side, but Jim's balance was beyond saving, and he fell face-first into an open coffin.
"Tsk tsk. Gotta do better than that, Jimmy boy," Liemann scolded, shaking his head. "Look at this zombie. I'm learning how the world works even when I'm bored as hell!"
Did you think I did nothing but talk to myself for the past weeks? Fool!
This zombie right here learnt that there are runes and that my zombie friends are all dumb!
"But runes…magic…I suppose it really is a fantasy world when you look at the fact that zombies are walking around like it's normal."
Liemann had spent his days in this graveyard, observing the zombies and practising his skills with runes. He had learned that there was magic in this world, and he was determined to master it.
He drew a strange symbol in the air, and a dim, black letter appeared seemingly out of nowhere, glowing and humming with power for a few minutes before extinguishing…
Liemann spent the first few days making sure there wasn't a gap or a secret mechanism he'd missed, and sure enough, he didn't miss any.
Then, he tried to communicate with the zombies in any way possible, even going so far as to remove a metal plate from the knight zombie and carve out all of the lexicons in every language he knew on the wall for zombies to learn… which was arguably an idiotic idea. Still, he didn't have anything better to do!
As such, after that tomfoolery had finished, Liemann went on to try to learn the strange, elegant letters on the gravestones instead of trying to make the otherworldly zombies understand him. If they cannot understand you, then try to understand them, right?
Gradually, day by day, he started to decipher them, until he finally unravelled the vague meaning behind his plaque, which read:
"A body whose origin is unknown, so have it buried with the others in the Grand Cavern of Alarc."
Liemann was incredibly proud when he understood the meaning, but was instantly disappointed by the utter lack of information (the fact that he was literally a nobody), so he went to the other plaques and began to decipher them.
That was when he found out Jim's name…not the pronunciation, but the spelling that was something like 'jIM', so he just called the zombie Jim.
However, that was not the most important discovery during the weeks he spent 'living' in that small cave. Despite Jim being a cool zombie, he was just a farmer before he died, so the text on his plaque was not particularly useful to Liemann.
Liemann's most important discovery was on the knight zombie's plaque a few hours ago.
Since he had already compiled most, if not all, of the alphabets of that elegant language, he could instantly notice that there was another set of letters on the knight zombie's gravestone.
They were more…blocky and filled with straight lines, a noticeable difference in comparison to the curvy ones he knew.
As such, he decided to decipher those too, in case they had anything more valuable than 'Jim liked to eat raw meat'. But just as he started to write them down, they began to glow and cause all sorts of things to happen!
The first one he wrote caused him to feel a little dizzy and nauseous despite being dead.
The second one generated a wisp of wind that blew straight through his missing left thigh.
The third one emitted a strange dark glow that contradicted the definition of 'light'.
And so on…
Liemann found a grand total of 15 runes, 10 of which were so weird that he had difficulty distinguishing their effect on reality.
Some only lasted for a mere second before extinguishing.
Some began thrashing around on their own, moving like starved, rabid animals.
Some even replicated themselves until the cave was filled with runes before extinguishing the very moment after.
This prompted Liemann to abandon them in favour of five 'stable' runes. Those of which he could actively cast without worrying about his life or the lives of other zombies - if one can even call them living.
"Hmm. I have the dark rune, breeze rune (this one he'd just used on Jim), light rune, vision rune, and flame rune."
He conjured them in order as he traced his bony hand through the air.
The dark rune…emitted dark. Liemann didn't know how to describe it, but it was like someone had changed the definition of what light was from 'the natural agent that stimulates sight and makes things visible' to 'the natural agent that stimulates blindness and makes things invisible'. It seemed to suck up the light near it and cause the viewer not to recognise anything in the immediate surroundings of that rune.
Next, the breeze rune was really just a rune that generated airflow. Though, its potency was much higher than Liemann had expected, as was evident from the zombie struggling to get out of the coffin.
The light rune was the opposite of the dark rune.
It emitted normal light and illuminated the cave with a brightness analogous to an old filament lightbulb, though it was white rather than yellow.
Moving on, the vision rune made his eyes sharper for a bit and then lost its effect almost instantly. Not too helpful, but it would definitely come in handy when he needed to see things far away.
And lastly, the flame rune.
Sizz…
It created a fire that burned on nothing at all.
"You are the oddest of all of them" he put his finger into the tiny flame but didn't feel a thing or see that his hand had started to burn.
"Not only does it violate the conservation of energy, but it also does not burn me."
Liemann conjured another flame rune and dragged Jim out of the coffin, holding a part of his farmer clothes to the fire and watching it burn before patting it to keep Jim from turning into crisp Jim.
"How does that happen? I refuse to believe that Von Mayer was wrong with his discovery", he mumbled as he released the poor zombie and left it to struggle in the coffin.
"Graa…graaa…"
"Shut up, Jim, I'm thinking", Liemann slapped Jim's head as he stood up, walking to an open space that he'd set up by placing rocks around in a perimeter to make zombies trip and fall.
Within the zombie-free perimeter, there were numerous disparate objects scattered about. Cloth, shoes, metal rivets, bolts, stones, and various other odds and ends littered the area. To Liemann, these items were treasures, invaluable resources he had collected during his time in the cave.
"But let us begin the test first," he muttered to himself as he prepared to delve into his study of runes. Once again, he traced the flame rune in the air and focused intently on his experiment.
With a sheet of metal in hand, Liemann lowered it onto the rune, effectively slicing it in half. The theory he intended to prove was that the rune, in order to "complete the letter," would have to burn through the metal.
As the metal touched the flame, Liemann's eyes widened in amazement. The rune continued to burn, as though nothing had happened. "How?" he pondered, shifting his head to observe the metal from every angle. Despite the metal obscuring half of the rune, it continued to burn without a care in the world.
"Alright then, it doesn't care that something is blocking it…"
He also tried all the other runes, and they did not care whether or not there was an arm, a sheet of metal, or a zombie in the way. They all continued to affect reality despite being entirely blocked by something!
"Hmm, the second test then."
He waited for the runes to disappear and drew the light rune.
"If normal matter cannot affect them, then can runes themselves do it?"
He drew a dark rune on top of the light rune to see whether contradictions could exist in the same space.
Click!
It sounded like someone had turned off a light switch, and Liemann could not see anything anymore!
"What?! What happened?!" he fumbled around the darkness and moved away from the test site, blindly walking towards the general direction he remembered his coffin to be.
Thud. Clang. Graa.
"Luckily, I'm still in the same cave as before…" he whispered as he could feel the ground under his feet, and the things he bumped into were just zombies and pieces of metal that he had lying around…
Click!
Suddenly, just like someone had turned the lights off, the lights went on again as Liemann could see Jim struggling around the coffin!
He stopped for a moment to think about what could've happened and turned back to look at the test site, only to find that the runes had disappeared from the place he drew them!
"What? Don't they last a few minutes?" he scratched his head and strolled back to the testing area with more questions than answers.
Once again, Liemann moved his hand in a bizarre manner before a pale letter appeared midair, emitting a pure white light that illuminated half of the small cave the zombies were in.
Hummm.
He moved closer and could hear the low humming of the rune, its power drawn from somewhere he couldn't begin to conceive as the light continued to shine with constant brightness.
"Such a strange thing"
He then began to draw the dark rune and carefully traced its letter to utmost perfection. Watching every line and corner connect in his imaginary whiteboard as he finished the rune!
Click!
And the place went to dark.
"Hmm…" now that he knew that there wasn't anything wrong, Liemann began to investigate the effect of layering a dark rune on a light rune.
"Logic would dictate that they somehow cancel out, even though I have no idea what dark is…maybe it's more like an artist's colour palette, where the light meets dark and becomes grey?" he pondered on it.
The space he was in was certainly not grey, for it was black…heck what would a grey space even look like? An area with neither light nor an absence of light…
Click!
And just like that, the cave became visible again.
"Hmm… the duration is much shorter than drawing out a single rune on its own…as if it is using up more power because of the increased radius of the dark rune…"
"Increased radius?" he had a light bulb go off in his head.
"What if I layer the light rune on top instead? The dark's radius was much less than the light, so would it mean that the light would be concentrated into one spot rather than spreading out?"
And so he went to testing immediately.
Liemann drew the dark rune and then the light rune in quick succession.
Whoop!
With the sound that felt like a vacuum cleaner sped up a thousand times, the light got sucked into the small dark ball that floated midair!
"Whoa… that's cool!"
He couldn't see any light being emitted from the ball that floated midair, but that made sense as all the light was contained inside that small space!
Liemann moved closer and reached into the ball with his hand to check whether it would kill him or not…and the hand came out fine!
"Ooohh! I see... well, I don't see, but I see!"
He poked his head inside the ball!
…
"GAHH! MY EYES!"
And came out with eyes that almost went blind by the sheer brightness of the white light contained inside!
Pa!
Liemann fell back with a heavy thud, landing squarely on the ground with his buttock as he covered his eyes with his hands!
"My eyes, my eyes! They're gonna go — not blind?"
At the sudden realisation of his misjudgement and overreaction, Liemann coughed a few times and stood back up as if nothing had happened.
"Tsk, scaring me like that, huh, you damn ball of light? I'm not affected by you at all."
He patted his rag and returned to observe the ball, only to find it had already disappeared.
"..."
"Damn. Maybe those crazy runes would be useful if I combine them in the right order!"
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