Noah approached the new rune, not daring to attempt to call it closer to himself. He didn’t want to accidentally snap the strands connecting it to the base of his soul and give himself even more soul damage.

It had been months since he’d gotten so much soul damage that the Hellreaver had been able to enter his mind, but he had no desires to ever let things get to that state again. He had more than enough stupid things to do without needing hallucinations to help him along.

He had a Demon Rune. Noah wasn’t sure how to feel about that. He definitely hadn’t been trying to make one. There was a reason he’d been avoiding drawing in any Monster Runes, but not once had he ever considered it would be possible to actually make a Demon Rune. Noah couldn’t tell if he was excited, terrified, or just plain confused.

This opens up so much. If I can form a Demon Rune, then could I use it to potentially help Lee? I could find a way to prevent demons from losing themselves when they hit Rank 4! I feel like I could study this thing for a hundred years and not figure out everything about it. Azel definitely felt controlled by his emotion, but Yoru feels surprisingly in control despite being considerably more powerful than him.

Noah took the rune in for a few seconds. Then his brow furrowed slightly. Now that he took a closer look, there was something off about it, and it wasn’t just the fact that he — a human — had formed a Demon Rune. Noah’s brow creased and his eyebrows knit as he drew to a stop directly before the rune. And then he stared. A minute ticked by. Noah didn’t move. He couldn’t place what it was, but something was definitely wrong. It became more apparent the longer he stared.

Even though he couldn’t read the rune, the sharp, twisting forms that made it up almost felt… familiar. Like they’d been written in a language he could understand but made from random letters rather than proper words. The longer he stared, the more familiar it seemed to become. The shadowy strands blocked him from getting a full picture, but he knew what rune he’d set out to make. He knew the energy in it. The answer was before him and all he had to do was dig until he found it. Of that, he was certain. Noah could practically taste the Rune’s name on his tongue.

He tried to form it, but his mind stubbornly refused. The finish line in sight was walled behind iron bars that refused to let him push the last few inches through. A twinge of anger broke through his concentration and Noah stepped away from the rune to walk in a circle around it and see if he could pick up on something that he’d been missing.

It was for naught. The back of the rune was even more covered with a shadowy mass than the front had been. He could barely even make the rune out from where he stood. It was just a few flickers of white-gray energy buried in a sea of twisting dark.

Noah blew out a sigh and tapped a foot on the ground. His impatience was already starting to poke at the inside of his throat like he’d swallowed a prickly seed. A distant headache made sure he couldn’t throw off his irritation but he stubbornly refused to activate the Fragment of Renewal until he figured out what the hell he’d just made.

Eh, fuck it.

He brushed a finger across the inky black strands. A faint shiver rolled down the back of his spine and he shivered, pulling his hand back. Noah paused for a second. Then he reached out and touched the strand again.

A startled yelp escaped his lips as a sharp prod of chilly energy poked into his navel. It wasn’t exactly painful, but it was extraordinarily uncomfortable. He yanked his hand away and took a step back from his rune.

“We’re going to have a problem if this is going to be how things are,” Noah said, his eyes narrow. He considered prodding the rune again but decided against it and let his hand fall to his side. Muttering under his breath, Noah started to pace around the rune.

Minutes ticked by like sand falling in an hourglass. Time slipped through Noah’s fingers as he studied the rune, determined not to leave until he figured out exactly what it was niggling at the back of his mind. The unwanted splinter would be removed. There was too much riding on it.This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.

Not only were the results of all his work locked up within the unreadable rune, but this was the best angle he’d found that had a chance of being able to help Lee. Noah wasn’t about to let that slip by or go unnoticed. If there was something to be learned from a rune he’d accidentally formed, then he was determined to find it.

“How the hell did I form you in the first place?” Noah mused to himself, taking a step back and shaking his head to try and reset his thoughts and locate a new angle to approach the problem from. “I didn’t have any demonic energy in my combination. Didn’t think I was imagining anything demon-like either. I suppose it’s possible that the Damned Plains themselves could have affected the rune’s formation…”

He trailed off and pursed his lips, pacing around the rune another time. Part of him wanted to go bother Moxie and see if she had any thoughts as to what the rune may have been, but that could wait for later. They didn’t have a Mind Meld Potion to spare so he could show it to her yet.

I should definitely get a few of those. Hard to do much together when we’re in the middle of a camp of nosy demons.

Noah stopped his pacing and crossed his arms as he ran back through everything he knew about its formation. There were three components that went into the formation of a new rune. Intent, magical energy, and the inciting energy or action.

The magical energy was the easiest to trace. It came from the runes he’d just broken down. While two of them had been from the Damned Plains, Noah hadn’t seen any Demon Runes within them while he’d been breaking them down. That might not have been enough to completely cross magical energy off as the cause of his little problem, but it was a fair argument against it.

I swear it couldn’t have been my intent either. I don’t even know what kind of intent you would need to form a Demon Rune, but I wasn’t thinking about demons. I can’t even read the damn rune. If I can make a rune in demonic, then I should be able to read the damn thing. That means it probably wasn’t my intent. But… that only leaves the inciting energy.

Sunder. The reformation of his body. Noah’s lips thinned. Sunder had come from the demon that had attacked the afterlife, but the rune itself was perfectly readable to him. It wasn’t demonic as far as he could tell.

“Maybe Sunder uses energy from wherever I am to make my body?” Noah mused, tilting his head to the side. “I am in the Damned Plains, after all. That could mean that my bodies here are formed with… I don’t know, latent demonic energy? But I don’t feel any different. If I had a Demon Rune, shouldn’t my emotions be somehow affected?”

There was a chance he was resistant to the rune’s affects because humans weren’t as closely tied to their runes as demons were — but the black strands holding the rune to his soul spoke differently. It might not have been as intense as the bindings that Lee’s runes were trapped in, but he should have still felt some difference.

I’ve never felt so close to being able to read a Demon Rune before. I’m missing something. I have to be. Even Aylin and Violet’s rank 1 Demon Runes were completely indecipherable to me, though they looked identical. This doesn’t look like them. If the black sludge wasn’t covering so much of it, I could probably tell what it was.

Noah walked around to the back of the rune again, where his soul had risen up to connect to the back of the rune, and peered through a few of the cracks that showed the rune from the other side to see if he could make out anything that he’d missed.

He raised a hand and drew on Natural Disaster. A crackling ball of electricity arced between his fingertips with enough intensity to cast yellow light over the darkness to illuminate the back of the rune. He drew in a slow breath as goosebumps prickled along the tops of his arms.

There was nothing. The few extra glimpses of the grayish-white light he could catch through the dark mass were just too difficult to make anything useful of. He walked back to the front and glared at the offending rune, then dismissed his ball of lightning.

It vanished with a flash, briefly lighting up his mindspace. Something caught the corner of Noah’s eye as the light went off and he froze. He summoned the ball of lightning a second time, lifting it into the air as he stared at the ground. The light flowing through the holes in the rune like a reversed shadow glowed faintly at the base of Noah’s soul.

His gaze snapped back to the rune in the air as he finally realized what had felt off about it. It wasn’t in another language at all. It was inversed.

The outline of a rune shone on the floor. He couldn’t quite read it completely because of all the dark matter blocking it out, but therein laid the biggest source of his surprise. The strands of his soul connected to the rune weren’t solid black.

When the light illuminated them, faint lines projected themselves onto the ground overlaid upon the first rune. Not just lines. A pattern.

“What the hell?” Noah breathed, his eyes going wide.

He hadn’t made just one rune.

He’d made two.