Date: 7.29.2798 (Ashen Calendar)

Gavric Romaran, Director of Research

Progress is slow. In the last three months, I have seen little more than a flicker to indicate that we're on the right track, but still, we press on…

Gavric jotted some numbers down in his notebook. Three months. They had been at this for three months with no indication of success. He knew that progress would take time, but the unrest in Ashen grew stronger by the day. They couldn't even send letters home to their families anymore, for fear that their activities in Ember would be discovered.

Gavric was beginning to lose hope.

"Are you seeing this?" Kere called from the other side of the lab.

Gavric looked up from his notes. In the center of the room, he saw it: a small opening, just about the size of a fist, floating a few feet above their circle of runes.

A boundary crack.

"Stabilize it!" Gavric shouted, rushing to scribble runes on the floor in a circle around the crack. Chesha—who in some terrible twist of fate had been assigned to Gavric's team—scribbled on the other side of the platform, muttering under his breath as he imbued the charcoal marks with Miasma.

Behind Gavric and Chesha, the Lerians on their team, Nallen and Kere, scribbled in the opposite direction, using Essence runes to create a counterforce that would work in tandem with their Miasmic runes.

At least, that was how it would work in theory.

The two Lerians squinted at the air, consulting what Gavric could only assume was their System Menus.

Gavric would never get used to that—the idea that someone would willingly give control of their magic to some hive-mind that might spoil their spells for the greater good.

According to the Lerians, that would only happen if they were actively trying to harm another, but on what basis did this Administrator decide what was right or wrong? Harmful or harmless?

Ronari, they said her name was… a woman barely fifty years old. It was Gavric's understanding that in Lerian years, that was barely an adult.

He reached the end of the line. "Bind," he whispered, blowing on the final rune.

It glowed softly, signifying the successful spell.

"I got it!" Chesha and Gavric yelled at the same time.

"Me too!" Kere said. "Nallen?"

There was a brief moment of silence.

"It's stable!" Nallen exclaimed.

Gavric closed his eyes. Had they really done it?

"Wait! Something's wrong," Nallen said, his voice panicked. "Get away from the crack!"

Gavric felt the wave of Essence a second before Nallen's warning. He threw up his hood and curled in on himself, praying the runes on the fabric would hold. Kere cried out in pain and Chesha grunted, but Gavric couldn't look or risk serious injury. He grit his teeth against the burning sensation that seeped through the rune-enhanced clothing.

He didn't remove his hood until he was absolutely sure that the energy had dissipated.

Chesha removed his hood a beat behind Gavric, frowning at the empty podium where the crack had been minutes before.

"Damn it!" he snapped, smudging his runes with a swipe of his hand.

"We were so close that time," Kere said, her voice pained. She was sitting much further away from the runes, her hand propped up on a desk so Nallen could tend to it. Her skin was charred black, the fingers curled into a loose claw.

"Are you going to be all right?" Gavric asked.

"I'll be fine," Kere said with a grimace. "It just might take some time to heal."

"It'll take less time if you quit distracting me," Nallen grumbled. "You can talk when your fingers move."

They sat in silence until Kere had regained the use of her hand, then they went about clearing the lab.

"What went wrong?" Kere mused aloud, rubbing out her runes with a cloth. "It seemed to be working. All of the runes were stable. Then it just exploded on us all of a sudden."

"Maybe we just need to try a new rune sequence," Nallen suggested.

"There's nothing wrong with my runes," Chesha snapped. "You're sure that puppet master of yours is giving you good information? How do we know the Essence runes are correct if you don't even know them well enough to draw them from memory?"

"The System isn't a puppet master. It has no control over us," Kere said indignantly.

"No control," Chesha scoffed. "You Lerians just need that almighty System to tell you how to wipe your own—"

"Enough!" Gavric snapped.

This was precisely why Gavric hadn't reworked the teams to spare himself the frustration of Chesha's company. The man was a genius, but he had absolutely no tact. He needed someone to keep him in line.

"We've only been doing this for three months," Gavric said, trying to pretend that wasn't a ridiculously long time to be working with no progress. "Expecting results this quickly is like expecting a bit of rain to grow your crops overnight. We just need to keep trying. Results will come in time."

The words rang hollow, even to Gavric's ears. Time was the one thing they didn't have.

"What if we drew the runes in advance?" Nallen suggested. "Then we would only have to imbue them with magic when the crack appears."

"Perhaps Essence runes are different," Gavric said. "But Miasmic runes need to be imbued with magic soon after they're drawn. The longer the time between the drawing and the working, the harder it is to complete the spell."

Chesha glared at his runes as he wiped them away.

Nallen, on the other hand, looked thoughtful. He still seemed to be trying to come up with a solution.

He rubbed his finger over a smudged rune, peering at the lighter charcoal on his black skin. "What if we covered the area in sand?"

"Sand?" Chesha repeated. "How's that supposed to stabilize the runes?"

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"It'll act as a heat sink," Nallen said. "Feel the charcoal, it's warm. What if our spells are overheating?"

A light pop echoed in the lab and Nallen shouted in surprise, rubbing the charcoal off his finger as fast as he could.

"That shouldn't have burned you," Kere said, frowning at the slowly healing wound on Nallen's finger. "Are the energies mixing? I thought we scrubbed this place clean."

Chesha shook his head. "If that was the case, it wouldn't have taken so long to have an effect. It must be residual Miasma from the spell."

He was right. If the charcoal was imbued with Miasma directly, it would have bored through Nallen's finger before he had a chance to get a full sentence out.

Gavric leaned over and rubbed out one of his runes, inspecting the charcoal. It definitely held Miasma from the failed spell. Gavric waited.

As soon as he felt the sting of Essence, he wiped his finger clean on his cloak.

"The mingling energies must be interfering with our spells," Gavric said. "We need a way to separate them, or the runes will keep overheating."

It was no wonder they had made so little progress. They were lucky the lab hadn't exploded, taking all of them with it. If they had to wait for specialists in energy filtering, the project would be stalled for weeks—maybe months.

"Maybe we don't," Chesha said, his hand hovering just above the runes.

Gavric had only seen this look on Chesha's face twice in the last three months. Each time had been followed by a breakthrough of some kind. The first instance had given them the entrapment method, the second had given them a way to tease out a crack in the boundary without risking a cataclysmic fissure.

He held his tongue, trying not to distract the man from his work.

After several minutes of painful silence, Chesha finally started to move.

"We're thinking about this all wrong!" he exclaimed, grabbing a piece of paper and running to his desk.

Gavric and the others followed, gathering behind Chesha to watch over his shoulder.

"Up until this point, our goal was to create two barriers; one that would trap Miasma and rotate it to the right, the other that would trap Essence and rotate it to the left." He drew two circular arrows, one inside the other, pointing in opposite directions. "The idea was that we could establish an equilibrium by moving the energies away from each other, while creating a sort of current to trap wayward energy."

"Exactly," Nallen said. "But it isn't doing that."

"That's because we're trying to trap the energy and it has nowhere to go. Instead of following our currents, it tries to break free." He drew a squiggly line in the space between the two circles, ricocheting back and forth. "Eventually, the energy realizes that it can't get out and tries something else. It takes the path of least resistance, funneling itself into our runes—Essence and Miasmic runes alike." He stabbed the pen down on the paper.

"You talk about the energy like it's alive," Nalen said, sounding more confused than judgmental.

Chesha shot a disbelieving look at Nallen. "It is." After a moment, he thought better of it. "Not alive, exactly. Neither Essence nor Miasma has a consciousness or thoughts, but they do have wills. They want to flow and they don't want to flow into each other. That's why the reaction is so severe when they collide."

Chesha moved the paper aside and drew a rune most commonly used as the beginning of entrapment charms.

"This," he said, tapping the paper. "Is a rune that conveys the meaning of being trapped or bound. It's used in entrapment, silencing charms, heat reduction; anything in which trapping something is the goal." He scribbled another rune. "This is the rune used for dispelling. It's most often used in conjunction with the entrapment rune. Once you've trapped whatever it is you wish to remove, you have to deal with it somehow or it'll explode out of your spell as soon as the runes fail."

He handed the paper to Nallen. "What are the equivalent Essence runes?"

Nallen consulted his Menu, drawing two runes next to the ones on the paper. They weren't as neat as Chesha's but they were recognizable even to Gavric who knew very little about Lerian magic.

Gavric made a mental note to add a few runecrafting books—both Essence and Miasmic runes—to the list of required reading materials.

Chesha pulled out a fresh piece of paper and held his hand above it. He hovered there for a full minute, studying the runes they had drawn.

"What are you—?" Kere started, but Gavric and Nallen shushed her in unison.

Finally, Chesha started to draw. It wasn't a Miasmic rune or an Essence rune, but some combination of the two. His charcoal glided across the paper, stable and sure.

He pulled his hand away, revealing two new runes scrawled across the page.

"What if," he said breathlessly. "We need runes that can direct both types of energy. We're trying to contain cracks indefinitely, but what if the solution to doing so is to force the energies to play nicely with each other."

"A new form of runes?" Nallen asked, his eyes wide. "So many things could go wrong with that, least of which is blowing up the entire facility!"

"We start small," Chesha said. "We don't practice on active cracks. One rune at a time. When the rune is stable, we move on to the next."

"We don't have time," Gavric said. "Ashen is growing less stable by the day—magically and politically."

"Which is why we need a real solution!" Chesha argued. "Not just vague plans held together by desperation and wishful thinking. We need something that'll permanently end the energy crisis."

"And when you create your runes?" Gavric asked. "What do you intend to do with them?"

"Trap and dispel," Chesha said confidently. "Trap them both, then push the Essence back into the dungeons for more filtering. It wouldn't stop all of the leakage, but it would minimize it enough that the land would be able to handle the rest of it on its own. It'll heal."

Gavric frowned. It was actually plausible; not easy, and certainly not safe, but something they could actually do.

But how much time would it take?

Gavric leaned down to examine the runes that Chesha had drawn. "I'll give you a week."

"A week?!" Chesha exclaimed. "That's not enough—"

"If you can bring me a working mixed rune in that time, I will entertain the possibility of pursuing this idea," Gavric said, cutting him off. "I don't care which rune it is. Pick something that isn't likely to blow up the lab. If you can show me results, I'll loosen the reins."

Perhaps it was a sign of desperation that Gavric was even considering this, but if it could work…

Gavric shook his head. "You have full access to the lab. Take at least one shift off per day. If I find you sleeping in the lab, you'll be taken off the project entirely, understood?"

Chesha nodded emphatically. "I'll be careful, I promise! Thank you!"

"Don't thank me," Gavric said. "You just made our mission here a hundred times more dangerous."

But Chesha was right. The potential benefits outweighed the risks. If he could prove the plan viable, Gavric would give him whatever he needed to make it work.

Now Gavric just had to find a way to explain the plan to their employer…

* * *

"Mixed runes?" Britt said slowly when Emma finished summarizing the journal's contents for the others. "I mean, there's no reason that couldn't work, from what I've been reading, but it's not mentioned in any of the books I've found."

"It's not like you've read them all," Nathan pointed out. "What have you read, one book? Two?"

"Hundred and fifty-four," Britt said. "I got a speed reading skill with the First Ascension."

Andrea put her book down. "Then why aren't you the one going through all these journals?"

"It's on cooldown," Britt said. "I only get two hours a week and I have to use them all at once. I used it earlier when we first found the library."

Emma put the journal she'd just finished aside. It was the third journal from the director of research. Gavric Romaran seemed to be going through one journal a month and the majority of his notes were completely illegible—random lists, numbers and runes. Emma was fairly sure that it would make sense to someone with more knowledge of the subject matter, but it might as well be spy code.

"Maybe we should just reconvene in a week when Britt can speed-read all of these," Nathan suggested, rubbing his eyes.

"There's no way I'm waiting that long!" Andrea said, picking up another journal. "We're sitting in the kitchen of an illegal science experiment. Aren't you curious how it ends?"

Nathan frowned. "I'm a lot more curious about where everyone went."

"And I'm dying to know what happened with the combo-runes," Britt said. "Anyone found Chesha's journals yet?"

Emma shook her head. "They weren't in the library. He might've taken them with him when he left."

"Maybe…" Nathan said, a thoughtful frown on his face. "I'm going to grab a snack. Anyone else want something?"

Emma nodded. "I'll take whatever you're making." Mummy bread or not, the food in the research facility was high quality and well preserved. The project was better funded than Gavric had first implied. Maybe it changed sponsors in the middle—or perhaps their original sponsor had a sudden spike in generosity.

Maybe it was the supposed end of the world that loosened the mysterious benefactors purse strings.

But the world was still here. Had they succeeded? Or was the end still coming? The descriptions of the encroaching apocalypse didn't match the descriptions of the Dark Age. Whatever was going on here seemed to be unrelated.

The researchers didn't seem to have left in a hurry, either. Their beds were made, the lab door was locked, and they hadn't raided the kitchen for leftover supplies to take with them.

Nathan placed a plate in front of Emma with a sandwich that looked like a renaissance fair version of grilled cheese.

She frowned at it. Had the portal worked in the end? If they went through the crack to Ashen, that would explain the lack of people, but it wouldn't explain why they didn't take any of their supplies with them.

"If it's that unappetizing, I'll just eat it for you," Nathan said, reaching for the sandwich.

Emma grabbed the plate and pulled it out of his reach. "It's fine. I was just thinking."

Nathan shrugged and went to make himself one.

Emma grabbed the fourth journal off Gavric's stack and opened it to the first page. There were only three journals left; three months left of records.

They would know what happened soon enough.

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