Clover was bored one day. She was a mid-level student at the Wizard school, and there was a short break from classes after exams. She was resting in her dorm. There was a slow drip in her room, roughly hewn out of the compacted dirt and stone, and she watched each drop form slowly, building up, finally reaching to heavy of a weight to be held up, and then dropping to the floor, probably to fall down again in whoever's dorm was below hers. She mentally traced the drops route, eventually falling into one of the labs, possibly into some forgotten bit of glassware. Then, she realized that this was all unspeakably boring, and she really had nothing else to do.
Clover took out one of her blank spell sheets. Most of the time, magic was work to her. She was in school, learning how to be a Wizard, so it was homework and classwork that made up the majority of her spells. Why was she learning to be a Wizard? Well, her parents did, and her parents before them, ever since well before the Wizards were kicked out of the King's palace. Ever since well before her ancestors came over on boats, explorers and colonists of a new land to the south. She presumed that even before recorded history, her family were Wizards. It was what they did.
Clover was in the ripe age for some teenage rebellion, but that wasn't her style, and she was a more thoughtful type than she immediately seemed. Sure, she was impulsive, but she had the taste and the knack for magic. She might not have been of the mindset to blindly go with something she hated because of the tradition, but she certainly wasn't going to move away from thousands of years of tradition so hard to prevent her from doing something she liked.
She thought she liked anyway, she corrected herself, because really, she hadn't felt like she'd done it, really. She had made magic for school, and for practical concerns, but was that really a way to determine if she'd liked it? She wanted to be doing something she liked, so she wanted to test herself and her desires. She wanted to know if this was something she'd be able to have fun doing.
Clover started off small, just a little fire spell. She drew it carefully, and like she had done many times before, mainly for exams. She laid it down on her floor, and gave it energy, and a small camping fire arose from the paper. It did not consume it, but rather it fed off of the energy that Clover was feeding to it. This gave Clover an idea.
Well, maybe she couldn't do it with this spell, like it was, but she thought, maybe she could tie the energy of the flames in with her energy. She knew that if she could do this carefully, she would be able to have some manipulation over the shape of the flames.
She spent an hour thinking, scratching runes into the claylike soil, testing out combinations in her head. Eventually, she thought she had something. She drew up another circle, carefully, this time with a slightly different set of runes. She activated it, and flames leapt out again, in the same small campfire shape. She had a bond with the fire though, and she used it, stretching the flames out into shapes, making streamers and snakes. Nothing terribly practical, as it was slow, and very difficult to manipulate, but in a way, it was fun, and Clover experimented to see what she could do until she nearly ran out of energy.
Clover rested for a while to recover her energy, she got nearly a complete night's sleep at midday. She woke up at some weird hour of the night. She quickly got up, and became excited. She repeated her previous experiment with a pot of water she had, guiding the water up into silly and intricate shapes. It was actually easier to move than fire for her, and she made a note of it.
This time, Clover stopped herself, and saved her energy for more ideas. She grabbed the rune scroll from her shelf. The rune scroll was a scroll with all the known runes and their rough translations, possibly one of the most important items owned by any Wizard. Laboriously copied by each Wizard when young, and inspected, marked, and corrected by teachers several inevitable times before being accepted, it helped ingrain the units of magic into young Wizards minds.
Clover had thought that perhaps the list of runes was incomplete. Opinions went both ways among the Wizards. No new runes had been discovered in hundreds and hundreds of years, probably since before the original Wizards came from across the seas. Many felt that, since there didn't seem to be anything that wasn't covered, and there were no new runes discovered in so long, that none existed. Furthermore, no one even remembers how a rune was discovered. Clover didn't have a strong opinion either way.
Clover did, however, have a feeling. Perhaps enhanced by her recent mode of discovery, and the late hour and her inconsistent sleep and food schedules, but Clover felt compelled to enter a trance. She felt her mind entering a place of calm, and an image went into her mind, a simple, angular character, new, vibrant, full of life. Like that, she had discovered a new rune.
Clover wondered on that for a little while, but the answer seemed to be inside her head as well. She asked, why her? Why was she so important? Sure, she was intelligent, she recognized this, and just a bit bold, but something happened to her that hadn't happened for a thousand years? Strange.
She considered writing it down in her rune sheet, but she grabbed a small scrap of paper, and wrote it down. It was probably burnt inside her mind anyway, but it helped to have a written record, as one never knows.
She knew that there was a reason that she had been gifted this rune, it was something beyond her, and some role she had to play in the future. Something that was, to some degree, fated, but she felt like this fate was just a loose script, and only her role was determined, not how she was going to fulfill it. Anyway, these sorts of things could be worried about later. She daren't share this rune yet, but she felt that there was no harm in using it.
A new rune. Transformation. A new power that could be tapped. And Clover, while recognizing her role in things to come, was certainly not above having a bit of fun with it first.
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