After the ceremony appointing Ronan as high priest, they all went to dinner.

  Despite the late hour, the other priests and members of the church had postponed said meal because they had preferred to wait for their leader and first priest Benedict to arrive from his journey from the academy.

  He, for his part, had shown surprise when he realized his hand was skeletal but, since for them that was a sign of their deity’s favor, he didn’t seek a healer. Rather, he walked proudly toward the dining room, showing it to whoever wanted to see it.

  Once they arrived, after crossing the tunnel connecting the cavern with the dining room, Ronan realized they were in a room with smoothed and painted walls, with a ceramic floor.

  From the natural ventilation he’d felt in the altar cave, he had sensed that they couldn’t have been far from the surface. The fact that the dining room was an ordinary room, which could well belong to the basement of any building, only confirmed it.

  What he didn’t know was what would be above that basement: whether a proper building or, perhaps, something more discreet, like a stable or an abandoned lot.

  Bloodwynne indicated to Ronan where he could sit and, once he had done so, took a seat himself followed by the rest of the attendees.

  The hierarchical order seemed to be respected: high priest, first priest, and the others.

  During the meal, which a couple of servants served, Ronan tried to find out more about the runes.

  “I noticed that the cubic stones on the altar, as well as your ceremonial dagger, had carved designs that lit up. They were very similar to those on teleportation portal stones,” he observed while cutting a piece of salmon fillet.

  The count continued as if nothing were amiss, using his skeletal hand to hold the knife with which he was also cutting his fish. If it bothered him that Ronan had just alluded to a forgotten magic, he didn’t show it.

  He waited until he finished cutting a piece to answer him. It seemed he was already used to his new hand, even though he’d had it for very little time.

  “You noticed well.”

  “Have you found some hidden artifact?”

  Ronan was interested in what Benedict would answer him, but he didn’t want to show it. So he continued eating normally.

  “No. It’s much better,” the first priest answered with a satisfied smile curving his lips. “We’ve discovered how to make runes.”

  Ronan hid his surprise. He knew that, both in this kingdom and in others, there were mages dedicated precisely to that, to reviving a forgotten magic. But without results.

  “That undoubtedly speaks very well of this church. Can you tell me how?”

  “Alchemy. We’ve been conducting experiments for years to accelerate Our Lord’s return. When we were performing a human sacrifice, one of our priests stared at the bucket we’d placed to collect the blood so it wouldn’t make too much of a mess. Then he told us he’d dreamed of that same bucket and moment. In his dream, he added some salt to the blood and crouched down, stirred it and, lacking a brush, painted with it using his fingers. When I gave him permission, he took out salt he’d kept in a pocket following an impulse after breakfast, dipped his fingertips in red and drew a symbol on the side of the bucket. It ignited in flames for a few moments, before going out and leaving the groove carved into the wood.”

  “I see, it looked like a rune.”

  “That’s right. We deduced the dream was a sign from Our Lord and we began searching ancient alchemy texts. We gathered all we could and found clues. It seemed that the ancients used alchemy as a basis for runic magic. From there, we began experimenting,” he concluded triumphantly.

  “I also like doing experiments, especially focused on improving my necromantic magic. Could I see them?”

  Ronan omitted the part about finding new curses, which was what he’d experimented with most, since he didn’t want to share his experiment notebook with Damien’s father. Talking about necromancy was another matter, since he didn’t have high affinity for darkness.

  “We have a laboratory and a library where the alchemy texts are, what little is known in the kingdoms about teleporters and runes, and, of course, the knowledge we’re learning, like lighting a flame consecrated to Our Lord with the help of a rune. Tomorrow we’ll show you.”

  The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

  “And could it not be after we finish dinner?”

  Benedict seemed so proud of what they’d achieved that he agreed without thinking twice. As if he weren’t tired from the trip and the late hour, or didn’t care.

  “I understand you’re eager to see it. We can stop by for a moment.”

  So when they finished dinner, they said goodbye to the others and left the dining room just the two of them, through a different hallway from the tunnel they’d entered through, one with whitewashed walls and tiled floor.

  They first entered what looked like an alchemical laboratory, a spacious room with benches full of test tubes, glass flasks, and gas burners. There were also, on the floor, large vats with different substances, as well as an area with chains with restraint rings anchored to the wall and blood stains splattering everything.

  “Here we try to obtain different substances and mix them, to then paint runes and see if they work. The problem is that we not only have to come up with the right substance, but also the right line of the rune. For now, the ones we make are very simple lines and curves that we extracted by breaking down those runes on the portals into their basic repeated strokes.”

  Ronan looked in detail at everything in the room, asked some questions about some of the substances in the flasks or vats, and then they returned to the hallway, from where they accessed stairs going up and reached the library.

  This was a room more or less the size of the laboratory, also without windows, where there was a large table in the center with chairs around it and many wooden shelves on the walls.

  Some held books made with folded and sewn parchments, others had scrolls, and some were empty.

  Ronan approached the shelves and looked at the nearby codices. Some seemed very old and he had the feeling that the leather of their covers could be human.

  That had nothing to do with his necromancy; rather, he had heard talk of books from the ancients bound like that. Of course, no one had managed to decipher the language of those books, so he doubted these were truly books from the ancients—or they would have been useless to Benedict.

  Feeling a sudden curiosity about whether they might be written with writing similar to runes, he reached out and pulled one of those codices from the shelf.

  It was heavy. The cover was wood covered with tanned leather, the one of possible human origin. Its texture was rough and irregular, with small veins and wrinkles. There was a leaf of some plant he didn’t know engraved on the cover, as well as some characters that weren’t at all similar to runes, but from his own language.

  Herbal Records, it said.

  Ronan was no expert in linguistics; in fact, he hadn’t even studied it. He knew, though, that the human kingdoms should have different languages, even if in antiquity they’d started from a common one, because that’s what happened when communities isolated themselves and naturally varied their language. However, when gods could be worshiped and influenced the world, they wanted to show their sacred scriptures in a language everyone could understand. That’s why, through priests, work was done to keep the language unchanged, teaching people from temples what the correct way to speak was, thus preventing a variation in a word from taking hold.

  Of course, since then, since the last war, several centuries had passed and Ronan was aware that, although the different human kingdoms could still understand each other without problems, differences had emerged both in pronunciation and in some words. Nothing that prevented them from reading a text from centuries ago, since human language hadn’t varied that much.

  So Ronan had no problems reading the book’s title, nor the interior when he opened it. Although the shelves were clean of dust, when turning the parchment pages he noticed a smell of ancient dust, dry ink, and traces of oil.

  With elegant stroke calligraphy, the book was full of drawings of plants, indications of where they could be found, and alchemical recipes for mixing them. It didn’t say, however, what they could be used for. Only the name of the resulting mixture.

  Possibly, when that book was written, there would’ve been some other codex explaining the uses or these would be common knowledge for anyone with the alchemist trade.

  “We’ve tried several of the mixtures from that book. Precisely one of them, along with human blood, is what we’ve used to light the sacred flame on the altar,” the count commented, proud.

  “It seems very old.”

  “Yes, we believe it was written by human beings who came to coexist with the ancients.”

  Ronan nodded, thoughtful.

  “Are the rest of the codices similar?” he asked after returning it to its space on the shelf.

  “Some are. Others deal directly with alchemical attempts to obtain the philosopher’s stone in vain. We haven’t found any that directly relate alchemy to runes, but once we know they used, or could use, alchemical mixtures to paint them, it’s been possible for us to experiment and advance.”

  Alchemy. It seemed to be the missing link that human sages had been searching for centuries.

  And had the old man told them about it?

  That thing about gods not interacting with humans wasn’t entirely true.

  “Can I take one to read?”

  “I’m afraid not. They’re for exclusive use of our Church and only in this library. They’re too valuable to take out.”

  “I understand. Can I stay here tonight then? I have already slept enough during the journey.”

  The count gave him permission but, despite everything, first showed him a small room he said would be his room in case he changed his mind and decided to retire to rest.

  He said goodbye to him and Ronan stayed all night reading books.

  Runes.

  For him they were important because he’d been wanting for a while to have freedom to go to the goblin village without having to depend on Bianca.

  More so now that they already had the town hall, which meant there was even more work to do. And even more so if he considered that his lady, since the engagement with the prince, was less focused than she should be.

  He didn’t understand how she could get distracted so easily.

  The next day, during breakfast in the same communal dining room, it came up in conversation that the count hoped to become the next demon king.

  “That cannot be,” Ronan told him calmly while taking a sip from his bowl of milk.

  “Why not?”

  “Because the next demon king has already been chosen. Should I introduce you?”

  The face both the count and the rest of the attendees made was worthy of being immortalized in an oil painting.

  Mituindal, Kay, Trevor Ramsey, Slipperyfish, Skisquirrel, Paul, HeirenFel, OakieTheTree and AbyssalChaos: Huge thanks for your support on Patreon! <3