#yes this IS the least plot relevant excerpt of this chapter don't worry about it everything's fine!

[essektheylyss]

wip wednesday post, with a bit of the next tiefling fic chapter, because I've been working on some original stuff this week and I'm not sharing that haha:

Fjord picks up a few of the sheets, examining each of them in turn. Essek watches his furrowed brow as he looks from each to each, and leans his chin on a hand. “How is it that you are familiar with runes? You have told me you have no formal education on the subject, yet Jester has said you know them well.”

“Ah,” Fjord says, and places a pair of slim reading glasses on the bridge of his nose, and his brow smoothes a bit as he squints less at the forms. “That is an excellent question.”

“What do you mean, ‘an excellent question’?” Essek asks, bemused, and Fjord’s grin is dangerously crooked.

“Well, I only know what I need to know,” Fjord says. “Much like how Jester has been taught magic by the Traveler.”

“But you do not speak with the Wildmother.”

“I do sometimes speak with the Wildmother.”

“And she gives you rune lessons?”

Fjord laughs brightly. “No, nothing of the sort. Generally she gives me reassurances, but that is rare. I talk to her more than she talks to me directly.”

Essek watches him, amused, as he takes another sip of iced tea. “And yet you have still not answered the question.”

“When you end up unwittingly in a demigod’s employ, you are far more useful to said demigod if you are able to defend yourself, in whatever ways it sees fit to bestow upon you. Those spells entailed a decent amount of runework, and somehow I would simply, ah, come to know their methods of casting. Like I had performed them in a dream, and carried the knowledge over to waking.”

It is both a tremendously cryptic and simultaneously elegant way of explaining. “And to think I endured years of study, only to come to you with questions,” he smiles around the rim of his glass.

“I am also relying on the expertise of entities who have been sealed away from the Material Plane for four hundred years, if not since the Divergence,” Fjord laughs. “My understanding of runes is a bit dated, but it is certainly useful for such things as mysterious rituals in ancient ruins.”

(also if you want to read the first 8 chapters of this, you can do so here!)