Simon went hunting that afternoon, but more to practice with his bow than for the food. He was planning to stay for a couple more days to trace runes and dig through the wealth of knowledge he'd collected. A deer would have been too much for that, so he'd been hunting for a rabbit or perhaps even a wild turkey. Still, his tracking was even rustier than his archery, so when a buck crossed his path, a buck was what he took.

He dragged it back to his cabin after he'd gutted it, but he didn't bother to skin it. "I'm not going to stay here for weeks just to tan a hide," he told himself as he built a low fire outside so he could smoke the haunches before he got to work butchering the rest of the thing. He'd pan-fried thin slices to make a sandwich with his bread. After that, he took a quick trip into the woods for more firewood, along with some herbs and tubers, and came back to slow boil whatever he could that night for a hopelessly underseasoned stew.

Maybe I'll stay for more than a couple of days, he reasoned as he started to lay out his menu. The haunches were food for the road, but even setting those aside, he still had a week's worth of eating to do, and he certainly had more than a week of thinking to do.

Since he'd wasted so much time, he didn't actually start on the dreaming orb first, which had been his plan. Instead, he started on his experimental staff and after lunch. He tried to use a lesser word of plant growth on it as well as a lesser word of earth, but neither of them did anything.

"I guess we're going to have to do this one the old-fashioned way," he said, pulling out his dagger. He'd been surprised that he couldn't use Zyvon to make it grow, but then, it wasn't really a plant any more than a bone was a person.

I could always make a tree grow a wand with the right symbols, Simon thought as he carved the thing and checked on his various cooking projects. He didn't do that, though. It had been a long time since he'd made anything by hand, and he was going to need to get back in the habit if he wanted to try his hand at making anything like the orb of dreaming.

While it was not his most urgent project, it was an experiment he needed to figure out. He was going to whittle the runes of lesser and distance into them and then see if a spoken spell would channel through those appropriately. Long term, he wanted to make a wand at least as versatile as the one he'd glimpsed on Magi Karala's lectern, but wands were delicate things, and he didn't have a good set of carving chisels. He just had a dagger with a decent point, which would be enough to carve his test words.

Simon didn't finish that project that night, but he had an excellent lunch, an acceptable dinner, and lots of time to think about what it was he should do. While his hands were busy, his mind was free to consider what the paths down any of the roads that lay before him might look like.

He had literally unlimited options, but really, it kept coming back to two possibilities. He could go step by step, or he could go as fast as possible, and as much as he wanted new levels to take his mind off the failures of old levels, he knew deep down the right way to handle this was to take care of levels in order. That wasn't really his dilemma, though; it was that the right way to do that was not simple.

The right way to save Ionar was to do it before the eruption. That would give him the opportunity to strike down his doppelgänger even if he planned it right, but the idea that he'd have to relive that life sickened him more than the idea of spending another decade as Freya's unwilling house guest.

"If you're going to do everything in the right order, you might as well do it the right way," he argued with himself, "Otherwise, you're practically skipping forward in the levels as it is."

While Simon didn't deny that his point was a good one, he didn't fume over it either. Instead, he just allowed himself to think about all the branching ways that the levels affected each other and maintained a meditative mindset as he trusted his subconscious to provide him some flash of insight.

Halfway through the next day, he finished his staff and went outside to test it. For those tests, Simon opted to use fire because it was the most visible of his attacks. His first attempts were fruitless, and he cast a normal fire spell twice as he tried each rune. He then inspected them and, seeing no error in the shapes, tried to think of how his teacher's wand had differed.

Simon didn't have a photographic memory or anything, but it had only been about a day, so he didn't have much trouble recalling the details. He had the same runes, and after a little trial and error, he carved lines down to where he held the staff at different points to complete the circuit. Still, it wasn't until he added a line to the tip of the staff that it finally did what it was supposed to.

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"So that's what completes the circuit," Simon said to himself. The first time the distant rune finally interacted with the word of fire, he spoke and sprayed a thirty-foot-long flamethrower instead of a five-foot gout of flame. It was much less intense than the shorter-range burst, but there was no denying the burn scar it left across his overwise pristine meadow.

It turned out that he needed a path from where he held the thing and started the circuit to where he imagined the spell being released from, which was, in this case, the tip. It was pretty straightforward but only of limited use.

"Well, that won't make my spells more powerful, but it will speed them up," he said to himself as he eyed his crude work. Only having to say one word instead of two or three wouldn't matter in most situations, but it could make all the difference in the world when he was fighting another mage. "What I need to do is make something that will fire on command, like a gun," he told himself.

That idea came with its own problems, of course, but it had real advantages, especially in lives where his tongue might be missing or he couldn't cast for some other reason. Simon smiled grimly at that memory but didn't start carving immediately. Instead, he went inside to review the orb and amulet.

He'd planned to start with the orb at least but as many symbols as it had, and the fact that half of them seemed to be conditional symbols that linked to multiple other symbols, put him on his back foot pretty quickly as he drank all the wine that hadn't gone into last night's stew in frustration.

"What a tangle of knots," Simon sighed, tracing and retracing runes. Even when he stuck to the simpler patterns on the outermost bands, he was missing too many symbols to say definitively what it did.

He had much better luck with the amulet and became fascinated by it, spending several days on it before he decided he'd learned all he could for now. That one made a fair amount of sense, but mostly because it was only about 80 runes linked together in several glyph structures. Some symbols defied his understanding here, too, but he could guess what they meant. The thing seemed to have two major functions and several minor functions.

The minor functions were resistances, not so different from the protective holy symbols of the Unspoken, though this one seemed to offer some level of protection against fire, ice, life drain, and soul damage. Soul damage wasn't even something he'd considered until the exact moment he finished tracing the circuit, and that concerned him.

"What would that even look like?" he asked. "Radiation? Memory loss? What would happen if your soul was damaged?" A chill went through him as he considered it. There was only one part of him he kept from life to life, and if someone could damage his soul, that would have unforeseen consequences.

Though soul damage piqued his interest, it was the life drain he was more drawn to. Simon would have thought that such a thing could get in the way of their blood magic, and he didn't see any way of discriminating on the direction of the flow. If you were blocking the rune Zyvon, then you were blocking it. He thought that lightning was a strange oversight, but he wasn't the one who'd designed the thing.

Simon unraveled the mystery when he tackled the major functions. The first and simplest major function was the self-destruct switch. If the mage died, then the amulet blew up. It was a very straightforward, logical circuit that shunted all the remaining life force in the corpse when it fell below a certain level and turned it into a fireball.

That made sense. He'd certainly seen exactly that happen enough times.

What made less sense was the soul rune at the center of the whole thing. It was the most complicated cluster of runes, and though he wasn't able to decipher it all, in the few hours before his fire died and he went to bed, he did reach one inescapable conclusion.

The amulet kept the Magi from paying for their own spells. They were drawing that power from somewhere else. Whether that was their God-King or not, he couldn't say. What he could say, though, was that the reason they never seemed to use a greater word was because the amulet wasn't powerful enough to channel it.

"Know your place, huh?" he said as he considered the solution.

That certainly fit everything he knew about the group. Acolytes were taught they couldn't cast a spell without a lesser word, and full-blown Magi were given a battery that was crippled so they didn't have to use their own lives, but they could only use so much.

That raised lots of questions. Where was the life force that powered everything coming from? Was that what the great pyramid was for?

Simon fell asleep that night thinking about it, but it didn't matter. In the morning, he was going to get ready to travel, and then he was going to go save a messenger from a wyvern and some kids from an owlbear. After that, he'd see. Simon was leaning toward escorting them all the way to where they were going and seeing if he could prevent trouble down the line, but he'd have to see how he felt when he got there.

Despite his misgivings, a big part of him was certain he should just start taking these levels in order and knocking them all down like dominos. While he certainly couldn't stand the idea of living in Ionar for a year or two while he waited for its volcano to blow his top, he could probably stomach it long enough to fight the fiery titan that emerged from it.

You don't even need to do that, he reminded himself with a scowl. Not according to Helades. You just need to save the people on the street between one door and the next, and it's all good.

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