Book One – Chapter 1

That is the thing.

You do not read Faramyr linearly, from top to bottom or left to right. It is read circularly, though not reliably so. More accurately; one witch rune guides you to the next. If you do not recognise that guidance, if you lose the thread or never grasp in the first place, there is no use in guessing. Now, spoken Faramyr comes with a whole new array of issues —

but this was not the time to get into that.
      It was ridiculous; that was really all you need to know.

Yes, Yves should very much not distract himself any further with his recurring fixation on rare and normal thoughts about witched and their doings. Indeed, he should did not care about the translation, especially not at this moment. Kneeling there, straining over the edge of the shattered arch and staring far down into the bottomless burning crater, he did not need a fucking word puzzle. He needed an explanation.

The entire basin burned, though not with ordinary fire and smoke. What churned below was some molten, flame-ridden substance, like sand liquefied past colour and beaten into a raging whirl of white mass — Never in your life would you call this a cloud, no matter how many world-ending storms you had survived. In the same way, even the most destructive of forest fire could not contain, in words or memory, the forces that raged here. The white fire swelled around the pit in thick, roiling plumes. It rose in viscous surges of all-swallowing brightness. There was nothing pure in this brightness, nothing light. It was rampant pressure made visible, a density so intense that the eye tried to reject what it received. The sight reached him as force before it became shape, and yet, Yves could see it through First Sight. That messed with his entire world view, literally. It failed the whole division by which he perceived the world; ordinary sight for matter, Second Sight for the ethereal. It redefined everything he attributed to the ethereal.

                         Because this was Adhar,
          world energy so compressed
                                   that it boiled in its own excess.