The seventh bell of night tolled through the upper towers of House Darsha, a deep, resonant sound that rolled down the corridors like a sleepy dragon's purr. The noise didn't just mark the hour—it announced to everyone (and everything) in the manor: It's officially time to stop pretending you're productive and start pretending you're asleep.
The house responded like clockwork. Candles on the walls drifted off their sconces in perfect formation, descending down to the level of the ground as though each flame had individually sworn an oath of nighttime duty. They settled gently into invisible bases, filling the hallways with a soft, honey-amber light. Above each doorway, runes sparkled in constellation pattern—not actual star maps, by the way, but the magically-researched "baby-friendly" sort. Astronomers had placed them carefully to calm babies into sleep. although they tended to make grown-ups yawn as well, an unwanted side effect no one resented.
Corridor torches were lowered just enough to appear warm without inducing existential terror. Nurses glided by in rune-embossed slippers, singing lullabies so soft you could have sworn they were made of moonbeams. The windows, notoriously magic to hate drafts, stood smugly wrapped in plush velvet drapes, warding off every breath of night chill like bouncers outside an elite club.
🐧 [GOOD EVENING, CREATOR. SURVEILLANCE STATUS: MINIMAL. LEARNING OPPORTUNITY: MAXIMUM. SHALL WE INITIATE TONIGHT'S EDUCATIONAL INFILTRATION?]
Sharath Virayan Darsha rested in the nursery, swaddled in a cinnamon-jasmine fleece blanket so plush that some historians doubted it was made of anything except cloud tittle-tattle. His breathing was measured and slow, his face smooth into the completely asleep expression with the seriousness of an actor playing "corpse" in a mystery play.
But his eyes… oh, his eyes. Wide, dark, glimmering with that unmistakable spark that says, "Yes, I'm tiny, but also yes, I'm planning something." Tonight, his mission had a name: Midnight Scholarship—his personal black-ops program for self-education in a place where "reading ahead" was considered adorable until it started looking like a coup.
🐧 [CREATOR, THE NURSERY ATTENDANT WILL DEPART IN EXACTLY 3.7 MINUTES TO PREPARE CALMING TEA. AT THE STEWARD'S DESK RESTS A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO RUNIC SYNTAX. THIS IS OUR OPTIMAL LEARNING WINDOW.]
Above, the ceiling runes slowly turned, casting constellations that were always different twice. They had been designed by a combined task group of wizards and child psychologists, allegedly to stimulate "developmental wonder." Sharath had reconfigured them altogether: he employed them as a warning signal. The instant the design cycled back around, he knew the nurse had left to prepare tea.
Fifteen minutes past the moon's apex, the manor's enchanted quill—known in staff gossip as the "glowquill" for its faint blue aura—began twitching like a caffeinated spider. It spun once in place, then unlatched itself from its holder on the steward's desk. A low hum drifted into the air, the kind that says something magical is happening, but not enough to worry about… probably.
🐧 [SURVEILLANCE CLEAR. TARGET ACQUIRED. COMMENCE OPERATION: MIDNIGHT SCHOLARSHIP.]
Sharath's blanket stirred. Slowly, deliberately, he rolled onto his belly. His motion was so quiet it could have been mistaken for a dream of crawling. Inch by inch, he inched forward in what military manuals one day might officially term the "Darsha Baby Belly Crawl"—stealth honed to such a point even the cradle's magical motion wards failed to trigger an alarm.
🐧 [FINE FORM, AUTHOR. STEALTH CRAWLING IS UP 23% FROM LAST WEEK.]
The steward's counter was a temple of temptation. Scrolls inscribed with silver glyphs rested in precise piles. Calibration rings whispered softly upon being drawn near, detecting thought-energy. And then—there it was—the reward: a primer folio containing runes employed for simple enchantments.
🐧[TARGET LOCKED: BASIC RUNIC PRIMER. EDUCATIONAL POTENTIAL: ENORMOUS. SECURITY LEVEL: AMAZINGLY INCONSEQUENTIAL.]
This wasn't merely a book. This was the book. The one that all those weeks back had gotten Sharath so excited that he had almost blown his baby cover. A Rosetta Stone for magic, perched a mere six inches from his wee fingertips, as if the cosmos had placed an open-source API in a nursery.
🐧 [IRONY ALERT: A NUCLEAR-PHYSICS-GRADE MIND LANDED NEXT TO KIDS' STUDY GUIDES. SUGGEST PRIORITY ON LEARNING TO PREVENT EXISTENTIAL OVERFLOW.]
He reached out with one perfectly plump finger. Every nerve in his arm buzzed with the thrill of impending intellectual theft.
🐧 [LANGUAGE ACQUISITION IN PROGRESS. YOU'VE MASTERED 97.3% OF RUNIC SYNTAX. YOUR FLUENCY SURPASSES A FIRST-YEAR MAGICIAN.]
The pages of the primer shone dimly as he turned them. Every rune came with a name and a function—plain to the naked eye, yet full of so much complexity that it would make today's programming languages look like a child's scribbles.
The Light rune was a candle in a circle of vision, containing both light and sight. Heat was arms around another, sharing not merely temperature, but the emotional warmth of a hug.
Lock was lines crossing, creating a seal that felt safe and sure.
These weren't images. They were… code.
🐧 [RUNIC SYSTEM = OBJECT-ORIENTED MAGIC. CONDITIONALS, INHERITANCE, MODULARITY. IT'S CODE WRITTEN IN SYMBOLS.]
Sharath drew the Word rune—a cursive script that vibrated beneath his fingertips. The air seemed to ripple, as if the room itself had confirmed his purpose. He realized then: this people didn't construct magic from reason. They constructed it from feeling-laden reason. Each spell was machine and verse.
🐧 [NEUROBOOP NOTE: YOUR QUANTUM SIGNATURE INTERFACES NATIVE WITH RUNIC OS.]
He smiled. The primer wasn't a scholastic text anymore—it was the key to the magic of the castle. And now it belonged to him.
A slight shuffling sound from down the hall caused him to hold his breath. His mental dialogue plummeted from "epic heist" to "panicked squirrel" in a heartbeat. Carefully, he replaced the folio precisely as it had been, to the millimeter, and slid back out of reach into the cradle.
🐧 [MISSION STATUS: SUCCESSFUL DATA CAPTURE. RISK LEVEL: MINIMAL. CRAWL SPEED RANK: GOLD TIER.]
Sharath slipped back beneath his cinnamon-jasmine quilt just as the nursery attendant came back in with a tray of hot tea. His eyes drifted shut, his breathing steady and slow, looking like a child so fast asleep he could probably sleep through an earthquake—or, at any rate, through the political coup he'd just begun plotting.
Inside his mind, however, the plans were already forming: practice the Light rune until it responded instantly, pair Warmth with Lock for defensive purposes, and—most importantly—figure out how to map runic commands to neural signals without having to wave his hands around like an amateur wizard.
🐧 [NEXT PHASE RECOMMENDATION: ESTABLISH LOCAL DEVELOPMENT ENVIRONMENT. SUGGEST CODENAME: CRIB-LAB.]
Sharath smiled faintly. Yes. Crib-Lab. It had a nice ring to it