Completed Knitting Glyphs

[Tsaba]

63rd Summer, 513AV The first few books that Tsaba had copied in her job at the library were books on weaving and stitching styles. She hadn't expected to ever need them again. Yet there she was, small desk buried under a stack of parchment and two large books open to knitting patterns. Well, mostly buried. To the right, a piece of parchment was laid flat, corners held down by tiny rocks. The parchment itself displayed a few carefully drawn glyphs. Along the bottom of the parchment, with the weighting stones carefully placed so as not to cover any words, were instructions: This scroll contains a bit of fire reimancy, enough to cause serious harm or death if used incorrectly. When you intend to use the scroll it must always be pointed away from the body and at the target when the trigger is activated. If the barrier or any other part of the scroll is damaged, the magic inside of it will be released. The trigger for this scroll is "Roza" meaning death, end, termination, and interrupted in the ancient tongue. It is only to be spoken when you intend to release the magic. Tsaba had no intention of using the scroll; at least, not before it started to decay and housing the magic within it became dangerous. But she did very much want to study it, to open her Auristic sight and watch the ripples of magic flowing within, to learn to replicate that effect on paper. But she was still very weak from the body transference ritual. Any magic, especially such an intensive Auristic analysis as she craved, would have to wait. Instead, she worked with knitting patterns. What she really wanted was a way to tie her barrier runes together to make them a single glyph. She was pretty sure she almost had it. She'd laid out interlocking 'skeletons' last time, made sure that the core of each glyph fit into the core of the next, although they weren't physically touching. She was pretty sure that she was on the right path. But it felt... inconsistent. Some matches were stronger than other matches. She wanted them to fit together like stitches in wool. The wool colour could vary, even the stitch type or spacing could vary, and the fabric would still hold together, unmistakeably one piece. That was what she wanted to replicate in ink. So Tsaba pored over the books. She remembered drawing out those knitting diagrams when she'd first copied the books. now she just had to do that again. She had to capture the heart of those stitches, in runes. She had to learn to stitch in ink.

[Tsaba]

Tsaba copied out rows of knitting patterns. She copied out rows of barrier runes. She sought a way to marry them. The thing about knitting was that each stitch had the sides pulled into the same shape by neighbouring stitches. If stitches couldn't be pulled into the same interlocking pattern, they weren't used together. Tsaba had tried to make the 'skeletons' the cores, of each rune interlock, but each was different; what she needed to do was to find a common interlocking pattern within them, an make that the core. So... pretty much exactly how she'd learned to draw a focus glyph, except instead of distilling a core from the glyphs of others, she was doing it from her own. Glyphing could be extremely frustrating. It was like learning a language, except without being given an alphabet or any sort of context; it was like being handed a large book in a tongue and hand you didn't know and being told, "This is a book about elephants. Not copy it until you understand it." The Valterran had destroyed so much, had reduced what should be a creative art to an imitative one. It had left them with a handful of sigils and wizardly instinct, and from there, they had to try to recreate the art. If only she knew more... But... She did know more, didn't she? She'd painted other sigils, fresh sigils, on her skin mere days ago; she'd done it on instinct, as she had a hundred times before. Tsaba picked up her brush and quickly drew the runes from her body transfer ritual along the bottom of the page. Left hand, right hand, left foot, right foot, chest, forehead, tongue. They came easily, as they always did. She laid them out in approximate relation to each other as they were on a body, each stroke familiar and right. The long vertical line with the intersecting smaller X forming the core of each. The two circles laid over the chest rune, one smaller than and sitting inside the other, like a double wall where the inner was pierced by the lines of the X, and the outer only by the vertical line. The equilateral triangles laid over the wrist runes. The extra lines on the tongue, turning the X into a many-pointed star; the same thing on the forehead with an added horizontal line, making it look like a compass symbol. The little half-moons on the feet. She'd never really noticed the vertical-line-X combination forming the center of each rune before. Well, of course she'd noticed it; she just hadn't found it noteworthy or important. But laid out as the runes were... her eyes flicked to her pile of notes, to an example focus. And she could see what was wrong with it. She picked up her brush and etched out another focus glyph, as if she were writing a rune on a body. She started with the core lines. They were present in her focus normally, but a little uneven, a little off, because of her normal stroke order. Around them, she added the rest of the skeleton, and then the peripherals. Yes. That was more... well, that was definitely Tsaba's 'handwriting'. She traced a finger down the vertical line in her chest rune, then along each stroke of the X. Under her breath, almost without realising, she murmured, "Djed." She similarly outlined the two circles. "Djas." The djed lines, the backbone, didn't show up much in her barrier runes. Not more than you would expect from mere coincidence. That made sense. They were the heart of nothing; they were a wall. 'Daeq', they should read. Perhaps 'Korad' or 'Randjaq'. Perhaps a complex compilation of the intent of all three. If was not something that she had the information to decode. But it was important, she realised, to focus less on the core of an individual unit, and more on its effect on the whole. Like knitted stitches pulling each other into place. Tsaba bent back over her parchment, and kept writing.

[Tsaba]

Tsaba painted a star in the center of the page to act as a placeholder for a focus. And around that, she drew a barrier. Using the spacing method she'd developed in class, she painted the skeleton of the glyph directly above the focus, then directly below. She filled in the rune to the direct left and the direct right. Then one in the middle of each gap, providing a framework for the cores of eight runes to act as a support structure for the glyph, to keep the spacing even. She prioritised not the strokes that formed the central structure of each, but the strokes that connected each to the whole, that gave an indication of an overall circular shape. None of them needed to stand strong on their own. They needed to pull on each other, tie in together, distribute tension around the circle evenly. She filled in the gaps with skeletons for the rest of the runes, and only then, only when she had a full circle, did she go back and complete each rune, fleshing out its core and adding the flourishes that hinted at a commonality between them.

[Tsaba]

The barrier was clumsy due to her lack of practice, but Tsaba was pretty sure that the method was sound. She repeated the process a couple more times, and each time, the lines became clearer and more sure. The best thing about being a Nuit, in Tsaba's opinion, was the lack of need to stop for basic body maintenance every few hours -- there was no need to pause for food or sleep. The sun began to sink; she lit a candle, and kept working. When she was fairly confident in her ability to replicate the circular barrier, she started experimenting with other shapes -- rectangles, triangles, straight lines, spirals. Dr Marin hadn't seemed to think that there was any use for such things, and Tsaba decided that she was probably right, but she had a principle to explore. A barrier was written in letters as surely as words across a page; letters she couldn't separate or recognise individually, but letters all the same. Yet they were written circularly, in two dimensions instead of one. If non-circular barriers could work, if they were as legitimate as circular barriers but for geometric reasons, then that second dimension could be actively utilised as part of the sentence structure... and that meant if probably was actively utilised. Glyphing was writing, writing in a language and alphabet that communed with the nature of the universe itself; not an artificial language like Common, but something like body language. That was evident in the ability for wizards to recognise wildly differently drawn glyphs as the same thing written by different wizards, much as how a human could recognise the fear or aggression of a wolf, even though neither of them had learned any code for it and would express the emotions differently. And if glyphing was in fact an alphabet that could be expressed two-dimensionally, or even (and here Tsaba once again traced the superimposed djed and djas symbols that made up her chest rune) three-dimensionally, then that allowed for a lot of flexibility and complexity within a very limited character set. It seemed like the sort of system that somebody would create in order to express a language that relied on a lot of nuance, tone and context to express concepts with very few words. Like an old, "primitive" language that was developed verbally without any regard for the written word, because there was no written word yet. It seemed like a sort of written system that might be given to the speakers of such a language, given by somebody so powerful that the system they so constructed had power. Too much power to be safely or efficiently used for everyday information recording. So a shorthand might be developed; a simplistic, one-dimensional model lacking context, lacking even vowel-sounds, since it only existed as a sort of second-rate, base carrier of information, where anything truly important could be read from a glyph. It also seemed like the sort of system that, carrying power as it did, would be vulnerable to a sudden, unexpected wave of divine power and magical storms. Exactly the sort of records to be all but wiped out, leaving behind only a few scraps of symbols from which to rebuild, so that people later looking for the origin of the written word would be left only with the primitive shorthand version. A version that made a lot less sense as a divine gift, because it was so poorly suited to the way the verbal language was used. Tsaba became aware that she had stopped glyphing some time ago. She wasn't sure exactly how long she had been staring blankly at the page, but not only was all the ink upon it dry, so was her brush. She shook her head, cleaned her brush, and got back to work. Her immediate concern was mastering the art of glyphing. Her theories on its origin could wait. After all, she had time.

[Abstract]

Tsaba

Skills

+ Planning - 1
+ Drawing - 2
+ Observation - 1
+ Glyphing - 1

Lores

+ Planning out a new kind of Glyph
+ Glyphing is like another language
+

Other:


Notes

Not much to give here. However, it was... interesting. But I wasn't entirely sure what you were doing exactly... and what knitting had to do with this XD

If you have any questions, comments or concerns about this grade, please PM me and we can work it out!