Solo Seeking the Inscriptrix

[Tsaba]

2nd Fall, 513 AV

Tsaba loved being so close to a library. Even after spending most of her life in close proximity to one, she took care not to take the luxury for granted.

She was becoming very familiar with the library's general layout and never became lost any more. Even though she'd never had use for certain sections, she knew where they were.

So her steps didn't falter as she headed for the shelves of books on religion.

Gods weren't something that Tsaba ever gave much thought to. They were there, they did their jobs, she did hers. She was no priest and they weren't really relevant to each other. But merely learning glyphing wasn't enough to properly develop her theory on its origins. If she wanted to show that glyphing was a gift of Qalaya, the original language, the divine language, and that other written forms of nader-canoch were mere shadows and historical artefacts, then she needed to understand the being that she was claiming as their benefactor. She needed to know about Qalaya.

To Tsaba, every book and every library was sacred. But she had the feeling that anything about the divine should be treated with even more respect. So she didn't touch the shelves as she passed books on Laviku, Rak'Keli, Zulrav... why didn't Qalaya have a temple in Zeltiva, anyway? It was a city of academics! ... and paused only when she reached Qalaya. After several chimes' deliberation, she donned a woolen glove to protect the book from her skin and carefully pulled down Word of the Inscriptrix -- the History of Writing and Religion.

It would be a good start.

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[Tsaba]

Tsaba had never studied history, as such. She knew what she had picked up in a long life of reading and speaking to others. She knew what the Valterran was. She knew that the world was once different. She knew the names of the old nations and had a vague idea of why Sahova had been established. But she knew very little more than that.

So seeing everything tied together in a history of writing was somewhat eye-opening.

The book didn't have much information on what most people would consider the prominent aspects of history. The Valterran was mentioned in the context of its effect on written records and how cultural shifts changed writing styles and methods, not as an event of interest in its own right. The book spent a lot of time instead on the origin of writing, with sketches and reproductions of the earliest examples known, at least when the book had been published. To somebody who had spent years doing little but reading Nader-Canoch manuscripts on Sahova, it was underwhelming. There was a little chart showing the evolution of major languages over time, with examples of script; she dutifully copied it out.

But reading about the history was less useful than she would have expected. Writing was writing, and it wasn't all that relevant what had happened since its creation. She was interested in before its creation. She wasn't looking for how human-developed shorthand scripts changed over time. She was looking for glyphs. She was looking for the divine.

She was going to need a different approach.

x

[Tsaba]

Tsaba took out a fresh piece of parchment. It always helped to write one's thoughts down. That way they could be properly analysed.

She wrote, Writing is a gift from Qalaya, and underlined it with a single stroke.

Underneath, she wrote, Nader-Canoch is poorly written, and frowned. Too ambiguous. That needed expanding.

Nader-Canoch is too simplistic to be accurately scripted in a one-dimensional, non-tonal alphabet. The alphabet is not sufficient for proper communication in the language.

Written nader-canoch lacks too many important features for a base language.

She drew and arrow, and added, Is this the sort of script a divine being would grant? Reads as a shorthand.

Everything she'd written so far had been on the left side of the page. She moved to the right side, creating a second column.

Glyphing is the universal alphabet of magic.

That, too, was underlined.

Glyphs are written in two-dimensional space; placement allows for context and subtlety not allowed by one-dimensional phonetic alphabet. = more appropriate for nader-canoch than standard written alphabet.

Glyphs contains power beyond their mere shape. Glyphs are drawn too differently from each other by different wizards to be properly recognised; glyphs can still be properly recognised.

Glyphs are letters with power.

Another arrow.

How could humans develop a language of magic, to put magic where it is not? Conjecture: glyphing is the language of the divine.

Then, in the center of the page, across the end of both columns, she wrote, Glyphs are Qalaya's gift to humanity.

Another arrow down. Glyphs are time-consuming = shorthand alphabets developed. Another arrow. Valterran. Glyphs are vulnerable to magic = many are erased by wild magic and general destruction. Arrow. Few early glyphs survive compared to shorthand writing, = mortal alphabets assumed to be original alphabet.

There. That was the chain of logic. That was what she was trying to support. What she needed was information pertaining to each of those steps, to each logical link in the chain.

It wasn't going to be easy.

x