Sleep didn't come easily anymore.
Sorrin lay in bed that night, eyes fixed on the hairline crack in the ceiling, somewhat concerning, but he didn't pay it much mind.
The spellform still hovered on his screen, minimized but not forgotten. His fingers itched to open it again, to keep parsing through it like an old mystery novel with the ending torn out. But it was already 3 AM, and even his stubbornness had its limits.
He forced himself to shut down his computer and rolled over, not expecting rest—only the illusion of it.
He dreamt.
A circle, etched in chalk and blood, it was... glitching? Every time he tried to read it, the symbols rearranged.
Such stupidity...
Eventually, he woke up and headed straight to the bathroom.
He showered in silence, the water pressure barely a mist, then dressed and slipped into the hallway. The city outside was its usual shade of gray. No sirens today. A quiet day. Which meant something terrible had either just happened or was about to.
At the tramline, Rell was already waiting. His uniform was freshly pressed and cleaned of the questionable stains that were on it earlier, but the bags under his eyes had crept deeper. He gave a nod, and they boarded in silence.
"You know," Rell said finally, as they passed a collapsed overpass, "you could still try for a Conduit license. With what you know now—hell, even without it, you'd pass. They need warm bodies. Desperately."
Sorrin looked out the window. Someone had graffitied a Gate symbol onto a nearby wall, three interlocking rings surrounded by crude flames.
"What do you think the symbols mean?" he asked.
Rell yawned. "The graffiti? Or the glyphs in the seal?"
"Both."
Rell gave a soft laugh. "The graffiti? Fear. Anger. Maybe hope, in some twisted way. The glyphs? Nobody knows. Some arcane scholar in the Core found one on an old ruin and thought it looked cool, so now it's on every fourth spellform. Half the spells are just mimicry. Nobody understands why they work. When they do."
Sorrin said nothing. He already knew that. But it was different hearing it aloud.
At the Academy, he skipped his first class and slipped into the abandoned robotics lab. Most of the gear had been stripped out, sent to reinforce other districts or melted for scrap. But the whiteboard was intact, and so was the projector. He powered it up, projected the glyph set, and started breaking it apart.
At first, he worked manually. Translating symbol by symbol, treating them like logic gates. Flowcharts emerged. A pattern in how mana flowed from one node to another. Conditional triggers. Embedded loops. He cross-referenced with the Type-1 and Type-2 seals because those were actually allowed to be shown to the common public.
He noticed consistent designs and symbols within each tier of the spellform further reinforcing his idea that mimicry was pretty much the only way people have discovered "new" spells.
He didn't know how long he'd been working before the door creaked open.
"You're not supposed to be here," said a voice—female, slightly amused.
Sorrin looked up, startled. A girl stood in the doorway, her Academy badge clipped sideways to her bag. Her black hair was buzzed on one side. She stepped in without waiting for permission.
"You're Sorrin, right? The hacker kid."
Hacker? What I do has nothing to do with hacking!
He frowned. "Depends who's asking."
"Calla," she said.
"You're trying to... decipher a spellform? Aren't you a computer science major?."
"Your methods are kind of— how should I say this, unorthodox too?"
Sorrin blinked. "You've seen this before?"
"I've tried it before," Calla said, tossing her bag onto a bench.
"Except I was looking at mana flow, not logic structure. Honestly, I didn't think there would be any logic at all behind these spellforms, considering it deals directly with magic out of all things."
Sorrin eyed her carefully. "You're a Conduit-in-training?"
"Eh, not really. I'm in the robotics division. I'm just interested in any and all things arcane related."
Sorrin just stood there for a while.
"That's— uh, cool... Well then, I'm just going to get back to what I was doing."
She smiled and sat down on a nearby chair, just staring at the board.
"Well, let's get on with it!"
Sorrin sighed.
I had a feeling this would happen...