Msr. Asher sighed theatrically, “How much time should you give between activation and the drawing of energy from the source?”

“Three seconds to complete final checks before you can begin to pull the heat from the source,” Teon answered automatically, “Oh or cold or air or whatever you are pulling from the source.”

“And precious seconds for you to do the final checks on both your mind and the rune.” he corrected, “Binding is an incredibly technical ability and to do it safely requires our complete concentration. From the back, we will check our environment, complete our binding checks, our personal protection equipment, check our rune gate, and do our final testing checks, and then, and only then, will we access the source for filling. IBEGU.” He moved away from Teon as he talked and circled the classroom towards the back rows. Teon let out a slight groan before she caught herself and cleared her throat to disguise her disdain.

Msr. Asher. observed each student hawkishly while they went through their checks. Teon moved her rune several centimeters so it was in the exact middle of her desk and settled in to wait for him to come back around later. If he started at the back, it would be near the end of class before she and Ellen would be able to have their turn. And by then, they’d not have the time to fill their runes and have him check them. 

From the pit of her stomach, a small fire burnt at the injustice of everything. Just like she practised, she pushed the feeling down and ignored it. Being upset would do her no good. She would just have to wait for the Exams and then she could put her time at the Institute behind her.

“I notice he didn’t specify a final testing of both the rune and our mind. That feels a bit irresponsible, don’t you think?” Ellen nudged her playfully and whispered.

“I am sure he will go through it next week.” Teon responded sarcastically, “I hear we will be learning important things like how to blink and how to suck eggs.”

Ellen gave her a confused look, “How to suck eggs?” 

Teon let out a laugh but quickly stifled it, “Oh, something my dad used to say. It is lame.” A memory of her father riding with her around the pine forest of the north came to her and swept her up in a wave of melancholic nostalgia.

“What is lame is that we are yet again stuck doing the same bindings in what is meant to be our Practical Magic class.” Ellen seethed next to her.

“Right! How are we still on the basics of bindings? I can’t believe they are wasting our time with so much safety protocol.” Teon joined her in angry whispering after she checked Msr. Asher was far in the back of the class again, “I was thinking we could ask for an additional test and then further practical application of magic during lunch from Msr. Asher so we don’t fall behind the others at the Academy.”

“Oh, to the hells with more time with Msr. Asher. I am going to tell Viera that he is wasting our time and see if we can’t get a new teacher. I didn’t come all the way down here to get told how to suck on eggs.” Ellen looked across quizzically at her, “Did I use it right?”

“Yeah, that was it.” Teon smiled, “But I don’t know if we should bother Viera. She told us to go to Msr. Asher’s class so I am sure she wants us to learn from him.”

Ellen grimaced in response, “I feel like she wouldn’t want us to be sitting bored in class. She loves magic even more than you do, T. And when we have our lessons with her, we aren’t wasting our time learning how to bind runes over and over again.”

“Binding runes is an incredibly important part of magic, thank you very much,” Teon responded dutifully and put her finger up before Ellen could contradict her, “and just because I don’t like binding runes doesn’t mean I don’t value its education.”

Ellen smirked, “Of course. But if it came down to it, you’d prefer we go back to classes like Magic Manipulation Theory and Practical Magic Application or is this more helpful?”

Teon rolled her eyes and refused to respond. She instead organised the equipment in front of her. Msr. Asher was going through the checks faster than normal and Teon watched as several students started to pull heat from their candles. 

Teon placed her matches next to her flame and tutted at the state of the candle. It was half burnt already with soot inside the dried well of wax beneath the wick. So much for the pristine conditions that Msr. Asher always harped on about. 

“I just don’t understand why we even need to do these classes. We,” Teon paused to find the right word, “left the Academy in the second semester but we now have to join the end of the eleventh year before we go through the first and second semester in the Institute for another final year.”

Ellen scoffed, “Yeah, starting the year over is annoying but I far prefer this to staying at home. And, the good news is we get to cruise through the year again and get top marks without even trying. I cannot believe they compare the Institute and the Academy in terms of preparation for the first tier Exams. It is like chalk and cheese.” 

Teon bristled at Ellen’s surprising non-chalant attitude, “We are falling behind down here, Ellen. Am I the only one that cares that we are in the most important time of our lives and instead of pushing our boundaries, we are just stagnating?”

Ellen turned to Teon and grabbed her hand, “T, not so loud.”

Teon took a breath and looked over to Fil, who had decided to ignore them, “Right. Sorry.”

“It’s fine.” Ellen let go of her hand and her face softened, “But we are being tutored by Viera Courfelt herself. I hate that we got expelled too but we can’t do anything about it now. Except trust Viera. She said we are going to be doing things that our friends in the Academy can only dream of. She’s promised that we are going to be trained by the best of the south and then welcomed back to Kudraul. That is a promise from the Viera Courfelt.”

Teon checked to find Msr. Asher several tables away still and well enough out of earshot, “If we make it back. We nearly died the other day. It was sheer luck that none of us got mauled by a gigantic rat.”

“Oh please. We did fantastic.” Ellen scoffed haughtily, “Even Thredrin said that we couldn’t have done better. It is a bit rich that -” Ellen stopped before she finished her sentence.

“What?” Teon prompted her. Teon knew what they thought of her. That she was completely out of her depth. 

“We are still getting ourselves sorted down here, T. And we’ll do better next time. The fighting is always a bit of a shock, but I assumed that your aunties and uncles would have told you all about fighting and magic. They’d have some stories.”

“If my aunties and uncles found out what we did in Suttrail, they’d come down here to personally whoop all four of us. And then take us home.”

Ellen drew back and pulled a face at the idea, “They’re not the gung-ho kind of warmages?”

“They’re in the Mage Corps.” Teon replied, exasperated, “They do not know I am going to be doing contracts, I promise you that. That’s if I do contracts, I didn’t agree to going on contracts. I told Viera that I wasn’t sure about them.”

A flurry of untempered emotions flickered over Ellen’s face before her usual cool mask suppressed them again. Ellen was a good friend of Teon’s for many years and she was almost always cool, calm, and collected. But when she wasn’t and the mask broke, it was unnerving to see what lay behind.

“You’re totally right. If it isn’t for you then it isn’t for you. But we don’t have much choice in the year. We don’t have many options but to do our final year down here.” Ellen swivelled back to face her rune and the front of class,” We can agree on one point though, these classes are beneath us.”

“Like most of the Academy classes weren’t just re-teaching us the same information as what our tutors told us five years ago,” Teon joked lightly and waited for the tension between them to pass.

Ellen laughed lightly but then stopped all of a sudden as she looked above Teon’s head, “Good afternoon, Msr. Asher.”

“Girls.” Msr. Asher rounded the table and walked to the front of their desks. Teon’s rune and supplies were still in perfect order thankfully and he passed by her to stand in front of Ellen’s messy table instead. 

“The rune should be always facing upwards, Ellen.” He noted dourly.

Ellen said nothing and flipped her rune. 

“Ok, please take me through the safety checks.”

“IBEGU - Investigate the environment, Bindings check, Equipment check, Gate check, Check yourself.” Ellen parroted off the old acronym for Msr. Asher.

His face contorted into a forced smile, “Very well. Start your safety checks.”

Ellen moved through each of the steps, clearly exaggerating them and ignoring Msr. Asher observing her hawkishly.

Teon sat facing the front and forced herself to think about something other than the safety checks. She would visit the Baked Buns Bakery after school, she had earnt it. But if she went to Baked Buns, she’d need to go before combat training started. Preferably with a bit of time for her stomach to settle. She’d told Ellen and Wosche that she’d stay behind after school for some gym or chase but she wouldn’t be able to make the bakery and hang out with them. 

Teon looked up at the ceiling and pondered silently. They’d not miss her surely and they always caught her in their chase games so quickly; it wouldn’t be a big deal. And she really didn’t like the idea of exercising on her empty stomach. 

“And then, I’m ready to fill my rune,” Ellen summarised as she placed her hand over the candle. 

Teon looked over and met Msr. Asher’s eyes. Msr. Asher said nothing but side stepped across to her and she focussed on the rune in front of her. 

She began with her voice in a low steady pace as she explained, “Hello. To ensure redundancy, and therefore safety, we need to ensure we check our environment to make sure it is safe. Then, we need to check the bindings to ensure there are additional binding links for the magic to flow through and that there are no obstructions that might influence the filling of the rune. Afterwards, I will check my own personal equipment as it is the last defence we have if things go wrong, and then the rune’s gate to ensure that it can be opened and closed as designed. Then, I must do a last check of the rune and then my own mind to ensure I am prepared for the filling of the rune.”

“Very good, Teon.” He congratulated her gently, “I am tough on you because I expect excellence.”

Gee, thanks. Teon willed herself to say it to him but failed. She instead looked down and focussed on the equipment in front of her. 

She made an effort to look around the table and checked her chair to ensure it hadn’t somehow become wobbly as she sat on it. Then, she settled herself and picked up the rune in her hand. She turned it over in her hand and inspected the outside thoroughly. The piece of limestone had four solid lines cut into it with the ashy wax melted inside the grooves. All of the wax lines looked intact and the grooves looked sufficiently deep. She then checked her safety glasses, her gown, and her gloves. Each of them were in good condition but she made a show of checking each of them carefully. She put the gloves and glasses on and then picked the rune back up. She was confident the gate’s integrity was good considering she’d made the gate twenty minutes ago but she closed her eyes and opened it and closed it a few times for good measure. The gate was intact and the well was in good condition. She pushed her mind into the well’s void and found the inner boundaries of the rune. The edges of the well were smooth and looked sturdy and she pulled back out and closed the gate. 

Content, she opened her eyes, did her final check of the outside of the rune and nodded that she was indeed ready to fill the rune, “Ready.”

“Good, please begin. Fill the rune up with fire mana from the candle and then close it for my examination. You will only have ten minutes so please only look to fill for five minutes then close the gate and leave the rune on the table.” Msr. Asher turned back to his desk and went to sit down. Teon watched him until he sat down and then cleared her mind. 

She checked the rune one final time out of habit and then opened its gate directly into her palm. She felt the slight suction as the physical boundaries of the rune tightened around the skin on her palm. It was an unpleasant feeling that Teon had learnt to put up with as one of the costs of doing rune filling. 

She focussed on her left hand instead and positioned it to the side of the top of the flame. She could feel the heat radiate outwards, and made sure that her hand didn’t get too close until she’d opened up the access point on her hand.

She took a breath to compose herself before she opened up her left palm’s access point and placed it over the middle of the flame. She’d filled runes hundreds of times but she still felt nervous when she began the process with fire.

The pathways opened with little issue and she started to slowly pull the energy through her left palm. She willed the energy to recompose into mana and stretched the mana into a nice even swirl. She sent the mana up her arm and then quickly out through her chest and down to her right palm. She pushed the mana into the rune and then molded the magic energy into a nice little ball she could build up for compression. She’d make layers and squash it into the inside of the well for later use. Or for Msr. Asher to check and then dispose of. 

She had plenty of runes to use and she wasn’t thrilled with how rudimentary this rune was anyway. First she balled the mana up into a nice size, then she flattened it into a nice even round slab. Then, she pressed that layer to the bottom of the rune and gave it several taps to press it firmly into place.  She ignored the residual heat that lingered in her chest while she worked on the first slab and then formed another ball. Once she got into the swing of filling, she could juggle all of the tasks, she just needed to avoid thinking about the unpleasant heat in her core and focus on the process instead.

She pulled more heat in, converted it, sent it to her palm and formed her mana layers. The flame in her left hand flickered and spat but stayed alight. 

She needed to be careful, despite being so experienced. It wasn’t uncommon for burns and frostbite to occur amongst mages that did binding, even those that were very adept at the skill. As her aunty would always tell her when she was young, doing magic was quite literally playing with fire.

Teon placed another layer gently into the bottom of the rune but stopped before she pressed it into place. Annoyingly, she’d missed a small section of the side of the rune between her two layers somehow. She huffed quietly to herself and kept her eyes closed. 

The section was vacant and wouldn’t be a problem in terms of safety. It, however, would be a problem with Msr. Asher checking her rune after class. No doubt he would write up the error and tell her about it as soon as she next came in for class.

Teon had no desire for his feedback about her filling of runes and so chose to instead get creative. She had an idea that she’d never tested and she felt ready to carpe her diem.

She began to carefully lift the layers of mana back up off of the bottom of the rune’s casing and ball them back up into a large swirling blob in the middle of the void. 

She knew she was able to do runes. She could have been great at runes if she was interested in them but she also knew one undeniable fact that most others weren’t willing to admit. 

The ball kept growing from the mana from her left hand and she concentrated on making the shape an oblong oval instead of the normal ball to make up for her space limitation. She slowed the speed she pulled the heat from the candle and she felt her body begin to heat up with the unchecked mana. 

She’d be ok. She began to flatten the edge of the oval and decided to spool out a reasonably thick thread of mana onto the bottom of the rune’s well. She worked the thread backwards and forwards and felt it tightly pack amongst itself. The mental gymnastics she needed to do to gently pull a thread of the swirling mana from the ball of energy was greater than simply squashing and layering the mana into a large sheet but her mind reeled at the implication of what she’d done. 

The simple, unacknowledged fact that no mage ever became famous for their runework. It was grunt work and those that mattered flourished in how they used bijous. 

Energised, Teon focussed on how she’d work with her overloading mana issue. She would give a nice pattern of threads lining up next to each other and slow down the mana collection for a moment. If she could place the thread into a tightly packed space, it would allow for some interesting applications in how bijous were created. She could potentially be far more purposeful with how she created the release of her bijous if she could slow the mana flow when she filled in the schematic. She was surprised she’d not heard of other mages using a thread for filling runes, now she thought of it.

She focussed on slowly bending the thread of mana around the edges of the rune and she moved onto the second layer as the first was finished. She chose to layer the mana out in a circular pattern and then press onto the back end of the thread as she worked, it meant she needed to add more steps but it was a fascinating challenge. As she worked, the ball of mana fed into the thread and she let more heat into her left palm again. The heat disappeared as she moved the mana from her chest to the rune’s void and she felt a weight lift off her shoulders.

As she relaxed, a small hiccup of energy rippled through her left arm and she gritted her teeth. She hated when it happened and she remembered why she hated filling runes with heat. She’d accidentally pulled some air in with the fire and some of the energy had snuck through into her mana lines. The feeling of the energy diffusing sucked but it wasn’t an issue. She let the discomfort pass and kept focussed on diffusing the immediate flare up of heat that came in with the air pocket.

The hiccup had come because she’d pulled too hard on the flame, she knew. She had a habit of pulling too hard at her energy source when she filled runes. The heat mana hurt more but pulling cold mana was a far more discombobulating experience when it happened mid-conversion. 

Teon looked down at the candle and pulled gently on the flame again and felt the rush of air pop as it got sucked in through the gate as well. This time, she caught the increase of energy and broke the extra energy apart eagerly.

She chafed at how small the candle’s flame was. Especially when she compared them to the burners of the Academy that gave her so much more heat to work with. She had begun with a candle when her father had taught her a long time ago and to go back to candles in her senior years of schooling was a maddening experience. 

She tried to ignore the drag that came from the smaller energy source, and chose to focus on the threading of the mana instead. She found solace in the nice added challenge to the monotony. She had formed the slabs of mana into specific shapes before. Shaping the mana was a test used in Academy classes to see how accurately a student could gauge their shaping of the concentrated mana. But even when she was making the shapes Mdm. Gnape had requested, she’d never considered creating a thread. She’d thought of stars and moons and smiley faces but never considered how a shape would help in unpacking the mana later on. 

Despite how interesting the threading was, she could feel herself begin to lose passion as she got into the swing of bending and working the thread in nice clean lines. The process was an interesting curiosity but she’d just tell Viera about the idea and see if someone else wanted to do it. Perhaps even Riu would want to figure out how to make runes with threads of mana in them if Teon described how she thought the mana could be utilised in bijou creation.

Even while she made the threads, she felt her passion wane. The entire process of filling runes was indicative of the issue with most Creation mages. So much of their magic was about creating fire runes for superheating forges or cooling runes for keeping Estates and courts cool. The botane runes for feeding livestock and electric runes to feed tacky devices that mages created to gloat about to all their mage friends. 

The runes were the foundation of magic and they were incredibly important, Teon didn’t dispute it. It was just that she craved the artistry that came from the creation of the bijou charms and how they distinguished the greatest mages in how they used magic to change the world in far more interesting ways than just as mass stores of energy.  

She kept the pace of her threading and smiled as she looked around. Msr. Asher was helping one of the other students in the back, Teon still hadn’t learnt their name but they were not good at magic at all, that much she knew. Everyone else had their eyes closed and brows furrowed as they filled their runes. All of them except for Wosche and Riu who smiled back at her. 

Teon turned back and checked in on Ellen who was working hard to fill her rune. 

Ellen wasn’t to be blamed for how hard magic was for her. She was very talented in many ways but she was just far behind the eightball when it came to magic. 

Teon felt her third layer of thread begin to form and pressed the edges of the second layer for good measure and watched Ellen’s candle flicker and dance with the rune-filling process. 

When they’d first arrived, Teon had wondered why Ellen hadn’t just stayed focussed on her martial training and other subjects she was good at. 

Teon hadn’t asked her about why she’d picked up magic when they’d come south, choosing to bide her time and ask one of the others but she’d quickly found out when Viera told everyone. Teon had been scandalised when she’d learnt that Viera had challenged Ellen to pick up magic in the same way she’d asked Teon to pick up combat. She told the group that she was sure that Ellen would become an adept mage as well as an experienced fighter before the next Exams, going so far as to enter into the magic Exam to prove it. 

Teon was buoyed by the idea. Ellen would have to work incredibly hard to prepare for the magic Exam and Teon could focus on Riu as a competitor for Lead student. Teon would go into the Exams in a strong position and she was happy to help Ellen when she needed it. And, as a way of thanks, Ellen would continue to beat Teon black and blue in the training ring.

Teon carefully moved her left hand from the flame and closed the gate in her palm. She delicately rubbed a bruise that marked her tricep and winced as she felt pain radiate in her arm. Even if Ellen didn’t get the best score in the Exams, the fact that she knew magic would be a great way to build up her reputation for the Palace Guard, Teon supposed. 

When Teon returned her hand to the candle, she opened up the left hand gate as far as it could go and slowly lowered her hand. The heat warmed her hand and she focussed on breaking the energy into mana. The mana trickled in and she fretted about the speed of her filling. 

Not only was the energy source too small for her but the rune gate felt clunky in her hand. Most of the runes she’d bought had the funnelled gates as well that enabled her to better control the speed of her bijou casting and it was peculiar to deal with a rune that was just an open void for its well. 

Teon felt another hiccup filtered through her hand as more air snuck through the access gate in her palm. She caught the additional heat, and instead of letting it dissipate, she broke it down into mana as well. If the influx of air gave her more heat, then she was going to be using it. 

And if she could pull the air in while she had the flame in her hand, she could just keep pulling it in for more heat, she supposed.

A mischievous grin spread across her face and Teon reached out to touch on the gentle breeze that was the wind’s energy.  

She lifted her hand slightly and caught onto a small wisp of the wind energy and pulled it into her palm. She focussed on ensuring she didn’t break the energy into mana but instead forced the wind to curl around the flame and catch fire. The flame ate greedily from her gift and ignited with a bit more energy. 

Teon grit her teeth and got to work. She forced the air into the fire and then the heat into mana before she sent it along her mana lines to the rune. She had to juggle the heat transfer with the condensing and threading of the mana before she then had to lay the thread in an even pattern. 

The mental exertion was a lot and Teon regretted trying to both thread mana and playing with the candle’s input on the same day but she lived for the days when she was challenged with her magic.

She furrowed her brow and squeezed her eyes shut until she got the hang of the multiple steps in her new rune filling. She thanked her past self for spending so much time developing her mana lines as the new wave of mana rushed through her and into the rune. 

She let the swirling ball of energy in the rune increase and she filtered it into the thread she was spooling out from the mana. The thread grew thicker but she worked it into the fourth layer of the rune by forcing the lines together and moving quickly towards the fifth layer. 

She knew she was losing the form of her threads and layering while she worked but the rune was big enough that it wouldn’t matter in the few minutes that she had. 

 She was confident that she’d be able to get a very respectable amount of the filling done even if it was poorly done. The idea was fascinating and the sloppy work would still work as a proof of concept to show Msr. Asher. And, who cared what he thought anyway. She’d make a neat one for Viera to look at later.

She relaxed into the new technique, eagerly anticipating the look on Msr. Asher’s face when she far surpassed the others in how much of her rune was filled. His voice filtered in from the back of the class, telling the others to pack up and leave their runes on the desk for him to inspect. 

She kept her eyes shut and kept working. She’d reached past the halfway point of the rune, the thread had become properly ungainly but the raw energy that she’d manage to convert was impressive even to her. She fed slightly more air into the flame mana and let the new wave of mana rush through her body. She could feel that her mana lines still had some space to work with but backed off just in case. 

Her first hint of the coming trouble came as a slight jolt. She had been placing the thread on one side of the rune and another section popped. The disturbance reverberated through the mana and Teon reflexively pulled her hand from the flame. 

She pulled the last of the mana through the lines and closed off the ball of energy inside the rune while she worked her mind through the threads to figure out what had happened. She’d never experienced a pop in a rune before but it didn’t bode well.

Another pop interrupted Teon and she felt a piercing pain shooting through the front part of her brain before resonating out through her body. 

Teon sucked in a breath, and focussed on figuring out where the pop had been. The threads were on the top layer were in disarray with small lumps protruding from what should have been a perfectly even surface. 

Teon wiggled her mind through the top layer of the mana but found the layer underneath had very little give. She prodded at the threads and they felt like they’d been compacted. 

She’d not experienced a compacting error before but she’d heard of the phenomenon occurring. If there was too much space left between layers of the mana, then the energy could leak out. But her layers should have made it harder for the mana to leak, not easier.

Teon had made sure to press each thread into place to avoid compacting errors. She’d even made sure that she’d compressed the third layer of thread when she was finished. Or she thought she had. 

She thought she’d kept the mana compressed from the threading but she had also been distracted with trying to manage the influx of additional heat mana. She couldn’t recall much of her work being so focussed on so many gears turning.

Another burst of energy swept through the rune, this time a large chunk of the top layer of mana burst upwards and several pieces of thread nearly touched the ball of mana that she held aloft in the void of the rune.

Teon’s heart stopped for a second and she felt the panic grow. She could feel parts of the layers begin to diffuse but couldn’t detect exactly where. She had no time to unpack the mana and if she let it diffuse, the whole runewell would have a chain reaction. 

Teon squished the mana that hovered in the middle of the rune into as small a ball as she could and then forced the mana out into a large slab. She quickly checked that the mana was dense in her improvised layer and then shoved the whole thing down as hard as she could onto the threaded mana. It was an ugly way  to force all of the mana  to compress but she had no better idea and very little time. 

She felt the mana compress and she willed the slab to go down harder. She needed the force to push out any gaps that she might have left. The slab sank slightly further then stopped and,for a moment, it held.

Then, everything went wrong. Small pops bubbled at the edges of the large slab and then, like an avalanche, a wave of heat assaulted her mind and there was a loud bang. 

Teon’s eyes opened and she gasped for air but forced herself not to let go of the rune gate’s connection to her hand. Her mind reeled from the shock but she forced herself to refocus into the rune. She checked the bindings at the top of the rune and her worst fears were realised. Two of the bindings had disappeared and the third was fast disappearing. She’d caused a chain reaction and she needed to find a way to stop it. She reached down to the mana layer and tried to pick up a part of it so she could figure out what to do but instead kicked off another storm inside the stop. 

The mana exploded and the energy raced up her arm, tearing up her arm and setting her nerves on fire, “Shit!”

The rune dropped onto the table in front of her and Teon opened her eyes to find the rest of the classroom in relative calm. Only Ellen had heard her swear and Msr. Asher was all the way in the back of the class. 

Teon looked down at the rune and saw it sizzling away on the desk. The third binding on the outside of the rune was gone and a small wisp of smoke had begun to rise out of the open rune gate and Teon’s brain froze.

“Teon! What the fuck? Sir!” Ellen sounded scared and Teon’s blood ran cold.

Everything slowed down as Teon looked at her right hand. Her palm was an angry bright red with several blisters beginning to form. The pain hit her at once and she screamed. She tried to squeeze her hand but couldn’t deal with the sheer agony that overtook her. The skin creased and bent unnaturally as she tried to move. 

Waves of pain ran through her body as well. Her mana lines carried a large amount of energy and it washed up and down her body like an excruciating tidal wave. 

She shuddered in her seat and forced the gate in her left hand open. She felt like passing out but knew she couldn’t. The energy needed to be vented or it could kill her. 

The idea rang in her brain and she felt her throat close up, she could die. She forced her mind into her mana lines and grabbed any of the energy she could. The pain hit her in waves and she focussed on one process. Grab energy, send to hand. 

The heat energy had no form and sprayed out in the area directly in front of her and sizzling as it made contact with the air around her. 

Teon blinked as her eyes watered but she forced herself to keep going. Each moment, her body screamed out in pain but she forced more of the energy out. Until the last of it left her body and Teon’s head collapsed into her chest. She sat slack-jawed, ruined and watched the desk catch fire.

“The rune, T!” Ellen yelled in her ear and Teon’s eyes slowly focussed on her rune. She had to fix it. 

Alarm rang in the back of her mind but she pushed it away. She forced her right hand across to the rune and snatched it from the desk. The pain tried to break through. It tried to goade her into feeling something but Teon was already starting to go numb. She checked that no one was in front of her and she tossed the rune towards Msr. Asher’s desk. 

She felt it leave her hands and she closed her eyes. Ellen would need to take care of the rest. She had faith as she slid sideways off the chair and into the gentle embrace of unconsciousness.