Mark led Naomi up the stairs, the rest of the family trailing behind them on the way to Grandpa Jack’s future room. Naomi threw out the occasional light orb to help them see, while Mark’s staff thumped a hollow note of auditory breadcrumbs that guided them to their destination. Once they were inside the room Naomi took over, directing Mark and his parents to sit in specific locations on the floor, while his sister was placed idly off to one side. The mage then went into business mode, pulling various spell components and foci from her satchel, as well as chalk and a sheaf of papers covered in drawings.

“Take this,” she said to Angela, handing her a piece of chalk and one of the paper diagrams. “Draw one of these rune circles around each family member.”

“I don’t need to use my runemarker?” Angela asked.

Naomi shook her head. “When working with a mage, you can use chalk for everything except the Chaos Rune.” She looked at Mark. “Mark, you should put your staff aside. I don’t know how it will react to the ritual, and it’s best not to take chances.”

Mark nodded and placed his staff just outside where his rune circle would be drawn, silently praying to whichever god would listen—except Chaos, whom he specifically excluded—that he wouldn’t have a seizure during the ritual. Naomi noticed his reluctance to part with the tool, but her attention was soon pulled away by the sight of Angela holding up the drawing of the rune circle and turning it back and forth like she was driving a bus.

Naomi gently took the paper out of Angela’s hands and spun it a quarter turn to the right.

“Just make sure this part points to the centre of the room so we can link it to a side of the Anord rune when we’re ready,” she said, poking her finger at a spot on the drawing. Mark had no idea what she was talking about, but Angela seemed to understand.

“Oooh! Yeah, I get it now,” she said, nodding. Dropping to a crouch in front of their mom, she began drawing what proved to be a surprisingly complex rune construct.

When Angela finished the circle around their mom—and after getting pelted in the head by stones at least twice—her head perked up.

“Hey, so can I just start using these runes?” she asked. “I barely know any runes at all; adding all of these to my Tome would be awesome.”

“Sadly, no,” Naomi said as she worked. “You can only utilize a rune if you know its true name, at which point it would appear in your Tome. Without the power of its name it is useless to you.”

Angela frowned and pointed at a rune on one of the pages. “You literally just told everyone in the room that this is Anord. Does that mean they can use it now?”

Naomi shook her head. “They still don’t know the name.” She looked at Mark’s dad and pointed at the rune. “Peter, what is the name of that rune? Angela just said it.”

He looked at the rune in question. “Sure, it’s…uh…?” He frowned in surprise. “I have no idea. I can’t for the life of me remember what she just said.”

“Neither can I,” Mark’s mom said. “How strange.”

Mark looked back and forth between his parents and Naomi. He had no trouble remembering the rune’s name was Anord. Why couldn’t they? Not that he was going to ask. He was flying enough warning flags as it was.

“How come you can remember rune names?” Angela asked Naomi. “Seems weird that you can remember them if you can’t use them.”

“It would be weird if that were the case, but it’s not,” Naomi answered. “I know the true name of Anord, but that’s it. The other runes I only know by their colloquial names. ‘Earth Rune,’ ‘Water Rune,’ ‘Sun Rune,’ etc. You already know the true name of more runes than any mage on the planet.

“As for the runes you’re drawing,” Naomi continued, “you don’t need to know the names because you aren’t performing a spell. All you’re doing is activating the rune lattice and maintaining it while I construct a soul lattice within it. My lattice will form the active part of the ritual, while the rune lattice will act somewhat like mirrors, allowing me to construct a lattice that is both more stable and more complex than anything I could manage on my own.”

Angela squeezed her head between her hands. “My head hurts. How can you do all this when you don’t know the rune names?”

“It’s not like I invented the thing,” Naomi said with a chuckle, gesturing to the runes drawn onto the floor. “Ritual lattices are an extremely specialized field of study. This particular lattice represents decades of work done by a brilliant druid-mage partnership about seventy-five years ago, whose work was in turn built on the brilliance of their forebears. I designed my spell based on the capabilities of this rune lattice, not the other way around.”

“Huh,” Angela said, looking around. “Nice to know someone did the hard part for us, I guess.” She kept looking around as Naomi got back to work, her eyebrows pulling tighter together. “Sooo, one last question.”

Naomi dropped her head, then looked up from her diagram. “Yes?” she asked, not trying to hide her annoyance.

“Sorry, we’ll get back to it in a sec, I promise. It’s just that I couldn’t help but notice there is a shit-ton—sorry mom—of runes here. I can only power two runes, max, and this is way more than that.” Angela looked around. “Hell, I don’t think there’s any power runes here at all.”

“You don’t have any power runes because this is your power rune,” Naomi said, pointing at the circle she was constructing in the middle of the room. “I will be standing inside this circle, and once you activate your lattice, it will draw mana directly from me. After that, your sole job will be to hold Anord active so that you can funnel off the Chaos that the runes will accumulate during the ritual.”

Mark raised his hands. “Wait, are you saying you’ll be powering Angela’s entire lattice and constructing your own? All from the same mana pool?”

Naomi smiled, but there was a sad air to it. “I am an aerix,” she said with a shrug. “We burn short, but we burn bright.” The woman again bent herself to her work, shutting down further conversation and leaving Mark with a creased brow.

Aerix, he thought to himself. He desperately wanted to ask what it meant, but there was a chance of it coming across as offensive. I wasn’t worth the risk.

“What the heck’s an aerix, anyway?” Angela asked, rambling obliviously as she drew her runes. “Sounds like a bird. You know, like Archaeopteryx? I mean, you probably don’t have those here. Maybe you never did. But you have birds, so you probably had dinosaurs at one point, right?” She looked up from her drawing, eyes wide. “Oh! Or maybe you have dinosaurs, like, present tense! That’d be so cool.”

Naomi sighed as she was forced to once again pull her focus away from the ritual. “The fact that I’m an aerix is not a secret in Palmyre, and I will happily tell you my story at a later date, but what I am doing right now is actually quite complicated.” She waved around the chalk in her hand. “May I?”

Angela cringed. “Sorry. Just nervous. I get blabby when I’m nervous.”

“And when you’re happy,” Mark noted. “Or sad, come to think of it.”

“Good one, bro.”

“Angry, sleepy, embarrassed…”

“Very funny.”

“…irritated, constipated…”

“Go on, yuk it up.”

“…nauseated, jealous, hungry—”

“Dude?” she said, holding up her own chalk. “Super important work to do?”

Mark grinned and raised his hands in mock surrender as his sister returned to her work.

The two women continued drawing their runes in silence, the intense focus only broken once when the sound of Leonard singing off-key Frank Sinatra hits in the back yard drifted through the open window. That was but a brief distraction, though, and soon they redoubled their efforts until the whole runic structure was completed and thoroughly double-checked. Once that was done, Naomi had Angela take up her position in the final of the four outer rune circles that had been created for the family. Each of those circles was connected to a smaller circle in front of it, which was in turn connected to a single, big circle in the centre of the room. That larger circle was where Naomi took up position, seating herself cross-legged as she waited for everyone else to settle. Unsurprisingly, Angela’s circle differed from that of Mark and his parents, with the Anord rune placed directly in front of her.

“I believe we are ready to begin,” Naomi said. “Does anyone have any questions before we start?”

Mark’s mom put up her hand. “Yes. What should we be expecting? Will we see my grandfather, or maybe have some sort of vision that will tell us where he is?”

Naomi shook her head. “No, even if this is successful, you won’t see anything at all. Neither will I, really. What I will see are the streams of magic that unite and bind our Tomes together. As an eṉakkumancer, I have a high-level Trait that allows me to read the streams with enough clarity that it’s almost as good as seeing the events with my own eyes. Better, in some respects.”

“Sounds like we should use ‘Neo-mi’ as your code name,” Angela chuckled.

Naomi stared at her blankly. “Why is so much of what you say so confusing?”

“…said everyone who has ever met Angela, ever,” Mark added.

Naomi shook her head, choosing to ignore them both. “While none of you will be able to see what I see, I will describe what is happening to the best of my abilities.” She gave Mark’s mom an apologetic smile. “I’m sorry, but that is the best I can do.”

His mom nodded in return. “I understand.”

“Thank you. Do you have any more questions?”

When his mom shook her head, Naomi gestured to Angela to begin.

“Hell yeah!” his sister said, donning a giddy smile as she pulled out her mistletoe runemarker and picked up a vial of some sort of silvery substance that Naomi had provided. Using it like ink, Angela traced the chalk outline of the Anord rune, the strokes etching themselves in a swirling rainbow of light that was uncomfortably familiar to Mark.

Without warning, a bright light illuminated the room as the lines of the entire rune structure flashed in a golden burst that erased any slight imperfections that may have existed, leaving behind a seamless, glowing rune lattice that took up almost the entirety of the room’s floor.

“Holy shit,” Mark muttered under his breath. Now this was magic.

The globes Naomi had placed on the ceiling blinked out as she freed herself from their ongoing mana drain, leaving Angela’s runes as the sole source of illumination in the room.

“I know I have stated this to you already,” Naomi said in a serious tone, “but there are no guarantees this will work, and I will explain why.

“The closer two people are within a family, the closer the ties between their Tomes. This bond is strengthened when people acknowledge their relationship by granting Tome permissions to each other. As an eṉakkumancer, I can use those ties to trace the threads of magic from one family member to another, finding a person’s Tome across distances far beyond the norm. Unfortunately, there are two obstacles in our path today.

“The first obstacle is that Jack has not accepted permissions from any of you. There has been no reinforcement of the bonds granted by being family.

“The second obstacle is that none of you are direct children, siblings, or parents of Jack. The closest we have is his granddaughter, Beth.”

Mark’s dad frowned. “I’m not even a blood relative. Are you sure my presence won’t do more harm than good?”

Naomi acknowledged him with a nod. “An excellent point. And normally, you’d be right—I would never try this with someone lacking direct blood ties, let alone no blood ties whatsoever. But you are not a normal family. You are Legends. When you were sent here, the gods that oversee the Tomes—”

Not sure Carl qualifies as a god, Mark thought.

“—decreed that you are a family, all of you, and I suspect this means your Tomes are linked in a way that even twins would envy. Perhaps there is some small variation based on your true biology, but this situation is so unprecedented that I’m willing to make an attempt purely on faith. It is also why I included everyone in this ritual, even Peter. The more of you here, the more potential angles of connection that exist to your Grandpa Jack.

“Beyond that, we can’t underestimate the impact of performing the ritual here, in Palmyre, where the ley lines are more stable than at any other place on Arenia. That, more than anything, may be what tips us into the realm of success.”

Then, to their surprise, Naomi’s lips curled into an impish grin. “And I must admit, I’m more than a little curious to see how this all plays out.”

“It’s certainly worth trying,” Mark’s mom said. “Do we need to do anything?”

“Yes. Everyone take out your Tomes and open to your Familial Party page, then place them in the smaller rune circle in front of you. Once that’s done, I want you to focus on Jack. Your memories of him, his face, his posture—even his humour and smell—and hold that in your mind. Focus on memories that are particular to you and you alone. And please, stay as quiet as possible. Once I begin casting, I’ll have to maintain my concentration, and any distraction could mean the collapse of my lattice.”

Taking a deep breath, she turned and looked at Angela. “It is time.”

Angela immediately giggled uncontrollably. “Holy shit, a mage just looked at me and said”—she waved her hands and used a low voice—“‘It is time…’ just before getting me to kick off a badass spell.”

Groans came from the family, along with a chorus of “Angela” and “Be serious” and “Language,” but she just grinned back.

“Did you get that out of your system?” Mark asked.

“Yeah, I’m good,” she said with a nod. Shuffling her positioning slightly, her entire demeanour changed, metamorphosing from her usual glib irreverence into a bulwark of unbreakable focus. If one didn’t know her, the switch would have been surprising. It certainly surprised Naomi, who tilted her head in curiosity. No one in the family was taken aback. They knew Angela had two very different gears, and she was a force to be reckoned with when she made the shift.

Mark smiled. His sister could be a bit of an idiot, but he also knew that no matter how long this ritual lasted, she would hold her lattice like it was forged in iron.