Like most wizards his age, Yves knew little more than the rudiments of Faramyr. Over the past four months, he had worked out two of the three words. First, the Witch Mother had not said emerald. That mistake had cost him two weeks. It had seduced him into an entirely false sense of progress, mostly because the association with stone had seemed invitingly plausible for whatever lay behind the Veil. Respectively, and rather reasonably, Yves had assumed that the whole name, at its core, referred to some rock formations.
Well.
It does not.
.e̫ͧ̐m̝̜͂r̹͇̫̖͒ạ̷̡̘̟̯́ͅͅh͍͎l̮͇͓̀ means something akin to march, in the older sense of boundary, threshold, or perhaps territory. It describes a place held under claim, or, most generally, the outer extent of an authority. In other, no less elaborate words, it was a location defined by the limit of whatever power or condition affected it.
That – precisely this sort of example – is one of the many qualities that makes the language of witches so profoundly off-putting. The words never change, but their meaning does. The runes themselves never develop, soften, or accumulate the ordinary corruptions of use. The witches pride themselves on the claim that Faramyr has remained unchanged since its creation, with not a single rune removed and none ever added to its lexicon. They say that, through Faramyr, every witch who ever lived speaks to every witch who ever will.
One language is enough to inherit all of them: every rune cut into stone, worked into metal, hidden beneath architecture or fastened to wild places where witches intended their governance to endure. Faramyr allows each generation to read what the last left behind, and then to build upon it — extending protections, strengthening prohibitions, altering purpose, or attaching final intentions to foundation markers that may have waited centuries for completion. Every witch who lived added to the claims and curses they anchored throughout the world. Through Faramyr, they wrote upon the world, and they rewrote it.
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