Chapter 34: Toma’s Runes Begin to Rot

It started with a kiln that wouldn't shut off.

The artisan claimed the heat spell was routine—low-grade, steady-state pulsework embedded in the relay's sublayer. But something had changed. The flames wouldn't die. Even after the relay was cut. Even after the rune board was shattered.

"It's not just this kiln," said Kael Idrun, his voice taut. "It's everywhere in the northern ring. Lamps. Tools. Heating nodes. Even clocks."

Benedict knelt beside the wrecked kiln, tracing a finger through the scorch-runes etched into the metal casing. The glyphs flickered under his touch—still active, but… looping?

"They're caught," he muttered. "Stuck in recursive feedback."

He stood. "We need to visit Toma."

---

Toma Grenn's vault was more of a museum than a lab. Every wall was packed with rune tablets, etched plates, archived pulse scrolls, and generational spelllocks sealed in lacquer.

The air smelled of dust and waxed minerals. A low hum pervaded the space, like an orchestra tuning off-key. A resonance not quite disharmonic, but wrong.

Toma greeted them in the old way—hand to heart, pulse to palm.

"I heard about the kiln," he said. "I assumed it was a tuning issue."

"No," Benedict replied. "It's glyph decay. Not just erosion—semantic collapse."

Toma frowned. "That shouldn't be possible."

"Not unless the runes are misinterpreting themselves."

Kael swept his tuner across the archive. The device screamed with mismatched frequencies. Several glyphs had become unstable—morphing slightly, their meanings shifting like forgotten dialects.

"Some of these… they're too old," Kael said. "They're misaligning with the current pulse syntax."

Toma's face paled. "These were my grandfather's records. And his. We've never changed them."

"That's the problem," Benedict said gently. "They weren't meant to be active relay anchors. Just reference sets. But now the pulse is recursive. Living. These glyphs are trying to speak—and they're not fluent anymore."

Shael joined them, her harmonics gloves blinking yellow. She touched a wall panel, then flinched.

One of the runes is screaming.

Toma led them to the central glyph stone—a family crest-turned-core-node. It pulsed erratically.

"This is our lineage rune," he said. "It's never failed."

"Until now," Benedict said. He reached out, overlaying a stabilizing weave—one designed by Eline's sync team.

The rune slowed. Then settled. Then… stuttered.

Shael translated the last pulse.

> "Who am I supposed to be?"

Toma closed his eyes.

"I kept them alive out of pride," he said. "But tradition is no excuse for signal decay."

He turned to Benedict. "Help me update them. All of them."

And together, they began rewriting the past to preserve the present.

---

The work took days.

Each glyph had to be evaluated—its original syntax decoded, its meaning clarified, its modern equivalent calibrated. Some couldn't be translated directly; they were metaphors built into dead cultural frameworks. Others were dangerously misaligned, echoing intent from outdated channel structures.

In one corner of the vault, Shael uncovered a forgotten pulse frame running on a loop. It sent out a single glyph every ten seconds: home. Except the glyph had degraded into bind, and the nearby house it once regulated was slowly rebuilding its door every hour, unable to stop.

Kael modified the house's intake node with a triple-syntax limiter.

Shael added a pulse cushion.

Benedict simply listened to the house for a while, then tapped it with an echo shard.

The reconstruction ceased.

---

The decay spread further than they thought. Vehrmath's older districts hummed with latent, unstable frequency. A clocktower's hourly chime extended itself into a six-minute chant. A family archive began replaying ancestor messages, but with scrambled voice patterns, making them speak in riddles.

Children in one district began playing with glyph-fragments that reacted emotionally. One piece, meant for warmth, began mimicking grief. It created a localized feedback haze until Benedict intervened, co-singing with Shael and using one of Toma's new anchor glyphs.

"Even emotion is code," Shael signed. "And these are old feelings that never ended."

---

As they progressed, whispers began to spread through Vehrmath.

Some of the city's younger technomancers scoffed at the event. "Just retire the old glyphs," one shard post read. "Legacy code is a hazard."

But others watched Toma work beside Benedict and faltered.

Because Toma wasn't just a relic. He was the bridge.

He'd spent his life defending static tradition, but now he rolled up his sleeves and helped reforge it.

At night, he and Shael sang harmonics into unstable slabs. Not to overwrite them—but to reassure them. To teach them slowly. Reacquaint them with the present.

One glyph—a shape for 'protection'—resisted.

It began broadcasting itself into nearby relay homes.

It created shielding fields. Then dampened emotional feedback. Then began muting sound entirely.

It wanted to protect. But it couldn't stop.

---

On the fourth night, Eline arrived.

With her came a harmonic tether net—designed to isolate failing glyphs from recursive resonance.

"It's not just your vault, Toma," she said. "The decay is fractal. Whole clusters across the city are syncing to broken patterns. People don't even know it's happening yet."

Toma sat down heavily on a carved bench his father once enchanted.

"So it's not just me."

"No," Benedict said. "But you were the first to admit it."

They looped the failing glyph through a triweave sync—Toma humming the old form, Eline laying the rhythm of present pulse, and Shael binding it with a whisper of future voice.

The glyph quieted.

Not erased. But stilled.

Toma wept quietly. Not for loss. For survival.

---

By week's end, the vault glowed softly with renewed equilibrium.

Each slab bore a new line beneath the original: an anchor translation, handwritten by Toma himself.

Visitors from other cities arrived to observe the sync process. Some mocked it. Some begged for blueprints. One monk whispered, "This is what Vehrmath does. It listens to the old and teaches it to sing again."

An archival glyph from an outlying farm arrived one night on its own—blinking erratically, worn from age. Toma placed it at the center of the vault.

He didn't fix it.

He welcomed it.

When Jorren's faction sent a request to seize the vault for 'cultural security,' Toma refused.

Politely.

Then publicly.

Then on shard-record, standing before his family crest:

> "I am not the past. I am what the past became. And you don't get to own that."

The message trended across five districts.

And just like that, a bridge became a wall.

Not to divide—but to define.

And in the quiet of that definition, a new pulse began—slow, layered, resilient.

The vault had stopped decaying.

It had begun to evolve.