Dark Magic

The last letter of the rubbing was the key. Eldrick bent over the runes carefully holding the candle away from the waxy parchment. Elanari sat cross-legged on the straw stuffed mattress behind him singing softly. The Hind’s Heart was a clean establishment if modest in its accommodations and Elanari’s melodic whisper echoed off the bare walls filling the small room with the rhythm of her homeland. She seemed unconcerned with Eldrick’s chanting and scribbling. Strange words tumbled from his mouth as he worked, his failure to decipher the final rune punctuated with a mumbled curse.

The first five letters had come easily enough. He had recognized a form of them from other stones he had studied in his travels. But the last, Isis entwined with Sol and his brother sun over a wave tossed sea, he had never seen. His tongue fumbled at his lips as he twined the ancient words for the suns, moon and sea in his mind changing their order, rearranging the words, splitting them, splicing pieces of one rune into another searching for meaning.

Edmund Renot’s face appeared in his mind. The sour faced Seeker had taught him to read the Binding Stones in the depths of the Blackspire when he was a child. Edmund had a sharp tongue and a stout staff and his lessons were not easily forgotten. Neither were his beatings. Eldrick smiled at the memory of the day he had called the Spark for the first time and set the hollow cheeked Seeker’s staff aflame. He had known long before that moment that the Learned Way was not his destiny and that day, the day before his fifteenth summer, he had turned Free Caster and began a life of constant wandering.

Solaris-te-Neder-to-Isis-Nauticalias-Exto-Trinitarus. The words leapt from Eldrick’s tongue and a blinding light filled the room. Elanari screamed as the pungent smell of burning parchment choked the air. Eldrick’s still open eyes faded to blackness. He felt himself falling through the air. In the Lady’s name, he mused, I think I’ve killed myself. Then there was nothing.