Mythshaper

The idea that I would be magically adept at shaping skills and casting after awakening was horribly inaccurate. Besides gaining the ability to move essence out of my body and finally utilise my Gift, the awakening had been mostly anticlimactic.

I was not complaining, merely stating a fact. I had anticipated the moment for so long that it had taken on an almost mythical presence in my mind, only to be thoroughly devastated when I tried to forge a rune in the air.

No matter how close within my halo of Influence I attempted to draw the rune, my essence threads flailed before I even managed to form an octagon.

“Remember what I told you about trying to run before learning to crawl?” Mum said, shaking her head in disapproval. “Pumpkin, you cannot force your way through the paths. You’d need twenty-five points in both Will and Weight to even attempt spellforging.”

“Alright, I give up,” I muttered, dismissing all my essence threads. Despite all her reminders, I had to try it for myself. Even if I couldn’t manifest runes in thin air as she had shown me, it was still an eye-opening experience to gauge the difficulty.

“Your time will be better spent engraving,” she said. “Or if you really want to cast spells with runes, practise Charms.”

“But it isn’t the same,” I grumbled under my breath. While the creation of charms followed the same concept as spellforging, and their effects were similar, instead of carving the runes into thin air, charms utilised thin plates of metal, essence-infused wood chips, or paper. It just wasn’t the same. “Why can’t I spend my attribute points on my aspects?!”

I had uttered it as a complaint, but Mum took it upon herself to answer. “Because the growth of your aspects is wholly dependent on the growth of your essence seed and aether root.”

So you’re telling me to cut time off from my other practices for Unification? Keeping the question to myself, I leaned back in my seat and picked up my engraving pen. “Now, let’s see how good I am at engraving runes with my own essence.”

Turning off the supply of essence in the pen, I infused it with all my essence threads. The rune formation within the fabricator merged them all together into a single thread as I began drawing.

I had thought all my mastery over the intricate flows of engraving would reset completely when using my own essence. Fortunately, I could not be any more mistaken.