Edge Cases

Helix sat in his cell, bored out of his mind.

He'd had almost no visitors after Karix. A small human came in every day to feed him his food — and really, it was demeaning, to have to be fed. They didn't seem willing to uncuff him and let him eat on his own, and Helix wasn't willing to let himself starve out of pride, so he was forced to let them feed him like he was a child.

At least the kid feeding him didn't seem particularly enthusiastic about it either. Helix wondered if he could get him to free him from his cuffs. Probably not. The cuffs required some delicate magic to open, rather than a key, and even if it had just required a physical key he doubted Wisfield trusted the boy with anything.

A little prodding didn't hurt, though.

"Is this your job here?" Helix asked, raising a brow. "Feed the prisoners?"

The boy didn't answer. He gave him a quiet, vaguely frightened look, and quickly fled. Helix just frowned.

Didn't seem like the poor kid was being treated well, either.

He'd gone over a couple of possible escape plans in his head, but most of them didn't seem realistic. They wouldn't be letting him go any time soon, and there were no apparent plans to transport him; Karix seemed perfectly willing to let him stay here for however long it took for the nobles to finish figuring out what they wanted to do to grandstand at one another.

He doubted his father actually wanted him dead. Karix would want him back in the family eventually, but he wanted Helix to feel appropriately punished first.

Which meant he just needed to escape sometime before that. Helix had no intention of owing his father anything.

It was easier said than done, though.

The second best thing he could do was be prepared for when someone else tried to break him out. The rebellion would likely be pulling any strings they could to get him back, simply because he was one of their highest-leveled supporters; they would no doubt be trying something. Helix didn't exactly want to rely on that, though. He'd be prepared, but only if his first plan didn't work out.

His arms and legs were both cuffed in magic-restraining cuffs, but there was just enough give that he could draw some runes.

Or, more accurately, some glyphs.

Vex had shared his secret with the rebellion, after all.

There was a possibility that this was what Karix wanted. The rebels had been careful to use their glyphs in ways that would be hard to replicate: invisible ink on parchment that could later be burned, manafire that would obscure the true shape of the glyph. The Wisfield spies would no doubt catch some of the more common shapes through their thoughts, but there was a reason the majority of the people that researched glyphs stayed in rooms protected by magefire, where their minds couldn't be casually read. They would scribe the glyphs onto disposable pieces of parchment, write out the effects, and then distribute the glyphs among their members.

They had ones for healing, ones for combat, and other ones that simply helped with the food issue. None of the Growth-related glyphs seemed to work when they tested it within the bounds of Elyra, but there were other glyphs that could prolong the effect of a single loaf of bread, that could stretch out what wheat and food they had.

Helix hated that it was necessary.

He knew some of the glyphs, because as a member of the Ashion house he was somewhat protected from House Wisfield's interference and mind reading. He tried to think through the glyphs he knew, to figure out which ones would help him here, assuming he managed to power a glyph using ambient mana alone.

The glyphs of Heat and Flame wouldn't do much to the magically protected cuffs. None of the other basic elemental glyphs would help them, either. The more esoteric ones, like Book and Sound, would only help in abstract ways — Sound could maybe be used for a distraction, and Book...

Book might help him, but only if he felt like instigating a needlessly contrived scenario in which he'd escape, and was equally likely to make things worse. Helix filed the Book glyph under 'last resort only'.

The other glyphs they'd discovered weren't likely to help here, and given Helix would have to claw the glyph into the ground, he didn't want to give away a particularly powerful one to the nobles to use.

There was one option he had available to him. A few of their number had managed to acquire what Vex deemed a Sign, which was a more personalized sort of glyph that would be difficult for anyone that wasn't the owner to cast — like a signature, of sorts. Helix had attempted to figure out what his own Sign was a number of times, and each time he'd mostly just scribbled into the ground and failed to cast any kind of spell.

Signs were supposed to be symbolic representations of something important to you. What did he think was important to him?

He'd tried thinking about the rebellion. He'd tried thinking about his family. He'd tried thinking about a number of smaller, disparate goals, like what he wanted to do after the rebellion; Helix thought he might enjoy trying out acting, or something similar. Magic was fun, but he had a flair for the dramatic.

None of those things were quite right, though.

Who was he, really? More than what he cared about, more than who he wanted to protect: what defined him?

Without quite thinking about it, Helix began to scratch a symbol into the ground.

Larok was trapped in his own cell.

Unlike Helix, the nobles hadn't bothered with cuffs on him, and he had no personal servant to bring him food; someone would toss in a loaf of bread every day, and that was about it.

They kept him away from paper, too! As if he could do anything with paper. They remembered what he'd done with the tax forms back at the fight at House Herastul, and apparently decided that any kind of paper was dangerous in his hands.

Which was somewhat true, but Larok privately thought they were being ridiculous.

He couldn't help but worry about Helix. He'd seen Karix passing by his cell, and he was familiar enough with the Ashion family now to recognize what Helix's father looked like. If Helix's own family was behind this somehow — and Larok would not have been surprised if they were — then his friend was no doubt going to blame himself.

Assuming he knew that Larok and Kirsa were in trouble at all, anyway. Speaking of which...

"Any luck getting out?" Larok called out across the hallway, and the orc woman let out a grumble.

"If I got out, you'd know," she told him. "And I wouldn't yell about it across the damn prison.

Larok shrugged. She had a point. He was just making conversation, anyway. Who would've thought prison would be so damn boring?

He'd already tried to break out on his own, but none of his skills really lent themselves to prison escape. Kirsa had more stealth-oriented skills, though her class was technically [Street Cleaner]; she had a lot of words for whoever had defined the skills of that particular class, considering how many of them were oriented around not being noticed by other people.

Larok privately thought that skills might be defined in some part by the public consciousness, and felt that the skills of a [Street Cleaner] in Elyra said more about the people living in Elyra than it did about the system itself. He'd never been brave enough to have that conversation with Kirsa, though. As much as she acknowledged the flaws of Elyra's system, she still loved the kingdom fiercely. Her presence in the rebellion was out of a desire to see the kingdom made better.

She'd fought the hardest against the decision to evacuate, but even she had eventually seen the necessity. They would come back once they found a way to reverse what was happening, he'd had to assure her, and he could see that she didn't quite believe him.

He wasn't sure he believed himself, either. Larok didn't know if there was a way to reverse what the Void had done. The reality that Helix's brother had found out about their reality — that it was all ending, and that their world was falling apart — a reality backed up by the gods themselves...

That was a reality that seemed hopeless.

But Larok had decided he would prefer to live his final days in hope than not, and many of the other rebels had been the same way. They'd chosen their path because they believed things could be better, after all.

And part of the reason they believed things could be better — at least for he and Kirsa — was, strangely enough, because of Helix.

Larok wasn't a mage. He couldn't see the sympathetic magic building, the way mana began to swirl around him. He did feel a strangeness in the air, an electric buzz that made the hair on his skin rise, and across the hall he could hear Kirsa's own confusion expressed as a sharp bang against her cell door.

"Whatever you're doing, stop it!" she barked, a touch of fear in her voice. She was scared of magic, Larok remembered.

"I don't think this is them," Larok said, just loud enough for his voice to carry over the rising buzz of the magic.

Elsewhere, Helix completed his glyph.

And both Larok and Kirsa vanished from their cells.

"Hey, guys," Helix said.

His voice was appropriately sheepish, which Larok thought was a good thing, or else he would have smacked his leader on the head.

"What in the world made you think making up a new spell was a good idea," Larok said. It wasn't a question.

"I figured it would help us escape?" Helix said. That was a question; it had the proper lilt and all, and Larok rubbed his fingers against his temples in exasperation.

"Okay," Larok said. He didn't bother to question Helix any further.

The problem with Helix's Sign — which appeared to teleport the people he considered 'his team' to him, if they were close enough — was that now all three of them were trapped in the same cell, and that was about the only thing that changed. Neither Larok nor Kirsa had the magic to remove the cuffs Helix still wore, and the door to the outside was unfortunately locked.

"You sure you can't break open the cuffs?" Helix said, eyeing the metallic chains that kept him locked against the wall. Kirsa gave him a deadpan look, then walked up and punched the cuffs as hard as she could.

"Nope," she said mildly. Larok and Helix both stared at her.

"Let me try something," Larok said with a sigh.

[Tax Fraud] — which was still, in Larok's opinion, a terribly named skill — allowed him to confiscate an asset from someone that owed the kingdom taxes. The Ashion family most likely did owe them some taxes, but the cuffs had to count as belonging to Helix. The idea that they would belong to him just because they were currently restraining him seemed like a far-fetched call at best.

And yet, after a moment of resistance, the cuffs vanished and reappeared in his hands anyway.

"Uh," Helix said. Larok frowned at his hands.

He was pretty sure that shouldn't have worked. He'd tried it before. He glanced up, about to speak, and then stopped and stared at the system notification instead.

[ Elyran Prime Anchor at insufficient integrity. Skills may not work as intended. Please evacuate. ]

"Oh," Larok said. "Oh, shit."

Helix stared up as well. "Maybe they'll listen to us now?"

Kirsa snorted. "They're going to blame us for this, and you know it."