Sigilia

Sigilia

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Sigilia, nicknamed “Jilly” for short by her close friends, spends her days in her den, at her desk, hunched over piles of books, the pages of which are packed with enough runes to make any inexperienced dragon’s head spin. The truth is, Sigilia doesn’t know what the runes mean either, but that’s her job. Sigilia pours over old magical texts, the languages of which have become long-lost, and works to translate those runes into modern Draconic.

Translating spells is no easy task. Cramming all the information in a spell into a singular rune is difficult in the first place, but to come across those runes thousands of years later, with no context, and have to decipher what those runes mean, is an entirely different story. It’s not just a matter of finding the corresponding spell and being able to decipher the rune from that. Sigilia has to work backwards, and try to find out what a rune symbolizes before she can know what kind of spell it represents. It’s a lot of trial and error, and Sigilia can often be heard in her den swearing up a storm as she guessed the spell incorrectly and some sort of den-contained chaos has ensued.

There’s a lot of back and forth between Sigilia and Runice. Either Runice will come across a mysterious rune while cleaning up and repairing a spellbook and bring it to Sigilia to decipher, or Sigilia will find a page missing or in great disrepair and will bring it to Runice so she can fix it. Sigilia sees Runice in a very maternal light, and frequently confides in her, mostly about the struggles she has with her work.

Other dragons might make snarky comments about how all the runes Sigilia fixates on have addled her mind, but this isn’t really true. While non-magically trained dragons might hear what Sigilia is saying and assume it’s gibberish, the trained mind will realize it’s just magical jargon and makes perfect sense. The only way in which studying runes has affected Sigilia’s mind is by giving her debilitating headaches, and her den is frequently pitch-black and eerily silent as Sigilia tries her best to stave these headaches off.