The heat still lingers in the air. Not scorching, but enough to raise the hairs along my arms, like the memory of a thunderclap.
I crouch over the burned edge of the spell ring, tracing a finger over one of the warped glyphs. Its symmetry has fractured — a clean loop now spirals jaggedly, as if the Pattern itself is rejecting the mutation.
Result logged: recursion exceeded bounds. Suggest limiters. Nested calls must be isolated to prevent cross-symbol bleed.
I tear off a corner of the scroll and start writing furiously. Notes, schema, revised anchor theory. It's still unstable, but the basic idea worked — I didn't summon a flame, I wrote one into existence.
For a fleeting moment, the rush is stronger than the fatigue.
Then I hear it: footfalls on the edge of the grove.
I don't turn. Not yet. I keep writing. Let whoever it is see me like this — hands ink-streaked, eyes wired with thought, surrounded by the charred fingerprints of a working system.
A voice breaks the silence, sharp and precise:
"You're either bold, or utterly foolish."
I finally glance up.
A young woman steps forward from between the trees. Late twenties, perhaps. Her cloak is gray-green, clasped with a silver insignia shaped like an eye enclosed in a teardrop — not ornamental. Institutional. She's a Warden.
Her gaze drags across the platform, taking in the burned glyphs, the lingering heat, the twisted anchor spiral.
"Did you bind a recursion glyph into an ignition weave?"
I stand slowly, brushing chalk dust off my jeans.
"I didn't know it was called that," I say. "But yes. Sort of. It wasn't part of your taught sequence. I isolated the anchor as a recursive logic gate. The system ran wild, but the containment glyphs prevented a true overflow. Mostly."
Her eyebrows rise, and for a moment her face is unreadable.
"You're lucky the Pattern didn't lash back. Unbounded recursion can rupture the land's breath. You could have warped the leyweave."
"I thought about that," I say, voice level. "The platform buffered the surge. It seems self-regulating — layered with embedded error-handling. Whoever built this designed it with failsafes."
She narrows her eyes.
"You're speaking like a scribe… but not one of ours. Who taught you?"
"No one here," I say. "I'm... adapting."
She studies me for a moment longer, then folds her arms.
"I'm Kaelin. Warden of Constructs and Runes. And I've seen enough wild mages, cursed artificers, and Pattern-breakers to know when someone is either reinventing the weave… or about to be consumed by it."
I meet her stare, calm but certain.
"What I'm doing isn't wild. It's structured. Just new."
She exhales through her nose — not quite approval, not quite dismissal.
"You're lucky Elara spoke for you. But if you keep experimenting like this without oversight, you'll find yourself marked, not welcomed."
She turns to leave, then pauses and adds, almost begrudgingly:
"...That anchor glyph. You pulled it from the old tree, didn't you?"
I blink. "You know it?"
She doesn't turn back.
"It's a remnant. A forbidden construct. No one's used it in three hundred years."
Then she vanishes into the trees.
Her warning hangs in the air, but I'm already back at work.
I kneel in the center of the scorched array and pull out a fresh scroll. My hands tremble—not from fear, but from stimulus overload. Data. Consequences. Opportunity.
A forbidden construct... but it responded. Which means it's still recognized.
I draw the glyph again, slower this time. But instead of setting it within a circle, I start building a modular framework around it.
Separate blocks.
Segmented functions.
Just like I'd structure a reusable program — components I can plug in and reconfigure. A spell isn't a sentence. It's a script.
I sketch a new diagram.
A base command ring.
A behavior modifier layer.
A containment field.
A conditional branch tied to gesture duration.
This isn't just a new spell. It's a shell. A way to execute modular actions inside a scalable container.
My pulse races.
I'm not casting anymore.
I'm writing.
And if I can do this—create a repeatable system with swappable parts—I can eventually automate, adapt, and deploy magic like software.
A grimoire that isn't etched in ink and ritual, but programmed.
My fingers tighten on the chalk.
This isn't just experimentation anymore.
It's development.