A Study in Stones
Twentieth Day of the Ninth Month 294 AC
If it was one thing Lya had learned in the days since her coronation, it was that the little things tripped you up more than the big ones. Welcoming feasts and small talk she could do with a skill that would shock the girl who had once struggled to relate to her fellow novices. It helped that the Royces, the Starks, and even the Tyrells were very interested in things within her area of expertise. But then she would start walking down the corridors with books and tablets floating in front of her and she would get servants offering to carry them for her, so Lya would have to stop what she was doing and explain that she really did not need the help and that the levitation was part of the way she analyzed the wards' reactions.
At Winterfell she got the castle steward up in a furor because she was knocking on walls, concerned she was going to tear them down. Honestly, some people were just too lazy to use the brain they had in their heads. There was some part of Lya that wanted to stop explaining what she was doing and just get on with it, but that would send entirely the wrong message about the doings of the Crown, of which she could be counted party to these days, and so it went.
"I am not entirely sure what tests I shall be running, but I can assure you they will be safe for all concerned."
"The light is harmless, go sit in a darkened room for a bit and the spots will clear up."
"I will put all the dirt back when I am done looking at the foundations. The Earth Elemental is harmless as they come."
Then there was her current stay at Runestone. Duke Royce was an excellent host and less inclined to look over her shoulder than most, but his lady wife had made up a bedroom for her in the keep 'as befit a queen' and never mind that said queen would rather be sleeping with her husband in the capital and doing other more entertaining things in that bed besides. It would practically be an insult to refuse her once she made the offer, and her other body was doing complex astrological observations of the ley-structure which she could not break up.
The master runes she was here to look for were hidden by design at their first carving and then obscured even more over the intervening thousands of years of construction and reconstruction. That the wards would be able to recognize this new construction as part of the keep and integrate them into the protections was as extraordinary as it was frustrating.
Rather than be anchored to the area the way the ward stones they had just liberated from the Brazen Throne were, these seemed to be anchored to the very stones of the keeps, making them stronger against physical and magical attack as well as preventing unwanted phasing in a way that would likely be very odd to the genie enchanters. The wards did not enhance specific aspects of the keep like a spell of hardening or forbiddance, they just made the castle more castle-like, more real than reality as it were, like wrapping a place in the meaning of itself.
The final breakthrough came when digging beneath the ornamental gardens of all places where she found the anchor stone, or perhaps better said the anchor block, since it was an enormous block of divination proof lead that had sat there since time out of mind, its runes glowing faintly with power at the roots of the world. This would not take a lot of work from a sorcerer at all, most of it was just carving stone and metal.
Runic Wards: 85 (Success)
Gained Rune Wards:
- Hardens construction against magical and mundane attack
- Blocks Phased Travel as Forbiddance
- Easy to carve and very long lasting
- Can only be used on fixed structures
Lya dusted off her hands and looked around the mound filled garden.
Time to put all the trees and shrubs back.
Do you spread the knowledge of rune wards to your allies?
[] Yes, every advantage against the Brazen Throne must be taken
[] No, it is too precious a secret to simply give away
OOC: This is a bit of a lateral upgrade compared to what you stole because the First Men had other concerns that the planar powers when making their defenses so they came up with different trade-offs.
