The runes illuminated.

As if they’d inhaled the moment, a reverberation rippled underneath his fingertips. There had been few moments in life where he’d felt such a strong aetheric presence; strong enough to leap up his arm and clamp into his shoulder like a bite from a feral cat.

He sucked in a breath. With Hemovision on, the lines looked alien up close. They were jerky, skidding, and almost panicked. Lines convulsed in place, darting so fast they blurred like wind-tossed threads. He had to rub his eyes twice before they resolved at all.

It took him another two seconds for the pattern to show up. Shapes began to separate from the chaos into four . . . maybe five (?) distinct ones. One of them looked like a rune but sat dead in the flow, refusing to move with the rest, causing the others to move around them.

Severa’s voice cracked across the air. “What do you see?”

“I’m—I’m still figuring it out!”

“Well, figure it out faster!” She said as another blazing sound, like a fireball striking into flesh, erupted.

He gulped.

The fastest set of shapes pulled his attention first. These were thin, linear marks with sharp little arrowheads at the tips, looping in wide curves around the slower runes as if following some massive track he couldn’t see the edges of. He squinted. There must be a pattern—probably the same one that had been carved neatly on the wall—but scaled up and stretched so wildly he couldn’t recognize it at first.

The arrowed runes veered and corrected itself, drafting the air like they were steering the wind itself. He was sure he’d seen these very same runes on Tommaso’s bracers.

“Severa,” he called out. “The arrowed runes, are those Swift?”

“Yes!” she shouted back. “What else do you see?”

Now that the Swift runes stood out, the next set became obvious by contrast—the stubborn ones. Heavy-edged radial shapes that didn’t zip or weave; they braced. Whenever a current slammed into them, it jolted, then rebounded as if hitting a padded wall.

“What do radial runes usually do?” He asked.

Another banging sound of wind hitting crystal, and his robe flapped wildly afterward. Severa’s voice rang out a second later, “Come again?”

“What do radial runes usually do?” He growled, louder.

“Guard runes! They bolster your defenses!”

Behind them, another set jumped around erratically. The air around them thinned and the currents near them sagged, as if someone had sucked the force out of the gust.

“And what are the spiral ones?” He called. But he was only met with the howl of the wind.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

The wind had grown too loud, howling past his ears in a continuous battering roar. It tore at his robe, slapped the breath from his mouth, and swallowed Severa’s reply whole.

How can I work if I don’t have the names—Wait. Why would names matter at all?

Fabrisse forced himself to lock in on the spirals. Don’t get caught up in terminology. Don’t distract her. Figure out what they do. The wall didn’t care what the books called them; it only cared how they behaved.

You can do this yourself.

A third cluster drifted almost lazily into his view, yet every time turbulence kicked up, the other spiral runes smoothed out and the jagged edges rounded. These had feathered tips and moved with a floaty ripple, barely touching anything yet calming everything they passed.

They’re smoothing the flow, but what does that do to the wind outside?

Still, one symbol still sat wrong: the diamond-shaped symbol. It didn’t do anything except sit there like a rock in a river, forcing every other line to bend around it. Most of them scattered at irrelevant places far away from the main Swift runes, but some of them snuck between the other symbols sitting just at the rear of the main stream.

The only way to see what he could do was to try it for himself.

Fabrisse reached out with one finger and pressed into the rushing path of a Swift rune. The line of motion sliced right through his fingertip as if he were a ghost. He tried again, pinching one of the arrowed runes between thumb and forefinger. It slipped straight through him. He couldn’t touch them.

He pressed his palm against a Guard rune. It didn’t budge, but it swung, almost like it was hinged at a single invisible point. When he pushed at one edge, the rune tilted, and the wind around it immediately rerouted, thinning on one side, thickening on the other as it tried to compensate.

So I can shift their angle, but not their position.

He angled it harder, forcing the ‘braced’ side toward the heavier stream. The flow jittered, snarled, then split more sharply than before.

He whipped his head toward the tunnel, hoping for some sort of hitch in the wind or a cough in the storm. There should be a part where a wind inexplicably splitted into smaller, more aggressive streams. Yet, there was nothing.

Have I been wrong this whole time? Is this not mapping the wind flow?

He frantically scanned the larger pattern, hoping to find an anomaly. Then he found it. One of the unmoving diamond-shaped symbols—usually nowhere near the Swift rune streams—sat directly in the path of a rushing arrowed line. The gale bent around it messily, like a river forced to collide with a boulder that hadn’t been there a heartbeat ago.

What if those runes . . . represent us? Because we’re standing in the path of the wind?

Three of the diamond shapes formed a little cluster, positioned exactly like him, Severa, and Tommaso. And two more further down the pattern moved in slow, subtle sways, like they were shifting on their feet.

Those are the two humanoids.

He reached toward the nearest diamond shape and tried to push it.

It didn’t move; a complete anchor in the pattern. But close to the left-most one, which might represent the left humanoid further back, sat a Guard rune, tucked near its rear like a shield on standby.

If blocking the wind changes things . . . then maybe I can redirect enough of it to slam straight into that one’s back. And if the effect mirrors outside—

He grabbed the Guard rune’s edge and wrenched the braced side into the oncoming stream. The wind balked, snarled, then rerouted along the new angle, funneling directly into the diamond shape’s spine.

The unmoving rune jolted forward by just a hair.

A second later, Severa’s voice tore across the wind, “Kestovar! Did you do something? The left humanoid just lurched forward!”

His eyes widened.

Bingo.