The sound of a pistol firing was the only warning I had.
I ducked my head but was unable to avoid the bullet as it sunk into my shoulder. I let out a muffled curse, hand pressing to my side, and threw myself behind a boulder.
I forced myself to remain calm, keeping my breath shallow in the heat of the moment. You’ll survive, I told myself with waning certainty. I didn’t know where the shot came from, so I hunkered down, fishing a hand into my bag.
The sound of pencils and papers rustling, accompanied by the frantic pace of my breath, broke the silence in this unnervingly quiet field. I had no time to think. I could feel an oppressive urgency to this situation. Finally, I found the sheet I’d been looking for. I laid it on the wet bloody ground below me and narrowed my eyes.
The Rune on the sheet showed an illustrated tree with roots digging deep into the soil. I frowned at it. There was only a spark of color within, indicating that it had little life left to it. I pressed the paper to my wound and sighed as some of the pain abated. It wouldn’t dull or heal the wound entirely, but it provided much needed relief.
I listened out, wary for more conflict. Silence. I didn’t want to stick around any longer than necessary, so I dug into my bag once more.
Another sheet of paper. This one held a different Rune: a bird resting upon a branch. I pressed my finger to the Rune and felt the air warp and shudder around me.
I recalled the placement Rune I’d embedded into the earth a few miles back. It was on the outskirts of a lone house, the voices from within comforting and homely. It seemed as good a place as any to teleport back to if I ran into trouble. I was careful to hide the Rune in the shrubbery. Only other Rune-crafters would be able to sense the placement Rune, though a mark on the ground would be too obvious.
Teleportation was one of the more uncomfortable experiences in life. Thankfully, after countless trips, the urge to vomit had mostly vanished. The placement Rune also made the experience less uncomfortable. It was possible to travel without one, but the effects were rather unpleasant.
When I appeared in front of the house, I almost fell over with shaking legs. God, I would never get used to that. I brushed my pants and straightened my spine with a shiver. That shoulder wouldn’t get any better until I drew a new Rune. I ran a hand through my wind swept hair.
“What the…” A voice rang out in the quiet. I snapped my head in its direction and noticed a woman staring, gap-mouthed, at me. She was holding folded clothes and her eyes were wide.
“Shit.” I rubbed my temple. I didn’t have time for this. “Look I’ll just leave you be —”
“You’re a Rune-crafter, aren’t you?” There was a hunger in her eyes that made my skin crawl. She must want something.
“I’m a cartographer,” I replied while rummaging through my bag once more. “I only came to track the progress of the war. No more. No less.”
That statement wasn’t entirely inaccurate. I was a cartographer, that much was true. It was something I did more out of habit than actual duty since the order went silent. The main reason for getting that close to the battlefield wasn’t my cartography duty. That was a secondary task.
There had been increasing reports of a Rune-crafter aiding in the war. That was too intriguing and tempting for me to let slide. I hadn’t seen another practitioner in over a year and a Rune-crafter being that directly involved was strictly forbidden.
I found what I was looking for in my bag and pulled it out, relieved. I eyed the terrain on the map, thinking through my best course of action. There was a key on the bottom right corner of the map. Green circles indicated Contester troop movement and blue circles tracked the Alliance. There was also a marker that tracked where I’d been. It allowed me to cover more ground consistently and limited my backtracking.
“Yes, but you can use and create Runes, can’t you?”
Despite my best efforts, chronicling the war was my only success of the trip so far. My bag had begun overflowing with depictions of the war and troop movements. Usually, I would deposit those at the Tower on a monthly basis, but that lies in ruins now. Everyone had simply vanished. The unknown of it all threatened to tear my heart to shreds. An entire group of people didn’t just disappear.
There had been a faint aura of Rune magic in the air, but I couldn’t find a centralized location. Constant exposure to this kind of work left an impression on the environment. You could see it in the way the wind blew and the feel of the ground underneath your feet. That aura becomes stronger when more closely acquainted with the person leaving an impression.
It was as if someone had purposefully used just the right amount of magic to attract attention, but not quite enough to where they could be tracked.
And who had shot the pistol? There shouldn’t have been warfare that close to me. The fact that the field was quiet before the shot rang proved the assailant valued stealth.
“Sir?” The woman tried again. More urgent.
It had to have been a targeted hit. I tried to rack up a list of possible enemies but that was useless. The number of people who would kill a Rune-crafter was not short. A hand touched my shoulder, and I flinched back into a defensive stance.
The woman stood before me and I blinked slowly at her. Oh. I raised an eyebrow.
“Sorry, sir, it’s just…” The woman grimaced. “I’m Alice.”
She held out her hand and I stared at it; eyebrows still raised. She was rather pretty, all things considered. Long dark hair that spilled down her shoulders and a pair of striking green eyes to match. Though her hair had several strands poking outward, as if she’d just walked out of a tornado. A moment passed and I grabbed her hand in mine and shook.
“Anthony.” I replied, eyebrows furrowed.
“It’s my husband.” She almost sounded apologetic. “You have to —”
“No.” I turned away. “I don’t have time for that.”
Alice grabbed my hand in a surprisingly stern grip. “Please. Just hear me out.”
“I need to keep moving.” I avoided looking at her face. It was always the eyes that got me. She obviously wasn’t going to let me go easily. I could redraw some Runes I’d need for the future while she talked. That might appease her before I escaped.
“Fine,” I amended.
Alice gave me a smile as bright as the sun, leading me inside. There was a table with a few chairs messily laid on the edges. The stove was turned on, a large pot on the burner. I could hear water boiling but Alice made no move to check on it. A little messy too, with clothes and papers scattered on the tables and floors.
“No children?” I thought back to when I first passed through here. I could’ve sworn there were multiple other voices earlier.
“Nope, just me!” The smile she gave was almost pained. Must be a sore subject. “And my husband too, of course.”
Alice rushed over to the table, where a chair lay knocked on its side. She carefully propped it back up and pushed it out for me. I raised an eyebrow.
“Sorry,” she said with a sigh. “Had visitors the other day and they were a rowdy bunch.”
Why have visitors when she was so clearly on edge? Various questions piled up in my mind, each extending from the other, until I forced those thoughts silent. I only wanted to get in and out. Investigating this weird situation would only slow me down.
I claimed the chair and set my bag on the table retrieving my Scalp and Rune-aper, the pen and paper of the Rune-crafter world. I set to work creating Runes that would help me in the future. One for fire. One for water.
A healing Rune. A travel Rune. The shield Rune. They each varied in levels of complexity and detail. No one knew exactly what gave these Runes power, only that they were a precise art, needing years of study. Something non Rune-crafters could ever understand. Every newly discovered Rune was a miracle at this point.
While I worked, she began speaking.
“My husband, he’s a soldier, you see,” Alice explained. “A devoted man, he was.”
“Hmm…” I hummed non-committedly. “That’s a bloody career path.”
She sighed. “Yes, well, he didn’t choose it. He’s a very gentle man.”
Against my better judgment, I asked “What’s the problem here?”
“He’s been captured.” She said it with a vehemence that made me look at her. “Some prison nearby, I think. I don’t know where.”
“Johnson’s Island, probably.”
Alice gasped, and while she did so, I withdrew a ruler from my bag. The spark on the fire Rune needed to be exactly 3.5cm or it wouldn’t work. I didn’t want to be responsible for some uncontrollable forest fire.
“How do you know that?”
I shuddered, closing my heart off to that hopeful expression on her face. Attachments in my line of work were unwise.
I looked up from my illustrations with a face of practiced apathy. There was that same hungry expression from earlier, almost eclipsing that hope. Desperation, it looked like. She must miss her husband.
“As I said, I’m a cartographer.”
Really, why was I indulging this woman? I had to get back out there and search for the Rune-crafter before they decided to take their magic elsewhere. “I know many points of interest and areas that others do not. I haven’t been to Johnson’s Island, though.”
And I wasn’t planning to go. It wasn’t a huge prison — barely large enough to accommodate the inmates there. Not well-staffed either. Still, it was where Contesters lumped their war criminals nearby.
“Do you think you could get him back?”
Alice was practically begging. I had to fight off a scowl.
“No.”
I moved to get up when she lunged forward and grabbed my arm. I stared down at the firm grip before glaring at her.
“No, you can’t, or no, you don’t want to?” Alice challenged, a little heat to her tone.
I sat back down, not wanting to provoke her further. Rune magic in spontaneous, close quarters combat rarely went well. I could listen to her longer before leaving.
I lifted the Rune-aper with the healing Rune on it and pressed it against my shoulder. The bullet wound receded and I frowned at the wasted use of Rune-aper. I didn’t have much of it left and there was nowhere left to restock. Rationing it had been the smart move, but even that couldn’t last forever.
“It’s certainly possible that I could get into the prison and free your husband.” I replied after a heavy pause. “I don’t meddle in the affairs of others, though, so I’ll have to pass.”
It was a philosophy I kept since my days as a Rune-crafter.
“I can pay you, Anthony.”
There was a startling amount of anger in her words. I glanced up at her before starting on the next Rune, a defensive one.
“I doubt there is anything you could offer me.” I frowned at the shield Rune. The lines within the shield needed to be a certain thickness. I think I drew it too thin.
I corrected that error and inspected the work. That would do.
“Such a typical Rune-crafter response,” Alice scoffed. “Always have to be neutral, regardless of morals. I can see where my husband gets it.”
She added the last sentence almost as an afterthought.
Stomping away, she left me with widened eyes. It felt wrong to leave her now but this was as good a chance as any to escape. Before I could make my move, she returned.
My eyes immediately zoned in on the paper in her hands. Specifically, Rune-aper. Even more strange, one of the sheets had a Rune with a tombstone, an eye centered in it. My breath caught.
“How did you…” I stared at her with renewed interest. Rune-aper was hard to come by and only a select few knew how to get it.
“My husband has a past,” Alice answered with a determined scowl. “If you help get him back, it’s yours.”
It was a struggle to keep my face neutral. Inside, her revelation shook me to the core. Another Rune-crafter? Could he be the one in the reports I’d seen? I bit my tongue, thinking. Maybe this man would have answers.
“His name?” I asked suddenly, “what’s his name?”
Alice moved the Rune-aper to the space opposite to me. “Simon.”
I shot up in my chair. “Simon Phillips?”
“The one and only.”
Alice smirked. She knew she had me and I scolded myself. Still, Simon Phillips was a legend. One of the strongest Rune-crafters alive and my… mentor. It was almost too good to be true.
A lump formed in my throat. I coughed, trying to dispel it. A memory — biting and vicious — threatened to overtake me.
It was two years prior.
To be continued…
