Before Orou started experimenting by himself, he remembered about a magical trinket that they had found in the shop. Dragging the scroll over the counter of the shop, Orou stared at the crystal ball that was simply standing there. Struggling to remember how this thing worked, Orou started looking between the crystal ball and the scrolls on the ground, thinking about what size the formation should be. The last few spells he cast, he had a specific size that needed to be met or else, the formation wouldn’t work, but in this case, the rune was simply drawn there with no more explanation.

Deciding to make the rune the size of the crystal ball itself, he started commanding his will to guide the spirits within the crystal ball, but the second his will touched the crystal ball, the spirits within started rushing towards the centre of it, creating the formation that he still held in his mind. The spirits arranged themselves in position and several seconds passed, but Orou’s hopes were let down when nothing happened. He experimented with the crystal ball a few more times, making the rune smaller and smaller until he saw that it had no effect. At first, he thought that the fault might be in the crystal ball, but after casting the ball of light spell and forming both an illusion and a scintillating spirit within the crystal ball, he confirmed that it was working as before.

Orou dragged the scroll back to Grizz’s room and coiled up in a comfortable position, preparing to experiment for the rest of the day. The first thing he did was to create the rune the same size as the scroll, overlapping both the drawing and the rune he was making with spirits. It was a bit tricky getting both the length and the thickness completely right and the fact that the rune wasn’t completely symmetrical like the rest of the spells was slightly bothering Orou, but the rune itself wasn’t anything challenging. A minute or so passed before he completed it, but just as before, the rune didn’t do anything.

Thinking that perhaps the fault was within him, he tried to adjust the various proportions of the rune, making one end thicker and the other, thinner. After an hour of experimenting with length and size, he realised that it didn’t matter how big or small he created it, it simply wouldn’t work. Then, he started thinking of other solutions. He looked carefully at the scroll before him and placed the spirits in specific places, as marked by the scroll. There was nothing to connect the spirits and thus, the rune once more didn’t trigger.

He tried to link the spirits in various ways, creating a spirit thread to connect the spirits just like he had seen the city barrier do and holding it all in place with his will, but no matter what he did, it simply didn’t work. He tried to shape a single spirit into the rune, but that was way too complicated for him to do normally. Employing the help of the black cube, he waited until the right time and, sending out a will wave of his own, he grabbed a hold of a single spirit. With a single thought, the spirit changed into what he imagined, in this case, the strange rune drawn on the scroll. Even though the spirit changed into the rune before him, it still didn’t work. Making sure the spirit didn’t return back to its original form with one will, he used the other to make small adjustments, guiding additional spirits to the mark placed on the scroll. Unfortunately, nothing he did with the spirit triggered the spell.

Hours had passed ever since he started experimenting with the rune and Grizz had already gone to sleep, snoring soundly to himself. Taking a small break, he looked around and only now did it hit him that the black lines that he constantly saw around him were similar to the black ink that was used to draw it. Orou knew that he was basically grasping at straws here, but nothing he did with the spirits seemed to work. Taking stock of the things around him, he noticed several black lines that looked like they might fit the rune, for example, the leg of the bed that Grizz was sleeping on was very similar to the first crooked line on the rune and the surface of the table housed another black strand, which seemed to fit the rune.

Slithering over to the table, he raised his head to look directly at the black line before him. It was constantly squirming and moving around, so it was difficult to keep sight on it for too long, but as Orou examined it closer, he noticed that it was exactly like the line of the rune before him. The only problem was, he didn’t know how to make the line move. He moved both of his wills to surround the black line and he forced it to stay still, but the line simply ignored the wills, swimming in the table without a care in the world.

He observed the line for a long period of time and finally, the black line had reached one of the table legs and the rest of the black strands had moved away to different parts of the table. He wrapped his tail around the table leg and very quietly, as to not wake up Grizz, he snapped the table leg. Placing the table leg next to the scroll, Orou carefully observed how the black strand moved and what it was doing. The strand was still swimming, unaware of what had happened and just as it was about to hit the broken part of the leg, it bounced right off and, adjusting its course, continued freely moving inside the table leg. Orou was expecting some sort of sign of life from the black strand, perhaps showing a bit of emotion like the spirits he dealt with on the daily, but there was no surprise at no longer being part of the table, not a single reaction from the black strand.

Throughout the night, Orou kept trying to force the strand to obey his will. He tried to do countless things with his will, but all of them failed to impact the black strand in any way, shape or form. Orou wrapped around the whole table leg and started to evenly apply pressure through the entire thing, but once more, it didn’t seem to have a single reaction. After a long period of time, Orou was tired of failure and wanted to see something new, so after waiting for the black strand to stretch from one end of the leg to another, he applied slightly more pressure and broke the leg in half. As soon as he snapped it in half, the same thing happened to the black line. At the point where the leg was broken, the single strand split into two smaller ones.

Of course, this meant that the black strand was no longer useful for his rune, but Orou was way too curious about the black strands and about what he could do. Placing one of the halves far away from both Grizz and himself, he dragged some of his food to himself and quickly started to devour the food before him, making the thing inside of him spin faster and faster, turning the black strands into the black mist. Following his theory that the blood core was responsible for this, he consciously made it spin faster and faster, to the limits of his current abilities. After he had done all of that, the completely wrapped around the table leg, making sure that it was as close to the core as possible and then, he simply waited.

He could see the effects of his actions without looking at the leg itself. There was a vast quantity of mist rising into the air and spreading through the entire house, much more than usual. He simply lied there for half an hour and carefully uncoiling himself and extracting the table leg, he was excited to see what had happened to it. The first thing he noticed was that the leg was considerably darker than before, the wood was very clearly rotting and degrading. Looking at the black strand inside of it, he saw that it had shrunk by about a third of its original size and while it was still swimming inside the table leg, the movement of the strand was nowhere as smooth as they were originally.

He repeated what he just did for a much longer period of time, that is until the sun rose and Grizz woke up. Two hours passed before he no longer felt the table leg within his grasp and uncoiling himself, he saw that there was nothing more but ash remaining on his body. He looked at the ash, both in horror and in amusement, thinking about what this discovery meant for him.