[SO-Sylira] A Sense of Symbolism

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[SO-Sylira] A Sense of Symbolism

Postby Keene Ward on September 5th, 2015, 11:28 pm

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The fourth day of fall, 515 AV

The steady rise and fall of the ocean's waves rocked the sturdy wooden vessel in a lapping lullaby. Gentle spays of salty mist drifted across the mostly vacant deck of the ship, dampening everything in a thin layer of briny dew. Everything but a young man with book and quill in hand, eyes focused on the pages as he dipped his quill in a moment of steady peace. Keene sat, body and book shielded from the spray of the ocean, squinting slightly under the light of the moon as he examined his handiwork. Though his time on Sahova had been put on hold due to forces beyond what he was privy to, his pursuit of knowledge and practice of skill was hardly stifled. On the open waters of the ocean with nothing but the rolling rise and fall of the blue-green waves in every direction, Keene had found that the members of the ship were not comfortable with the few wizards - nuit and otherwise - practicing their various crafts. The captain had said it was too dangerous, and anyone caught casting spells of any substance would be thrown overboard. The general response had been one of minor disgruntled acquiescence, as everyone was fully aware that what the captain had ordered was reasonable.

That did not, however, mean that there was nothing for the researchers of various fields to take part in, Keene included. His hands felt lighter without the leather vambraces that had become like a second skin to him, but it was something he found to be more of a feeling than an actual truth, as he was still perfectly able to wield a quill with just as much proficiency as he had been able to before, not that that proficiency was laudable in most respects. Though he had only been on the ship a few short days, Keene had set his efforts towards furthering his understanding of the far more magically benign world of glyphing and, by some extent, animation. At first, he had tried to craft an entire new alphabet, but he had found that the letters and correlations were too contrived to be functional. His symbols had shifted somewhat, Master Rayage's words remembered in explanation that glyphs could be used to pen Nader Canoch, to give a spoken language form.

His quill scritched over the paper, ink left behind at an angle as he moved over the page. It was difficult to keep his hand steady in tandem with the gentle rock of the ship, but even with a slightly wobbly scrawl, it was more than enough to practice. He had begun to link certain symbols with the overarching concepts of the ancient tongue, and while it had taken him the better hours of the past few days, shifting from solitary perch to perch as the deckhands and passengers alike moved about the deck and within the ship's hold, he had begun to find a familiarity in the various combinations of dots, curves, circles, and lines, some even eliciting in the forefront of his mind vague reminders of what it was he aimed to convey. Progress, then, had acted as a steady lure, pulling him along as he slowly but steadily shifted the off white papers of his practice book to a dusty grey, his inks put to use and quills finally finding more use than once every now and then.

With fingers stained by the incessant use of pen and ink, Keene stared blankly down at the pages before him, nib hovering over a small blotch of darkness were the ink had dripped onto the paper. Nen. He could see it, exemplified in the simplicity of a single dot. Taking quill in hand, he gently pressed out another small dot, finding that the glyph, while basic, was only the beginning. He pulled two lines together, an angle with nen in its crook. Abase. Life began from youth, from the young, thus nen was pulled forward. The various scribbles of runes before all faded from his focus as Keene continued, quill moving to his thoughts rather than the commands of his mind. He had spent so long staring at the ink that it had become familiar to the point where the gentle rock and sway of the ship seemed to come not from the massive hull of wood where flesh lay housed in safety from the elements, but instead from the very pages he had filled, lakes of muddy darkness upon shores of murky beige.

Water. Adra. The quill made a dip, a curved "u" settling on the page. Keene's lips turned in a slight frown. The flow of the marking was certainly indicative of fluidity, but it lacked substance. It was abstracted... Yaq. Weighting the rune with a dot in the middle of the "u's" cradle, Keene found adra. Found. The idea was strange to him, that a craft was discovered over created. Still, it wasn't unwarranted. His progression of shielding and reimancy alike had been grounded in fact but had expanded through experience and, essentially, the more airy "feeling". Thus, as the quill continued to move and drew Keene's thoughts back to the task at hand, Keene found it was not nearly so strange that his fingers felt more possessed than his own as he focused on the next logical progression of the runes had begun to find their way onto the page.
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Last edited by Keene Ward on September 12th, 2015, 9:31 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Keene Ward
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[SO-Sylira] A Sense of Symbolism

Postby Keene Ward on September 6th, 2015, 6:24 am

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Rather than focusing on the art of writing itself, Keene found his attentions drawn towards the djed within him. It was different than manipulating the essence of his being into a specific spell, rather he found his body moved of the accord his djed - a circular sort of concept that he didn't linger on. He could feel his djed, shifting and thinking, drawing upon what information it had to produce an actualized, symbolic character to represent what it could. The quill dipped, dabbed, and lit onto the paper with a gentle, steady scritch, leaving behind a single, simple line. Djed. He stared down at the simplicity of the rune's solidarity and the vast array of potential that it possessed. He understood the word to mean many things, though the definitions were far too myriad for him to properly gather under the single heading, but the main point of the word itself was "soul". Again, the quill moved, Keene's muscles twitching as they worked to actualize the flitting concepts within the fringes of his own consciousness. Two more lines drawn in mirror of the other met in the center of yet another vertical line to form a wide "k". Djas.

Had Keene been one to find humor in irony, or even the separate concepts of humor or irony in general, he may have found the concept of the first letter of his name to represent the Nader Canoch "I" or "self" amusing. As things were, however, he simply moved on, the symbol only a symbol to him in his search for revelation as it slowly continued to blossom before him on the hungry pages of his journal. Another "k" was drawn, followed by a mirror along the vertical line, creating a single symbol out of what might have been two, forming nader. The symbols continued to flow, ala, ruwe, vaknui, ranuri, radjud, cha, daeq, djunn, roza, vasat... Each had a form that, when penned, matched his concepts of the various words: sky, earth, fire, craving, brokenness, ice, creation, art, finality, conflict. They were there, in his mind and slipping from the nib of the quill, even as he dipped it once more into the ink.

It was an odd sensation, one that was comparable to a very lucid dream. He understood what was unfolding before him, and while he also knew that his body moved of his own volition, it did not quite seem as such. Another vertical line, this one boasting two horizontal tails from its top and bottom with a circular dot in the middle. Canoch. The rock of the ocean had been forgotten, though it still had plenty of impact in the uncertain stroke of his pen, and while the moonlit mists of the night sprayed on, Keene was drawn into a world of his own making, the few others who shared the deck with him little more than unnecessary shadows on the fringe of his vision. A square was penned with a line centered in the middle, carefully confined by both the top and the bottom of the shape it split in half. Irst. The line was removed in the next shape, a square first with a circle drawn so that it intersected each side of the prior shape while allowing the corners space enough to create arrows with concave backs. Gug.

His hand moved to dip the quill once more, but his eyes remained on the page and - in a shift of the ship's position upon the rolling hills of the ocean's seascape - he knocked the vial from its perch atop the crate had claimed for the night's work. Gaze pulled from the pages of his work, Keene watched the vial bonce off of the wood below, rolling in a haphazard path marked by the dark stain of the spilled ink down the way. Setting his book aside, Keene rose in a fluid motion, halted for a few ticks as the stiffness of his legs once more found fluidity in their use, each step bringing him closer to his prior state of mobility and the retreating figure of his inkwell. When he was close enough, he knelt down, quickly reclaiming it and assessing the loss, finding that at least half of the bottle had been lost to the weather worn boards below him. His attention was drawn from the disappointing adhesion of his fingers to the slight stick of the wasted ink that saturated the sides of the glass in his hand towards the steady, milky light of the moon.

It had been a long time since he had last seen the moon. There was nothing particularly brilliant about it that night, partially veiled behind the few stray strands of cloud that remained in the darkened sky littered with flecks of starlight. If anything, it was more plain than usual, so mundane that, in its sheer lack of distinguishable difference, it had become almost alien. Keene had seen the moon many, many times, but with his mind still churning with the various potentials of abstraction given form, he gazed at the moon like one might any other word. Randjaq. He could see the moon, it's circular body split in half by one of the many ropes, a knot easily fitting into the very center.

Returning to his crate, Keene opened the journal, penning the rune down several times until he felt it radiate the nature of what it was he wanted to impart. The moon itself was not a prison, but the symbol itself was reminiscent of a shut door. It possessed the potential to be opened, to be freed, but it was sealed by the folly of youth and the solidity of the soul. There were more runes drifting through his djed, jumbling the nature of his self. He could feel them, itching to be actualized, and he set about dipping the quill and drawing upon the pages for several chimes more, allowing himself to once more sink into the strange numbness of the glyphing itself.
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Keene Ward
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[SO-Sylira] A Sense of Symbolism

Postby Keene Ward on September 6th, 2015, 6:51 am

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Daraq: two vertical lines with a circular dot on either side, paved the way for glig, effectively an "H" with tails on either end of the horizontal bridge. Vino followed, a slight variation of the prior symbol, taking more of an "h" shape with a similar elongated bridge. How many bells had passed, Keene neither knew nor cared to know. The pages had been filled with more than successes, and his ink had begun to dwindle. Still, there were more words to give form, more runes to discover. He stared down at what he had drawn already, his gaze catching on those symbols which were true glyphs and passing over the others as easily as if they had been nothing more than the pictures that they were. It was an odd manner of visual searching, something that was familiar in the sense that it was slightly similar to how he might search for an aura: he was drawn to that which held power.

The glyphs themselves didn't possess any true ability. They were vessels, empty but willing, should they created with anything more than the sheer sake of creation. There was a familiarity about them, one that Keene found no reason to question. They had come from him, and in a sense, they were him. They were representations of his own djed, his own soul, and the manner in which Master Rayage had explained the supportive magic to him began to make some sense. He was able to read his own glyphs because they were not writing so much as they were a reflection of will. His thoughts were drawn back to the impressive sigil he had been called to protect seasons before. The purpose had eluded him, but the power of the writings had been clear. They had been far different than those before him, but he had seen key concepts: "connection", "continuity", "containment". The words, if they could have been called such, had been too complex, too vast, for him to truly comprehend.

Quill lifted and thoughts were once more penned. The concepts of connection and unity pulled at his djed, finding its way to the page in a vertical line that joined two horizontal ones, each only coming to half the length of the other before extended a half length farther in opposite directions. Korad. He leaned back against a smaller, less sturdy box than the one he currently sat upon, considering the logic of his actions. It was undeniable that simple trial and error had given him little result other than pages and pages of relatively useless content, but he wasn't quite certain the strange sensation of "rightness" that came with his current methods was quite infallible. The concept of "inspiration" wasn't something he had ever put much stock in, and though he currently benefited from him, Keene did not forget that the runes he penned were the written equivalent of speculation. There would be time, he knew, to study and refine them.

Leaning forward once more, Keene flexed his fingers before regripping the quill. Until the time came for him to more closely analyze his experimentation in introspective revelation, he found that it was a waste of time to spend what was potentially a limited window of inspiration wondering about the validity of what could easily be the proper notation he'd been attempting to create for so long. Sutla came next, a horizontal line with a short vertical cap on its right end. Out of it, after several uncertain trials, rose the forests of fuguru, a horizontal line with two vertical lines rising out of it, the left taller than the right, and a circular dot beneath it all. Each symbol was, in a way, reflective of the others, and while the correlations between certain symbols and the specifics of his own life may have escaped him, he found the inter-connectivity appropriate and, if anything, marginally more valid than the concepts of sheer luck or chance to support his progression.
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[SO-Sylira] A Sense of Symbolism

Postby Keene Ward on September 12th, 2015, 6:35 am

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There were only a few more runes left, and while the ink was running low, so too was his djed inspired state of epiphany. The quill moved once more, ink left behind in a sideways "u", vertical lines rising and falling from the outside of the initial shape at about the middle of the entire letter. Dala. His hand pulled back for a tick before setting down to pen a hook, an elongated left line into the dip of a "u" with a circular dot in its center. Keene's quill scratched out several more instances of kasai, until a curved "u" with its mouth to the right, a small horizontal line to the left attached to its crook, and a small circular dot denoted hea, "reaching". It was appropriate that hope and reaching and change all shared similarities.

With a sigh, his body reminded him that fatigue had begun to set in at least a bell back. Taking time to set the quill aside - with care taken to keep the inkwell in its place - Keene rose, stretching his arms and legs before lightly pressing the back of his knuckles to his his closed eyes. In the darkness of his own mind, runes drifted in a myriad of shape and size. He wasn't sure how long he had been on the deck, but the moon had already passed the crook of its arc, and the soft hiss of the waves had grown just a hair louder since he had last taken note of them. Making his way with light step and quiet feet, Keene leaned against the ship's gunnel, staring out into the waters to relax the tense state his eyes had fallen into. It was different from the strain of auristics or the pounding of a mundane headache; it was the buzz of information, of creativity. Djunn. The angled point split by a vertical line crossed his vision, and Keene let his eyes close once more, letting the rock of the ocean pull the thoughts from him in the brief moment of respite.

When the quill was taken up once more, Keene's mind had calmed some. What had become a roaring flare of djed rising and falling as his self had settled into a steady hum, something that he found was accessible through the quiet, gentle scratch of the quill against paper, aimless shapes made until his hands took over. Pond: a vertical line with a horizontal line on the bottom left and one on the upper right, both attached to the respective opposite ends of the first with two circular dots on either side. He stared down at the symbol, his quill still moving in a near mindless manner, shapes drifting from its tip. Some were certain while others were almost as abstract as the concepts they represented. When he looked back, he found his attentions drawn towards those there were more triangular. For several chimes, Keene drew and redrew the three lines in varying lengths and relations, until three even lines found their way onto the page, the point of the shape straight up towards the top of the page. In the center, Keene dabbed a single dot; yomi.

He slowly began to flip through the pages, eyes catching on those symbols he recognized, lips moving silently as he repeated their meanings to himself, checking against the relatively small vocabulary that he shared with the language itself. He could think of only one more word he had yet to "discover", and so he settled into focusing on the concept and feel of the word as he let the book fall to a fresh page, ink quick to fill it as he let his hands display the thoughts that were typically kept within him, the scritch of the quill only truly audible to him in the face of peaceful lap of the waves and hiss of sea as the night carried on unimpeded by the young mage's efforts. A circle with a single line was finally drawn, the line almost a drip from the bottom curve of the circle's influence. Two more at angles mirror on the lower half of the circle's remaining space were added, and as he stared down at zaptl, Keene repeated the symbol until it filled the page, various adjustments in shape or size until he arrived at a small circle, only large enough to barely include a dot of white to set it apart from most of the other dots he had used prior, with a longer center line and shorter auxiliary ones.
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Keene Ward
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[SO-Sylira] A Sense of Symbolism

Postby Keene Ward on September 12th, 2015, 7:02 am

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Though his eyes had grown heavy, it had been nearly a season of steady work since he'd last felt as though he'd made any true progress in the strange in-between world of personal and world magic that was glyphing. Deciding that it was worth a few days' worth of discomfort due to mental and physical fatigue to compile the runes while he had them fresh in his mind and in his book, the quill was taken up once more. This time, however, there was more flipping of pages than there was filling of them as he scanned back through his work, penning each symbol down in alphabetical order based off the symbol's meaning. First, abase then adra, ala, canoch... until the list the finished with zaptl.

It was a strange revelation to find the correlation between what he had just done in his own arbitrary creation and copulation of symbol of meaning with that of the Common Tongue. In Common, "a" had several different pronunciations, but it was still "the letter a". That single letter could be joined with other letters, all possessing various different phonetic sounds, which would then create a word. That word was, in essence, the same as the Nader Canoch ideas: abstract linked to the concrete. In the end, however, his weariness began to drag at his capacity for thought, jumbling together epiphany with exhaustion until he was forced to close the book, recap what was left of the ink within the vial, and make his way on unsteady legs to the hold below.

As he made his way to the bed that had been allotted him, Keene lay back upon the firm, ungiving cushion of the mattress and let his eyes finally close. He could see the various symbols swimming in his head, snippets of Nader Canoch from years of lessons sounding in vague whispers as he drifted right on the edge of consciousness. There was so much he had yet to learn, and in the time he had had on the island, he'd only been able to glean a small amount of the vastness of what magic truly was. With Sahova's resources no longer accessible to him, Keene drowsily came to the realization that he was on his own. There were no more masters to guide him, no Wardens to show him the way. The world, as it was, held nothing more to give him. What was left to him had to be taken, in some way or form.

It was the final cohesive thought that passed through his mind before he fell back into the subconscious drift from night terror to empty darkness.
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Keene Ward
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[SO-Sylira] A Sense of Symbolism

Postby Pulren Marsh on December 14th, 2015, 1:42 am

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A Grade is Coming
Your Wave
A fine inquiry into the meanings of Nader Canoch and their connection to Keen's own Djed.

 
Keene
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  • Writing 4
  • Glyphing 5
  • Meditation 3
Lores
  • Nader Canoch: Abstract to Concrete in Form
  • Similarities between Nader Canoch and Common as languages
  • Glyphing: Personal Glyphs a reflection of Will



Your Grader,


Pulren Marsh
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Pulren Marsh
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