Heron and Kur had both began studying the book on Ancient Runes, but Heron had to admit Kur did so more diligently. The elf was almost constantly poring over it, even taking it to the table to eat.
While Heron also spent a considerable amount of time trying to learn it he was also doing other things.
For one, he had convinced Elswyth to teach him archery. It had not been hard as she deemed it a good exercise to do outside that would strengthen his muscles.
…She'd also started putting him through what she called training. She'd have him run around outside and play outdoor games – for which she recruited children of the servants of the castle.
He could see improvement on his health, as well as his strength and endurance. And as he saw improvement she also started upping how much activity he had to do daily.
This was how he was spending his mornings now. By the time noon came around he felt physically exhausted each day and more than ready to just spend the rest of the day studying.
Heron had also finally gotten around to filling out a personal spellbook that would help him to remember what spells he knew. While a spellbook wasn't absolutely necessary having one was nice as it would allow him to learn more spells than what he could actually remember at once.
He had left it in the library by accident one day though, and then freaked out the next day. Thankfully it was right where he had left it, though shifted a little. There were new spells written in it. That surprised him. Though he knew what had happened.
It caused him to chuckle realizing that Kur had found his spellbook and gifted him spells to study. He did set about studying them at night. And thanked his friend for them which put the shy wizard on the spot but he seemed happy.
Days really were becoming very full. Heron found himself falling asleep easier than he ever had before. He was always tired by the time night fell. But he also thrived on this busy lifestyle.
He loved feeling like he was actually growing, both physically and mentally. And the fact he was learning a dead language was exciting.
A month passed like this. They had pretty much figured out the language. There were two different parts to the language. A normal alphabet sort of system that worked much like their own, and symbols that represented all sorts of basic concepts and things. Joining them together could be used to represent more complex things. It was basically a kind of shorthand.
That was actually really useful for magic and Heron could see some similarities to the runes and the shapes drawn when casting spells. They were different, these were sharper and more distinct. But they had the some of the same concepts to the basic magic runes. And there were some runes that were altogether unlike the magic symbols he was already familiar with.
Magic runes though also had unique runes to each spell, that were modified off of the base runes that signified things. These could probably be somewhat substituted but Heron was not sure to what degree and did not want to play around with that.
Anyway the runes were obviously made for the purpose of being able to quickly get across concepts as their were runes for non-concrete sort of ideas. And with the regular words to sketch around these other ones, it could be used to quite easily explain things.
But it was a complicated language. To actually write in it would take a lot more studying. But he felt like they could probably struggle through reading it.
He decided to practice on the book he did not care about translating as well. So the one they could not read at all. It turned out to be another history book. This one on the last king of Nireal. Most of it was written in the more regular runes. But there were some that weren't. There were two people that the book discussed a lot that had the special runes constantly written by them. A woman named Xeltia had a string of symbols before her name almost every time her name came up. The symbols for faith, Xi'eli, commitment, and honor. The other one that kept showing up was named Summit, who had the symbols of arcane, nature, servitude, and shielding always written after his name.
It wasn't hard to figure out from context and the other book he had read that the woman's symbols were symbolizing that she was the High Priestess and the man's were for the Protector.
There were other symbols in the book as well and Heron slowly did his best to figure out what they meant with Kur's help. By the time they had read throughout the book, rather slowly cause they weren't that good with the language, they felt more comfortable with it.