They left the ravine, forcing their horses into a steady trot, pushing toward the setting sun. Elias knew he couldn't afford a full night of rest. He had to attempt the next strokes of the Rune of Displacement now, while his adrenaline was still high.
As night fell, Kaelin stopped near a secluded rise shielded by a ring of scrub brush. They were roughly a day's ride from the first major checkpoint. Kaelin set up a small fireless heat-Rune for warmth and began sharpening her sword.
"Show me," she commanded, not looking up.
Elias retrieved his Gryphon quill and the precious leather scroll. The next six strokes of the Displacement Rune, the scripts for Volume Exchange, were dizzying in their complexity. They dealt with the conversion of a three-dimensional space into pure conceptual location data, ready for transfer. It was the most difficult piece of scripting he had ever attempted.
He worked on a spare piece of parchment, focusing on the mental visualization. He had to internalize not just the form, but the implication of the scripts. Every line demanded a perfect understanding of how a physical object maintains its presence in space.
If I move the volume of a cup of water, he thought, where does the cup's presence go? Does the air rush in? Or does the Rune of Space itself fill the void?
The theoretical understanding alone was a drain. After an hour, he was sweating profusely. He was trying to copy a script meant for a Librarian with the resources of a starving Scribe.
"You're fighting it," Kaelin observed, not looking up from her whetstone.
"The Rune of Volume Exchange is unstable," Elias whispered. "If the script is imperfect, it won't just fail; it will exchange the volume of the target with an equivalent volume from a random location. A small stone might trade places with a pocket of methane gas, or a block of solid granite."
"Then practice on something you don't mind swapping with a block of granite," Kaelin retorted, her stone cold logic hitting him hard. She pointed at his dried river jerky. "Make that disappear and reappear five feet to your left."
Elias took a deep breath. This wasn't copying. This was creating.
He funneled the raw, fiery energy of his Aether Ink into the copied script. The four foundational strokes he had mastered were the anchor. He layered the first of the six Volume Exchange scripts on top.
Visualize the jerky as pure spatial data.
He pushed. His Aether Ink surged out, a thin, controlled stream. He felt it connect with the jerky's local Runes. The object shimmered, but instead of displacing, the surrounding air vibrated violently. The jerky remained, but the scent of burning sulfur momentarily assaulted their senses.
Elias gasped, pulling back his Aether Ink. "Failure. It tried to exchange the jerky with something volatile from the Fire Realm."
Kaelin finally looked up, her expression grim. "That scent is worse than an Enforcer's wound. You must be more precise."
They continued the practice for another hour with minimal success, until a new sound cut through the silence: the deep, rumbling groan of shifting earth.
"We have company," Kaelin muttered, leaping to her feet, sword in hand.
Elias immediately scanned the active Runes of the earth. It wasn't Enforcers.
"No, it's a Seismic Adjustment Rune breaking down," Elias said, his eyes widening in alarm. "The local Rune of Ground Stability is failing. There's a washout coming."
Kaelin immediately saw the implication. The ground they were standing on was stable, but the main path ahead, still half a mile away, was about to collapse into the ravine below. If they waited until morning, the path would be gone, and they would be forced onto a long, exposed detour.
"This is your cost, Scribe," Kaelin said, pointing the tip of her sword toward the path. "We need to cross before the full collapse. If there's a partial collapse now, you will stabilize the ground or reduce the volume of the threat so we can cross. You are the only thing that can cheat the law of erosion."
They mounted their horses and galloped toward the threatened section of the road.
When they arrived, the scene was worse than Elias had predicted. A significant portion of the path had already slumped into the valley, leaving a yawning, twenty-foot gap of unstable, crumbling mud and rock. The air above the gap was choked with frantic, self-destructing Gravity Runes.
"We can't jump that," Kaelin stated. "The far side is too brittle. We need to stabilize it, or shrink the gap."
Elias knew he couldn't stabilize the fundamental Rune of Ground Stability across such a wide area. It was far too vast for his current Aether reserves. But he could perform a targeted, temporary Volume Exchange to make the remaining section of the path viable.
He dismounted, running to the edge of the gap. He focused on the crumbling earth of the far side—the twenty feet of unstable ground they needed to cross.
"I can't displace it completely," he yelled over the sound of crumbling rock. "But I can force a Volume Reduction—I will temporarily shift 75% of the path's volume into conceptual space. It will be light, stable for a few seconds, but structurally hollow."
Kaelin grabbed his shoulder, her grip like a vice. "You have one attempt, Elias. If it fails, we fall, and the laws of this world claim us both."
Elias nodded, fear mingling with the high-octane focus of pure Runecraft. He closed his eyes, not to block the light, but to block out the visible, deceptive reality. He channeled every remaining drop of his Aether Ink into the Displacement scroll.
He recited the four foundational strokes, the anchor of location. Then, with a scream of mental agony, he layered the six newly visualized Volume Exchange scripts on top, forcing them to coalesce into a single, temporary, coherent command.
Reduce Volume: Target Mass/Location: 75% Reduction. Duration: Six Seconds.
He pushed the command out.
The effect was subtle, yet terrifying. The entire twenty-foot section of the far path didn't disappear; it simply shrank. The rock and mud seemed to contract in on themselves, becoming impossibly dense, yet strangely light, like a shadow of its former self. The gap between them narrowed from twenty feet to a six-foot jump.
"NOW!" Elias screamed, collapsing instantly onto the ground, his body hollowed out from the sudden, massive expenditure of Aether Ink.
Kaelin didn't question it. She spurred her horse, towing Elias's horse on a lead rope. The horses leaped across the six-foot gap, landing safely on the momentarily shrunken path. Kaelin jumped off her horse and immediately dragged Elias the last few feet before the effect faded.
With a deep thrum, the Volume Reduction ended. The path's structure returned to its full mass and volume, but the effort had stabilized the surrounding Ground Runes. The gap was now safely closed by the temporarily dense path.
Kaelin stood over Elias, who was shaking violently, his face a ghostly white.
"We made it," Kaelin breathed, the terror in her voice replaced by awe. She looked at the path, then at the small, prone Scribe. "You broke the law of mass, Thorne. You just made the world hollow."
Elias managed a weak smile. "The law… is merely a suggestion."
He had survived, but he knew the cosmic energy signature of such a violation would travel further than the sound of their horses. The Watchers might not be close, but their systems would be recording.
Far beyond the fractured Realm of Veridia, on the surface of a distant, polished metal sphere rotating slowly in the void of the Great Library, a single crystalline sensor flared a brilliant red in the vast data stream. The sensor, dedicated solely to recording high-level violations of the Rune of Fundamental Mass, registered the anomaly. A nameless, immortal entity whose form was woven from pure script gazed at the blip of chaotic energy then quickly ignored it.
End of Chapter 3