Book One – Chapter 18

Bubs looked at him, sharper now than at any other point today.

Yu held the gaze but felt a coil twist inside him. It was a good question, he told himself. The travellers had come with a witch. So of course, the crossbreed of a failed wizard who knew nothing and a dumb novice guard who noticed even less would latch on the most obvious danger, on this only possible explanation.

That said, it was an honest question, too. Because the markings truly looked like runes. Yu’s eyes kept slipping back to them. The detailed lines. The complex symbols. To make sense of them, Yu drew from the little bits of knowledge he had taken from Ayenfora; which was a few hours of lessons between two months of getting beaten to shits. This presumed education had barely gotten him through the first letters of the most basic of wizard languages. Still, he had learned that in principle, wizard scripts used letters. They formed words by combining letters, much like Teh.

Faramyr was different. It relied solely on runes, which were a sheer endless amount of symbols. Each symbol represented a whole word. Yu had no idea how anyone was supposed to learn something like that by heart, but apparently, witches did just that. What made Faramyr even more complicated was that a single rune could represent more than one word, and when used for witchcraft, their meanings shifted depending on how individual runes were combined, how large they were drawn in comparison, and how they leaned into each other. It also mattered when and where they were put down, and if it was a place with lots or little energies. Also, on what they were drawn, and with what substances.

In short, you could not simply read them out, like wizards did with their spells. If it all came down to linguistics, it was right there in the name; wizard magic had spells, because they spelled out their words and scripts. Witches had witchcraft, because in their vexed handywork, anything and everything made a difference.