Comment by Maria

Everyone else is all excited about the eating-problem but I'm just like nah maybe she, idk, does magic and gets food out of the air or something? (Or maybe she had more squirrels than the only one left OK SORRY NO.)

Or maybe she's the spiderman of this city. You know, bitten by a mutant squirrel and now she's got super powers and she can do miracles and talk to squirrels and, um, do squirrel things. And find food out of nowhere.

But what made me curious is that "everyone expects runewriters to have some stuff wrong with them". We can see Sev is very good at this, and Jonan has some minor problems too, and Aember is not doing much better. We even saw Iavin with his some kind of a scar thing on the head, and wasn't that guardian lady someone like that too? So - what about Xira? He doesn't seem to have any problems so far. Either he hasn't been doing witch stuff long enough to fail OR he's mentally insane. Or he's miscasts haven't hit him but the victim... I mean, he does stuff in people's HEADS. You can't convince me he's never made any big big mistakes. (Maybe that's why he's no longer with his family.)

Reply by Glew

Very valid point! I know I pondered this too. I mean I don't even want to imagine what kind of disaster he could do without a miscast, not to mention with one.

Also the vote incentive suggests you can research rune of certain purposes? As in Jonan was looking for a rune that silences someone. So there must be SOME sort of known logic or system behind runewriting, one that even runewriters know of. I mean this far it was said that it is unlike other fantasy magic which you can just learn from books, that it is very intuitive. But this suggests, there is in fact an element of control over what kind of new spells you get.
That being said, it then says an awful lot about someone what kind of spells they can cast...

Reply by Why?!?!

I think Jonan's vote incentive bit is referencing how he created---from his healing magic---a rune to seal flesh together. Which he uses to bind people's lips together so they can't speak and thus can't say the verbal component of rune casting. I don't think Jonan necessarily got the spell from anyone.