"Top to right. Left sweeps up. Double ogonek."
He straightened his back to a series of satisfying cracks. Lying before him on the table, surrounded by various styli and bearing a chain of glyphs winding the entirety of its surface, the stone had begun to hum gently. One of the closer, smaller styli drifted absently upward. The grammarian smiled to himself as he gently plucked it from the air and began to put away his tools.
On his left forearm he placed each stylus into its own holster. The whetstone went into a pouch on his right hip; the luminous and rune-covered chunk of amber, his left. His eyepiece, itself consisting of a lens of quartz mounted in bronze and padded with leather, was clipped onto the shoulder of his jacket. Ringing the lens were freely-rotating silver discs covered in their own glyphs.
This last was his proudest invention. By adjusting the alignment of the discs, he could modify the semantics of the phrasing to adjust the magnification and focus of the lens they encircled. If this lodestone functioned properly, however, even this achievement of grammar would be overshadowed by the complexity of this new undertaking.
By now the stone was gliding, centimeters above the table, towards an old, iron vice. The grammarian was snapped from his happy thoughts by the crackling corona of the vice as the lodestone accelerated along its trajectory. Panicked, he snatched it from the air before the two could make contact. He chuckled at the close call as he turned around; it wouldn't do to have such a delicate creation be destroyed. Certainly, other masters of grammar had crafted phrasing that crudely acted against gravity, but this was unlike the others. The stone's negation of mass was merely a side effect of the complex script of glyphs carved into its surface.
He walked towards the silent mass of gears, cogs, shafts, and belts that hulked in the shadows. Scarcely a surface of the labyrinthine contraption was undecorated with some manner of rune. Certain parts were so densely covered that the grammarian couldn't decipher them without magnification while others bore a single large glyph. Behind a pair of quartz discs in mounts like those of his eyepiece was a ring of iron only slightly larger in diameter than the lodestone and marked with just four symbols spaced equidistantly around its perimeter.
As he lifted the lodestone towards the ring, springs began to flex and cogs started to strain at each other's teeth. He released the stone to float in the center of the ring and stepped back to watch eagerly as it began to pulse with an internal light and spin in place. Speed blurred its surface and a faint blue glow came from the pair of quartz lenses. With creaks and ratchets, the whole machine shifted to a standing position.
The grammarian looked up and smiled into the face of his construct.
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