Meditation was always an essential part of keeping good mental health. Luvi began to sneak in mind clearing exercises every once in a while just to deal with the culture shock of being in such different places during her travels to the Eternal Empire. She was still a long ways away, she’d barely even scratched the surface of her journey despite having spent a few weeks on the road already. She was happy to spend a night in an inn for once, however. Sitting alone in her inn room let her reflect on her current situation and ways that she could improve.
Her main qualm with this particular place was that people had given her odd looks due to her arm mutations. She had a feeling that she was distrusted despite travelling with others. She much preferred people to be met with intrigue instead of sideways glances. She wondered for a while if having mutations was enough to label her as a bad person. She was an Umbral mage, after all. They weren’t exactly known for doing nice things, from what she had recently gathered.
She was afraid that she was going to have an incredibly difficult time trying to fit in wherever she went and maybe she would end up not fitting in at all. People were going to misunderstand her intentions, people in charge of protecting her would scorn her, and it’d be difficult to find a suitable profession. If her destination disliked magic then perhaps she would have to alter her plans and find a city out there that would embrace her for what she was.
As she meditated, Luvi contemplated and affirmed that her place in this world was to be with her people and to help them with her magic. But to truly help them to the best of her ability, she felt like she needed to broaden her horizons. Visiting other lands, learning what they had to teach… that was the only way she could be sure that she was doing the best for the people she cared to protect.
She felt her body sink into the bed and her back curved forwards just a tad. She was only vaguely aware of what was happening in the real world anymore. Only an incredibly loud brawl from a nearby bar would be enough to draw her meditative state. Now she could finally focus on what she had really wanted, or more accurately, what her spark wanted. That damned thing was getting bolder with its demands as of late.
The ultimate goal for today was to learn a rune. Any rune, Luvi didn’t even care. She wanted to prove that she could do it without anyone else’s help and do it with meditation no less. She had done it many times before with plenty of success, though it was always a gamble whether her efforts would pay off. She was a seasoned meditator now and she knew exactly what kind of power she was dealing with.
Luvi’s spark didn’t share her determination and was showing her a bit of resilient resistance. It had gotten complacent with its recent progress. Even now it urged her to seek out a proper teacher and learn from them instead. Surely she could learn multiple runes from a hone mage in the time it’d take her to learn one via meditation. But she was unlikely to find one nearby so if they were going to learn a rune, it was going to have to be like this.
Luvi thought about how mysterious and powerful runes were. It’d become almost second nature to cast them but really thinking about what runes were got her into a very focused state. When she learned runes via meditation she always felt like she was unearthing some ancient secret. She imagined that other mages had done similar things, so did it stand to reason that there were some runes out there that had been long lost to history? Or were all the runes already discovered and recorded?
“I suppose runes are more like an alphabet than anything else,” she mused. They could be strung together to form chains, almost like words with a wide variety of applications. What was more, she thought about what actually stopped her from learning another dialect. She’d tried her best to try learning a Lucis rune through meditation, but the knowledge felt locked away from her – as if her very being couldn’t handle the information.
The spark eventually gave in and started to delve into its ancient memory. For within the spark was an ancient memory of every rune that was. Luvi believed that if they worked hard enough it was possible to do more than just learn more runes. Maybe it was possible to gain a power even greater than any rune wright before her!
So they worked together in harmony. The spark opened itself up to reveal information in an ancient language that neither of them could ever fully understand. There were only bits and pieces that they could make out even after hours upon hours of meditation. She wouldn’t have thought it possible, but just sitting there all day had mentally drained her. In the end she was only left with a feint outline of a runic shape. Try as she might, she couldn’t focus in any more on it. It might not have been much, but it was a sign of sure progress. She practiced drawing it as she drifted off to sleep. It meant nothing to her and because of that it was unusable to her. If only magic were as simple as memorizing a bunch of shapes and regurgitating them onto paper.
Luvi woke the next morning to a dull pain. She looked and saw that she’d drawn the rune’s shape so many times on her skin in her sleep that there was a raw patch on her leg. She would have loved to jump right back into the meditation but she couldn’t completely ignore her bodily need to eat and drink. Once she wrapped all of that up, she could sit back in her bed and try to fall back into the deep meditative state. If only it were that simple.
The bustling sounds outside were too distracting and Luvi’s body didn’t want to sit around all day again. She actually could not as the group she was travelling with wouldn’t wait for her. And so, she had to put off her training until the evening once more…
Evening did eventually come after a long day of walking in a caravan. They were camping out under the stars again and finally Luvi felt like the conditions were right to start meditating again. It wasn’t like she had anything better to do. She had a shape in her mind, and that at least gave her a starting point. She focused on the symbol and the spark tried to dig deep within to find anything that would tell them about what the rune was. Unlike learning from a teacher, she had no name to associate with the rune.
She had an assortment of feelings, mostly associated with her eyes. She experienced the memories of sights she had never experienced before. It was at this point that she assumed that whatever rune this was had to do with eyesight, which was strange because she already knew the rune of Night which blinded people. Yet when she tried, she still couldn’t apply the new rune to herself.
A lightbulb went off in Luvi’s head and she suddenly felt that the time was right. The rune wasn’t doing anything because this was a rune that needed to be applied to her head! She took a finger and drew the rune into her skin slowly to make sure she didn’t mess up. The rune stuck, much to both her and her spark’s enjoyment. The rune went into effect and Luvi’s eyes were filled with ether. It was like she was zooming in on the night sky above her.
“Whoa,” she said to herself, feeling herself get lost in the beautiful view. She lifted her head and saw that she could see many things in extremely clear detail, even small things that she would have never seen with her natural eyesight from a far distance.
“Now this seems useful,” she continued, wondering if there were any other runes that dealt with senses that she still didn’t have access to. She could now enhance touch, taste, smell, and sight. That left only sound… which made her also think that there must be an associated umbral rune to harm one’s hearing ability.
“It seems as though there are still many runes for me to figure out,” she said with a sigh, turning her gaze back up towards the stars. It was a shame that she wasn’t a Lucis mage, as it would have been incredible to let others experience her gift. Alas, she would have to settle for keeping the joy to herself.
