"We are?!" Maddie asked, surprised to him say that they were in agreement. "I mean...I'm a Runes newbie, so I kind of thought you'd tell me I had it all wrong." She suddenly noticed that he was taking notes and figured that she should, too. She spread out a fresh piece of parchment before her, tossed her book to the side, and wrote down what they'd discussed so far. She also added in a few of her favorites, because she was a thirteen-year-old girly girl, and that's just what she did.

She smiled when Derf mentioned the storytelling aspect of Runes. "I've never quite thought of it that way," she said. "So are you still into Creatures, too? I remember that from my first year." They'd worked in the Nursery some together. She turned her focus back to the runes when Derf asked what she thought the combination of both of them meant. "Hmm..."

"I think it means that whoever used this maybe used it in times of war or struggle. Maybe it was when they wanted to stop or slow down to rethink what they were doing," she suggested. She took a minute to jot that down in her notes. "As for the pendant..." She had a feeling he already knew the answer but was giving her a chance, too. That was nice of him. She studied the pendant, comparing it to the same page in the textbook she'd used when studying the hinge strap. "Hagalaz... Ansuz..." She paused, her eyebrows wrinkling inward in confusion. "There's only two? I think I see Eihwaz there, too..."