It was alive.
The first Runewriter hummed faintly on the table, glowing with quiet promise.
Leonel sat back, breath shallow. The violet ink shimmered along the etched rune like oil over water—balanced, stable, perfectly synchronized with the alloy. No leaks. No fractures. Just a clean flow of potential.
One pen, complete.
Forty-nine to go.
He reached for the next frame.
It felt heavier in his hand now—not physically, but in weight. In cost. A single misstep could ruin it. And there was no telling how many times he'd get it right before he got it wrong.
Still, progress waited for no one.
He uncorked another ink vial, the scent of Myrrhroot and crystal binding sharp in the stale air. Dipped the inscriber again, just enough to wet the tip, and started on the second frame.
The first lines glided smoothly.
Flow. Retain. Conduct.
His wrist moved with confidence, tracing curves from memory now. But as he laid the fourth stroke—a minor glyph meant to stabilize ambient mana absorption—he felt it.
A tremor.
Subtle. Too subtle.
The alloy twitched beneath the inscriber as if flinching. The ink didn't settle like before. It bubbled.
Not normal.
Leonel narrowed his eyes. Shifted pressure. Tilted the pen slightly to change the angle. Maybe the alloy's mana resonance wasn't calibrated correctly. Or maybe the rune wasn't aligning with the grain of the metal.
He marked a correction on the side with his finger, then reached for the stabilizer glyph to offset the flickering feedback.
Too late.
The line snapped—just a fraction off—and the entire array pulsed, light shifting violently from violet to white.
A whine filled the air.
High. Shrill. Vibrating.
"No—" Leonel pushed back from the table.
The pen exploded.
Not in fire—but in light. A sharp crack of unstable mana discharge followed by a searing flash. The frame split open, alloy buckling, shards clattering against the walls. Ink splashed across the blueprint pinned to the far wall and ignited instantly.
Leonel hit the floor, arm curled over his face as the table scorched.
Smoke poured from the rune channels. The second pen—if it could still be called that—lay molten and blackened in a smear of purple and silver.
Silence rang louder than the blast.
His ears hissed. Vision blurred. Everything smelled of burnt ink and ozone and failure.
He coughed once, sat up slowly, and blinked through the haze.
The first pen—the working one—still rested in place, untouched.
But the blueprint… the copy on the wall was gone, curling into black ash, corner by corner.
Leonel stood on shaky legs. His right sleeve was scorched to the elbow, threads singed and fused to skin. He hissed through his teeth, swiping the back of his hand against his temple, smearing soot across his face.
The window wouldn't open. The latch was jammed from age.
So the smoke stayed.
Thick. Acrid. Crawling low across the ground like a creeping mist of failure.
His eyes burned.
Of course it had failed.
Success always tempted you into forgetting how close it sat to disaster. One frame worked, and suddenly he'd believed they all would. But metallurgy wasn't uniform here. Alloy batches shifted from village to village. Temperature control didn't exist outside dwarven cities. Runes didn't behave like printed circuits—they breathed. Reacted. Rebelled.
He leaned on the table, both hands braced against wood that still smoked beneath the wreckage.
This wasn't Earth.
This world had its own rules.
And it wasn't going to hand him anything just because he thought he'd earned it.
Another cough rattled out of him.
Then footsteps—fast, heavy—slammed down the corridor. More than one set. Servants. Maybe a soldier. Maybe worse.
Voices filtered through the door.
"Did it come from down here?"
"Something exploded—check the old lab!"
Leonel wiped his sleeve across his mouth and turned toward the blueprint scraps. A corner of the page still survived—burned at the edge but legible.
He stuffed it in his coat and kicked the smoldering remains of the failed pen under the table.
The door banged.
"Leonel?!"
Lord Varnhart's voice cut through the chaos like a blade. Sharper than worry. Closer to fury.
"Are you alive in there?!"
Smoke crawled under the door like a warning.
Leonel stared at it for a moment, then reached for the surviving pen.
The one that worked.
The one that proved this wasn't madness.
He held it in his hand—not as a weapon, not as a trophy, but as a promise.
He wouldn't run.
He wouldn't lie.
He'd face whatever came through that door.
Even if it meant dragging the truth through smoke.