I spent three months preparing to change a single rune.
I know how that sounds. If you'd told me on Earth that I would one day spend three months planning to delete one word from a document, I'd have laughed. At the archive I edited catalogue entries a hundred times a day without a second thought.
But this wasn't a catalogue entry. It was my own soul.
The first thing I did was write it all down.
In the Reading Room, the night after I first looked inward, I sat at the desk with a fresh stack of paper under the green lamp and wrote out the entire script of my Language Comprehension skill from memory. Every rune, in order, exactly as I'd seen it glowing in that quiet dark.
It took four nights. The Memory skill, the Keeper's gift, made it possible at all; without it I couldn't have held more than a few lines in my head. Even with it, I went slowly, checking each rune twice, because if I copied it wrong, every bit of planning that followed would be built on the error.
When I was done, I had eleven pages of runes in black ink in my careful hand, spread across the desk.
I sat and looked at them for a long time.
It was like looking at an X-ray of my own skeleton. This was part of me. A part I used every moment of every day without thinking about it, the way I used my lungs. And here it was on paper, every piece of it visible.
Then I studied it the way I'd study a damaged manuscript.
I went through it line by line, rune by rune, tracing every connection. I made notes in the margins in Japanese, the way O had in the rune book. I drew diagrams of how the parts fed into each other: the section that noticed sounds, the section that gathered meaning, the section that bound meaning to memory, the loop that strengthened everything a little with each repetition.
And I found my redundancy again, exactly where I remembered it, about two-thirds of the way down the eighth page.
It was a structure rune. Repeat. Placed at the end of a section that gathered meaning from sounds. But a few lines earlier there was already another Repeat doing the same job, wrapped around the same section. So every sound I heard was being processed twice. The second pass added nothing. It just cost a little extra effort, every single time, like a clerk who stamps each document and then, out of habit, stamps it again in exactly the same spot.
It wasn't harmful. The skill worked perfectly well with it. But it was wasteful, and I was fairly sure, from what I'd read about inscriptions, that a skill with less wasted effort would grow faster, work better, and leave more room for improvement.
I circled it in red. The Library would provide red ink too, I'd found, if I asked.
Then I started planning how to take it out.
This was where I nearly made my first serious mistake.
My first plan was simple. Find the rune. Remove it. Done. In my head it was like deleting one line from my old script.
I'd already started writing out the steps when something made me stop. A memory of the last chapter of The First Grammar of Runes, the part about inscriptions. There'd been a passage I'd skimmed, because at the time it had seemed technical and not very interesting.
I went to the shelf and found it.
An inscription that is active, that is to say, one through which mana is presently flowing, must be treated as a living thing. If a single rune is cut from it carelessly, the lines that connected to that rune are left open, like the ends of a severed vein. Mana will spill from those open ends, and the inscription may unravel, in part or in whole. Before any rune is removed from a living inscription, the lines on either side of it must first be bound together, so that the flow is preserved. Only then may the rune be lifted out.
Below it, in faint grey pencil, one line from O.
I learned this the hard way. Lie down when you do it. You will want to be lying down.
I sat back. My fingertips had gone cold and white, and I tucked my hands into my armpits without thinking about it.
If I'd gone ahead with the first plan, I could have unraveled my own language skill. Woken up unable to understand Berta. Unable to understand anyone. Possibly worse; I didn't know what happened to a mind when a skill came apart, and the book didn't say.
I took down the list propped against the lamp and added a seventh rule in large letters.
Seven. Before changing anything: find out how it can go wrong. Then find out again.
So I started over, and planned properly.
I learned everything I could about binding. There wasn't much in the Reading Room, only a few pages in the rune book and a short section in The Elements of Mana on channeling mana through narrow paths. But it was enough for the basic idea. You used a thin thread of your own mana, shaped by the rune for bind, to join the two lines together before you cut what lay between them. Like a surgeon tying off a vessel before removing a section of it.
I practiced on paper. I drew the section of my skill on a fresh sheet, drew the binding, drew the result after the rune came out, over and over, until I could see it with my eyes shut. I traced the path of the mana through the new version, line by line, making sure it still flowed the way it should. That nothing was left open. That nothing joined the wrong place.
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I ran it fifty times. A hundred. It always came out right.
I practiced the movement itself, too. In the real world, in my bed at night, I'd sink into the inward gaze and simply look at the skill without touching it, and imagine the mana moving: a thin thread rising from the wellspring, shaped into bind, reaching toward the right place on the page. Then I'd stop, come back out, and do nothing at all.
I did that every night for a month. Looking, imagining, not touching. Until I was certain that my hands, or whatever I had in that place instead of hands, knew exactly what to do.
I chose a night in late autumn, a few weeks before my third birthday.
It was a rest night by my rules, so I wouldn't be tempted to go to the Library afterward. Berta had been in a good mood all evening. Jonas and Mette had announced they would marry in the spring, and Berta had spent supper planning what she'd wear and grumbling cheerfully about the price of ribbon. Now she was asleep, snoring softly, and the stove ticked as it cooled. A crust of frost had formed along the bottom edge of the window.
I lay on my back in bed. Lying down, as O had said.
I took a long, slow breath. Then another.
Then I sank.
he quiet dark. The book that was me, glowing softly. The blank pages, and the written ones.
I drifted to Language Comprehension and down to the eighth page. The redundant rune was exactly where I'd drawn it a hundred times. Repeat. It glowed faintly, a shade dimmer than the runes around it, as if even it knew it didn't belong.
I reached down to the wellspring and drew up a thread of mana. Thinner than a hair. I'd practiced it so often that it came easily, warm and steady, rising through the dark.
I shaped it. Bind.
I reached toward the line on the left side of the rune, the one that led in. Then toward the line on the right, the one that led out.
I touched them both.
I don't have the words for what that felt like. Not pain. Not pleasure. A sharp, bright awareness, like touching your tongue to a battery terminal, except everywhere at once, through all of me. For a moment I could feel the mana moving through the skill, a quiet, constant current, the way you suddenly hear the blood in your own ears in a silent room.
The thread of bind settled into place. The two lines joined.
The redundant rune sat between them, now connected to nothing on one side, glowing very faintly.
Carefully, I told myself.
I lifted it out.
It came away like a thread drawn from a piece of cloth: smoothly, easily, with one small tug at the very end. For a fraction of a second I saw it floating alone in the dark, a small glowing shape. Then it faded and was gone.
The lines of the skill shifted and settled. The bound section pulled tight and neat, like a stitch.
And the whole block of runes brightened.
Not dramatically. Just a little. As if someone had cleaned a window I hadn't known was dirty, and the light came through clearer.
The bell rang inside my head.
[SKILL IMPROVED] Language Comprehension — Level 2 → Level 3
I stared at it.
It had worked. It had actually worked.
I'd read my own soul. I'd found a mistake in it. And I'd written it better.
Then the pain hit.
It arrived all at once, like a door slamming inside my skull. A huge, white, splitting headache from the base of my neck to the space behind my eyes. I was thrown out of the inward gaze so hard I gasped out loud and found myself back in bed in the dark, curled on my side, both hands clamped to my head.
It was the worst pain I'd felt in either life. Worse than the fever. Worse, by a long way, than the truck, which I hadn't felt at all.
Something warm was running from my nose. I tasted copper.
I must have made a sound. Berta was out of bed in a moment, lighting the candle with shaking hands, and when the flame caught and she saw me, she cried out my name. There was blood on my pillow. A lot of it, a dark red stain spreading across the pale linen and soaking through to the ticking.
"Head hurts," I managed. "Head hurts, Berta."
She didn't waste a moment. She pinched my nose gently and tipped my head forward, the way you're supposed to, holding me against her with her other arm while she shouted for Jonas, who was sleeping in the storeroom that night because of the cold. Jonas came stumbling in half asleep, his hair flattened on one side, and was sent running for cold water and clean cloths and Berta's box of herbs.
Willow bark tea, bitter and warm. With a pinch of meadowsweet, I noticed, even through the pain. The one the book forgot, that every herbwife knew.
It took nearly an hour for the bleeding to stop and the headache to ease enough that I could lie still. Berta sat beside me the whole time, holding a cool cloth to my forehead and humming, her face pale and drawn in the candlelight. Nosebleeds, she muttered. Children got nosebleeds. Dry air from the stove. That was all it was. But she said it the way people say things they're trying to make true.
I felt terrible. For frightening her again. For the blood she would have to scrub out of that pillow with cold water and salt.
But under the guilt and the pain, there was something else. A small, bright, stubborn spark, like the first light I'd ever made above my palm.
I had done it.
I didn't go to the Library for three nights after that. Not even a glance. I let my body sleep deeply and dreamlessly, drank every cup of willow tea Berta brought me, and let her fuss as much as she liked.
On the fourth day, when the last of the headache had drained away, I noticed the difference.
Elke came in from the yard, chattering to Berta about the wedding. She talked fast, the way she always did when she was excited, in her thick village accent, swallowing the ends of her words. For two years I'd caught perhaps four words in five when Elke got going.
Now I caught all of them. Effortlessly. Every swallowed syllable, every scrap of local slang, as clear as if she were reading from a page. Even what she muttered under her breath about Mette's mother's terrible hat.
I lay on my bed and listened and grinned at the ceiling until my cheeks ached.
That night in the Reading Room, I sat at the desk with the eleven pages of runes for a long time. Then I took the red pen, carefully struck through the rune I'd removed, and wrote beside it in small, neat Japanese: Removed. Level 2 to 3. Side effects: severe headache, nosebleed, three days' recovery. Next time: thinner thread for binding. Drink more water beforehand.
An archivist's note. For whoever came next, even if it was only me.
Then I sat back and let myself think properly about what I'd done. All the way through.
I'd changed a skill. A thing that, in this world, everyone believed was given by the gods. Fixed. Unchangeable. Brother Anselm's whole book was built on that. Skills grew slowly, with practice, if they matched your gift. That was all. Everyone knew it.
Everyone was wrong.
And if I could remove a rune, I could add one. Repair a broken part. Join two skills together. Perhaps, someday, with enough knowledge and enough care, write an entirely new skill from nothing on one of those blank pages.
Perhaps, someday, even read someone else's.
My heart was pounding again, and not entirely from excitement.
Some will come to take what you have, by any means they can, the Keeper had said. Be careful who you show your light to.
If anyone in this world ever found out what I could do, what a scholar's gift and a grammar book had let me do, they wouldn't see a child. They'd see a key. To power, to wealth, to every locked door in the kingdom.
I picked up the library card and turned it over in my fingers.
Volumes Comprehended: 31 / 48
Then I took down my list of rules and added one more line at the bottom.
Eight. No one can know. Not yet. Not even Berta.
I looked at it for a long while. I'd pressed so hard on the last two words that the nib had scored the paper.
But I didn't cross it out.