The candle flames atop the arm-thick candlesticks flickered without a breeze.
James set down the scroll in his hand and closed his eyes. The life energy within him stirred faintly as he guided crimson streams of energy to carve an upward-pointing arrow into the flesh on the back of his right hand.
Tiwaz represented wisdom, immortality, victory, and more.
He watched in silence for a moment. The rune, formed from fiery-red lines of energy, did nothing beyond glowing faintly red. It neither hurt nor itched, and he felt no change in his body whatsoever.
After recently devouring all the knowledge he could find at Kamar-Taj's Sanctum Sanctorum about the various forces of magic, James had accepted that his life energy wasn't suited to constructing magical forms out of thin air like the mystics here.
The method he'd come up with was to take inspiration from Asgardian Rune Magic, which could imbue objects with a measure of divine power, and use his own living flesh as the foundation for building a new power with his life energy—
a cornerstone.
Washington, the White House, the Oval Office.
John Kennedy watched his youngest son crouch behind the Resolute desk. Pretending not to notice him hiding, he let the boy crawl past his feet and wriggle underneath the desk, which the Queen of England had given him years ago.
Little John pushed open the panel beneath the desk. It had been specially made to hide President Roosevelt's disabled legs, but sadly, he'd used it for only a little over seventy days before passing away unexpectedly.
The president's youngest son was not yet two years old. His tiny feet were smaller than Kennedy's palm. As he looked at the Awakening Project proposal in front of him, he fought the instinctive urge to touch his ribs