Pride

Gaton’s happiness was not unwarranted. Even if all twenty of the rune knights were novices equipped only with elementary runes, that was at least a hundred runes that Richard needed to produce. Over three years that was an average of about three a month.

Runemasters weren’t always successful in producing their runes. Even great runemasters failed on occasion, and regular ones only had a success rate of about 30% for a grade 1 rune. Although grand runemasters were better, they still had a failure rate of about 30% as well.

Although the time taken to manufacture an elementary rune could range from a few days to an entire month, the process couldn’t randomly be compressed. The bulk of the time used in the manufacture of a rune was to check for mistakes in the hand-drawn magic formations, and making additional amendments to them. The likelihood of such mistakes having occurred depended on the precision of one’s drawing, making it a core quality of a runemaster....