Uncertainty

After extensive testing, I think it was just my imagination. Sometimes there are people in the City, and sometimes there aren’t.

Instancing

The Cavern has been behaving strangely. Sometimes Ae’gura is nearly empty, and at other times there are people running around. It may be that this is only a matter of sleep schedules, but I suspect otherwise, because the Nexus is affected as well.

I need to investigate this matter more carefully. I will post again when I am more certain of my observations.

Static discharge

One of the symptoms of the wonky Link is a small buildup of static electricity. This is inconvenient, as it makes the Book unsafe to carry electronics through.

I’ve been experimenting with tinfoil and some other forms of metal shielding to see if I could protect electronic devices with a Faraday cage. Unfortunately, it seems not to work at all. Thirty-five dollars worth of low-end digital watches later, I’ve concluded that my initial suspicion was correct: the static builds up evenly through the whole volume, so surface shielding doesn’t have any effect.

This is inconvenient, but not impossible to deal with. There are other Linking Books to Greenflower, in the Nexus; and if we lose those, then in the last extremity we can still Write a better Link.

Not that it isn’t still annoying.

Oh well.

Last night, I had a dream.

My dreams have been strange, of late.

I dreamed of an endless bell that rang from within my mind. I dreamed of an orb of steel and glass, and a battle between the Serpent, the Hand, and the Sun. I dreamed of a blasphemous Book to an Age that should not have been.

These things have the wrong character to be prophecy, but they are more vivid than mere dreaming. They are not true dreams, but they are Dreams.

Some days, I think I spend longer asleep than awake.

Link to Greenflower

Crossposted from the Greenflower thread:

I’m very pleased to report that I have successfully Written a Linking Book to the Greenflower meadow.

I should explain why I felt the need to do this. I have developed a sort of paranoia about losing access to the Cavern. This may even be not entirely unfounded: I’ve briefly lost access on occasion since I heard the Call, and there have been longer periods of Cavern closure — months or years, in some cases — before my time.

The only known Greenflower Book accessible outside of Nexus was Horatio’s, and I didn’t know where he was keeping it. I didn’t want to take the risk that he would leave it in Relto or Ae’gura, or that it would be somehow lost or damaged. If there’s anything I’ve learned from the history of D’ni and the Restoration, it’s not to keep all the eggs in one basket.

So I found a way.

This is my first serious foray into the Art, and the results are imperfect. Using the Linking Book is profoundly unpleasant; there’s a not entirely physical wrenching sensation as I travel through. There is also a slight static discharge, so I wouldn’t recommend carrying electronics through the Link (though my KI appears undamaged).

Still, the Link is functional, and appears to be safe. I’ll try to figure out what I did wrong so that I can correct it in future attempts at Writing.

I don’t know where I should put the Linking Book. At the moment, it’s in a safety deposit box in Eddy County, but I hope to find it a proper home soon: somewhere it will be available to the public, and where it will still be accessible if the Cavern is closed. Suggestions on this point are more than welcome.

Sanity

It seems I was writing the gahrohevtee with incorrect stroke order. I am shocked by how much of a difference Writing correctly makes. Before, the process threatened to break or warp or unmake me; now, it gives me … the only word I can think of is “orthodoxy”, but that’s entirely incorrect. It makes me right in the head, right in ways I didn’t know I had ever been wrong. Writing makes me terrifyingly sane.

The gahrohevtee, the Great Words, are things of immense power. It is a long-known law of nature that for every force exerted there is another equal and opposite; thus, in the course of Writing, as the mind impresses itself onto the Words, so also the Words impress themselves upon the mind.

If the Words are right, they exert a powerful righting — no, a right force; and if they are wrong, they exert a powerful, wrong force. I know this because I have seen it both ways.

I cannot begin to imagine what Writing must have done to Yeesha.

The Library

I’ve been exploring the Library in Ae’gura, ostensibly to find Books for research but really because I need a break.

I’ve been using Twitter to keep myself sane. The stream of relative banalities, matters of simple fact stripped of their poetry, are like air to a drowning mind. But I’m beginning to realize it’s not enough. I’m soaking in this, immersed in it, and if I don’t spend some time away from it I’m going to sink.

The Great Old Ones sound cool on paper, but it’s something entirely different to speak their tongue.

I spent at least half an hour today curled up on the stone floor, crying. It was the best I’ve felt in as long as I can remember, which I think is about two days.

On the nature of the Art

And we’re back.

I think I may be starting to understand how the D’ni grew proud. Not that power necessarily corrupts, although it does; rather, that the Art is difficult and dangerous, and in part unteachable. This leads by its nature to anger with the incompetent, and from there to elitism.

In some sense, humility requires the ability to take oneself lightly. It is unwise to take oneself too lightly when practicing the Art.

Fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate. Is it any wonder that the Writers and Maintainers became tyrants?

But the hardest part by far is that the gahrohevtee are unspeakably beautiful.

Every time I set pen to page I want to cry — yet I must not, for that would ruin the Book. I must not let my hands tremble, my eyes waver, my breath break its rhythm. I dare not do these things, and yet I desire them more than anything.

I cannot begin to imagine what effects Writing must have in the long run, bottling oneself up with the unmasked Face of God gazing directly into one’s soul.

Catching Up

So I haven’t really been keeping this blog. Once I post something on Twitter or the DRC forum, I mentally shelve it as “done”. I’ll try to stop doing that, but we’ll see how it works out.

Day and night have come and gone in Greenflower several times since the last time I posted here about my activities. I’ve fallen off taking observations; it doesn’t seem as urgent now that I’m confident in my calculations. I suppose I could do sightings of the moon or something, but meh. Whatever.

Relto’s out again. I have to wonder sometimes. There are a great many Ages I can still access — Fens, Bimevi, Maw, Devokan, just to name a few. I haven’t been able to get at the Ages on my Relto shelf to test them while Relto was out; in theory, I suppose I could walk down the Great Shaft, or wait in the Cavern until Relto failed. I don’t think I care that much.

But it does mean I can no longer trust Yeesha’s Art. I’ll carry my Relto book with me, but I need to have another Link. Learning to Write Linking Books needs to be my new first priority.

Later, I might start in on Descriptive Books. Perhaps.

A Usable D’ni Language

I know I have no business posting this, between all the other things I’m already doing (including one possibly rather urgent restoration task), but it’s been itching at me for a while and I need to get it out.

There should be a usable dialect of D’ni. I don’t care if it’s not historically accurate; it doesn’t have to be. The known texts just aren’t giving us enough to go on, and we aren’t finding new ones fast enough. We don’t even know if we’ll ever be able to reconstruct enough of the language to hold a coherent conversation in.

“But,” I hear you say, “people translate complete texts all the time!” Yes, they do; I’ve done it myself. But there’s a difference between being able to understand a whole text, where the gist can often be sussed out from context, versus constructing an arbitrary sentence where each word has to be right. (If there wasn’t, new texts wouldn’t give us new words.)

So here’s my proposal. I think we should create a modern dialect of D’ni. We’ll start with what we know of historical D’ni as a baseline. Then we can add in speculation, good guesses, and uses attested in modern attempts to write in D’ni. Then we can start coining new idioms, and so on and so forth.

For example:

.gel met hevtee t’dehevetseth f’kahnradoyhahoy
or, more idiomatically:
.gel met hev t’dehev f’koyhahoy

“I write this sentence in the Reformed Tongue on my computer.”