Throughout the entire walk on their way out of Blancwood, Noah couldn’t help but shake the feeling that they were being watched. He resisted the urge to turn and look over his shoulder every few steps.

Moxie walked robotically, her mind clearly not with her body. She nearly walked straight into several passersby, only saved by Noah pulling her out of the way at the last moment. Her dazed state wasn’t entirely unsurprising after what she’d just gone through, but Noah was still surprised.

A crow hopped from building to building, fluttering to keep pace with them without getting too close. Noah suspected that Lee was bursting at the seams to turn back to her normal form and speak with them again. She’d been stuck acting like a guard for a week, so she probably wanted to put the city behind her.

Noah felt the same way. The Torrin family had a beautiful city, but it was tainted to his eyes. The sooner they left it behind, the better.

Somehow, they reached the city gates without being stopped. The guards barely even gave Noah or Moxie a second glance as they walked out and into the grassy field surrounding it. Not one to question his luck, they continued on.

Noah lost track of Lee at some point. She popped up a minute later, in her human form, covered in a ratty cloak and dragging her axe behind her. It was covered in dirt – evidently, she’d buried it somewhere, at some point. She dropped it beside Noah and turned back to a bird. She burrowed into Noah’s travel bag as he and Moxie got onto his flying sword, securing Lee’s axe between them. Then, without a word, they took to the skies.

He flew for an hour before the urge to talk more properly took over him and he brought them down at the bottom of a valley. No sooner than the sword had touched the ground did Lee spring from his bag, morphing out of her crow-form midair.

“Finally!” Lee exclaimed, rifling through Noah’s bag and pulling her clothes out. “That took forever!”

“Sorry, Lee,” Moxie said. She blinked, then shook her head to bring herself back into the present. “Are you okay?”

“I’m fine. I was just so bored,” Lee complained. “When you said I’d be in danger, I thought it was going to be fun danger, not danger of dying from doing nothing.”

“Is that a real problem for you?” Noah asked.

Lee squinted up at Noah. “Yes. Now I’ll need to do twice the fun things just to make up for all the boredom I just had to deal with.”

“You did a great job, though. My plan would have fallen apart completely without you,” Moxie said, ruffling Lee’s hair with a smile. Lee beamed up at her.

“That part wasn’t bad. Did you see the look on Rinella’s face when the guards showed up? It was hilarious. Tricking people is great.!”

Uh oh. That’s not a good habit to develop.

“Only ones that deserve it,” Moxie said gently. “You’re quite good at it, though. Thank you for all the help you did – and for keeping watch over our room while I was recovering.”

Lee shrugged. “It was easy. The watching part, at least. I did want to attack that asshole that broke your Runes, but I held myself back.”

“That’s probably for the best. He was just doing his job, and I doubt we would have won that fight if you’d attacked.” Moxie paused for a moment, discomfort passing over her features as she pressed a hand against the side of her head.

“Are you okay?” Lee asked, beating Noah to the question.

Moxie nodded. “It’s over, now. All of it. I won’t have to worry about the Torrins controlling me again.”

“What about the damage from having your Runes shattered?” Noah pressed. “You look like you’ve got a headache. That’s soul damage, isn’t it? Is the Fragment of Renewal not healing you?”

“No, no. It is.” Moxie raised her hands and laughed. “The headache is self-inflicted. I’ve been thinking really hard trying to figure something out. I didn’t want to mention it back in Blancwood in case someone overheard while we were leaving, but when my Runes were shattered, I didn’t fix them properly. I was in such a rush that I put some of them together differently than I had the first time around.”

Noah’s brow furrowed. “Moxie, you don’t have to worry about that. I can just cut them with Sunder and you can recombine everything. Have you been stressed about this all day? You should have just said something while we were flying.”

“That’s not it. The issue isn’t that my Runes aren’t perfect anymore.” Moxie looked up to meet Noah’s eyes. “It’s that they are.”

“What?”

“It’s not just that.” Moxie chewed her lower lip. “Even though I recombined the Runes incorrectly, I think one of the combinations actually feels better than it did before. It’s not obviously stronger or anything like that, but it just… I don’t know. Feels more responsive, I guess?”If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

Noah stared at Moxie in confusion. “That doesn’t make any sense. A perfect Rune is a perfect Rune, isn’t it? They’re both at ten percent capacity without any extra energy in them. Maybe the new Runes just fit you better?”

“No, that can’t be. I remade the same final Rune. It was one of the Blooming Earth Runes. It had the same intent, but different Runes went into it and I got the same result – it just feels better. It’s the same final Rune and the same intent. So why does it feel different?”

Noah’s brow furrowed. “I don’t know. I can see why you’ve been drifting off in thought all day. The Rune is exactly the same in name and shape?”

“Identical.”

“Huh. And it’s got completely different components going into it?”

“Well, they’re mostly the same, but an entire Rank 2 Rune got swapped out. It’s possible I missed messing something up in the Rank 2 formation, but it was also perfect. I wasn’t really paying attention at the time.”

Noah rubbed his chin and sat down, crossing his legs as he dug through his mind in search of answers. It wasn’t actually all that much of a shock to find that the same final result could be achieved through different combinations – but he’d expected it to be significantly different combinations paired with different intent, rather than just a single modified Rune.

That doesn’t make sense. If a Rune is perfect, then it should be perfect. Swapping a Rune out should automatically make it not perfect, because you haven’t found the ideal combination yet. And, if that wasn’t the case, then the Rune’s actual name would be different because you’d have found a perfect Rune of a different name.

The only thing that would make any of this make sense would be –

Noah’s eyes widened. “The Rune wasn’t perfect.”

“What?”

“Your Rune wasn’t perfect the first time around,” Noah said. “We just thought it was perfect!”

“I’m not sure I follow. It’s a perfect Rune,” Moxie said, stressing her words. “That’s not a range. Either something is perfect or it isn’t.”

“I agree with you on that. Hold on. I need to test something,” Noah said, excitement building in his voice. Before Moxie could even respond, he’d already closed his eyes and plunged into his mindspace.

His runes swam up around him, but Noah was focused only on Natural Disaster. Even though it was partially filled now, it had supposedly been a perfect Rune. A small part of him had admittedly wondered why that had been the case when he had two Howling Cyclone Runes within it.

And now, the more he thought about it, the more confusing it became.

How would it be that the only perfect combination to achieve Natural Disaster is inexplicably skewed toward Howling Cyclone? It wouldn’t – unless we weren’t actually looking at the whole picture.

Noah reached out to Natural Disaster, calling on the elements of Natural Disaster that had come from Pyroclastic Resonance. He didn’t try to do anything in particular – he just wanted the energy. But, instead of opening his eyes to observe it, he tried to remain in his mindspace.

It was difficult. As soon as the magic passed through him, Noah was nearly pulled out of the darkness. It was like trying to look in two directions at once – but he held firm, keeping himself locked in his mindspace to observe his Rune and taking note of how much pressure was coming off Natural Disaster.

Then he released the magic, and reached out once more, trying to form a ball of wind in his palm in the real world. The Rune shimmered in response to his call, providing energy.

It was so subtle that Noah barely noticed it, but now that he was actively looking, it couldn’t slip by. The pressure in his soul shifted as he changed what energy he was calling on. Noah’s skin prickled as goosebumps raced across it.

I was fucking right.

He ripped himself back into the real world. “I knew it!”

“What?” Moxie demanded. “What did you figure out?”

“My Rune isn’t perfect. It’s perfect in its resting condition,” Noah said, running his hands through his hair. “When I called on two different types of energy within it, I felt the pressure in my soul change. If the Rune was really perfect, it would always put out the same amount of energy no matter what part of its power I drew on.”

Moxie opened her mouth, but no words came out. Her eyes widened a moment before she closed them, throwing herself into her own mindspace. A second later, they snapped back open, her lips remaining parted in shock.

“Damned Plains,” Moxie breathed. “You’re right. The pressure changes. It’s so subtle that I barely even noticed it because of all my other Runes.”

Noah nodded so quickly that his hair whipped around his head. “The noble families have to know about this, right?”

“I… I’m not sure,” Moxie said slowly. “I remade one of the Runes the Torrin family gave me perfectly – it was the one I tested. It had the same issue. I… I don’t think they know about this, Noah. The Runes the Torrins give out to their own people are supposed to actually be perfect.”

“Then this is it, isn’t it?” Noah’s spine tingled. “This is why people have been having so much trouble reaching higher Ranks. Their foundational Runes – even the ones they think are perfect – aren’t actually perfect at all.”

“Whoa,” Lee murmured, her eyes closed. “I just checked my own Runes. You’re right.”

Moxie started to pace back and forth in front of them. “That means everything we know is wrong. All the noble families are guarding Rune combinations that might not even actually be perfect. For most of them, fixing those flaws would be basically impossible. Ripping a Rank 5 or 6 Rune out of someone’s soul is going to kill them.”

“Nothing’s stopping us, though,” Noah pointed out.

“It makes so much sense,” Moxie muttered, barely even hearing him. “That’s why nobody was reaching Rank 7. If you need genuinely perfect combinations, not just ones that look perfect, and nobody has noticed yet… the chances of mistakenly making all seven of your Runes genuinely without flaw is almost zero. Almost nobody would do it.”

“Do you really think nobody knows about it, though?” Lee asked. “It seems so obvious.”

“I never thought about it once,” Moxie said. “It is obvious, but noble families have been using the same combinations for years. That’s why they’re so protected. Sure, there’s a ton of research going into new combinations, but the core ones are the ones that the family heads keep close to heart. If they didn’t know about this, then they’d never pass the max Rank their combinations could handle.”

They all fell silent for several seconds.

“There’s no way to confirm if this is right with a noble without giving it away to them,” Moxie said as she wrung her hands together. Her eyes landed on Noah. “But we can test it ourselves. We might be the only ones that can. I can’t even imagine how hard it is to make a truly perfect combination.”

“I think we’ll find out,” Noah said, an excited grin starting to pull across his lips. “I get the feeling I know what we’ll be doing over the rest of summer. We’re going to need a hell of a lot of Runes – which means we’re going to need to get our hands on that Catchpaper artifact that Karina has.”

Moxie and Lee exchanged a glance, then both nodded as one.