Chapter 74: Translating the Text
It was a bitter irony. The witch’s copious notes, the countless slips of paper and margin scribbles, had been meant to illuminate the ancient text. But for me, they were a hindrance. I could understand the original, alien script, but the witch’s handwritten commentary was as indecipherable to me as the city’s own strange language. Her attempts at clarification had only muddied the waters.
Fortunately, the witch at least knew the importance of these texts. She would absolutely never write or draw directly on the words to cover them up; at most, she would write annotations between the lines.
I turned to the first page of the ancient text. The first symbol… its meaning bloomed in my mind, a constellation of related concepts: life, survival, magic, energy. The second symbol: to attract, to seduce, to plunder, to assassinate. What? My mind reeled. How could a single symbol contain so many disparate meanings? And when combined, what was the intended message? It was a maddening puzzle. Based on what I had seen in the execution square, the red mist, the draining of life, I made an educated guess. Life Drain, perhaps. Or Magic Siphon.
I read on, and my confusion only deepened. That had just been the title. The text below was even more complex, the combinations of symbols forming esoteric, almost philosophical riddles. To grasp another's soul with one's hand. To become something other than oneself. Life is the source of the Art, and fate is its principle. What did any of it mean? I was beginning to understand that simply knowing the meaning of the symbols was not enough. It was like knowing the words of a language but not the grammar, the syntax, the soul of it. Each symbol had a dozen different meanings, and some of those meanings were concepts so alien I couldn't even find a proper word for them in my old vocabulary. It was a language of pure concept, and I was trying to translate it into the clumsy, concrete words of a human tongue. No wonder the witch had needed so many notes. She must have spent years, decades even, wrestling with this text, her countless failed translations and discarded theories filling volumes. The notes in this book were likely the refined, distilled essence of a lifetime of frustrating, maddening work.
“I can’t… I can’t keep it all in my head,” I said, my voice a strained whisper. My brain felt like it was about to crack under the strain. “Jared, do you have a pen?” I had to write it down, to anchor these fleeting concepts to the page before they dissolved back into meaningless symbols.
“A pen?” he asked, looking at me as if I’d asked for a winged horse. “Where would I get a pen?” He couldn’t read or write; he had never held a pen in his life.
“Right,” I said, my heart sinking. Of course he didn’t have one.
“You could use a stick,” he suggested, ever the pragmatist. “A burnt one. I’ve seen folk who want to learn their letters do that, writing in the dirt.”
It was a brilliant idea. I took a piece of kindling from our small pile, charred the end in the brazier, and, using the smooth stone floor as my slate, I began to write.
“Eh? What’s that? What kind of writing is that, Parula?” Jared asked, his eyes wide with a new kind of astonishment. I looked down. And my hand froze. The characters I had been writing, the letters that had flowed from my hand with an unconscious, instinctual ease, were not the script of this world. They were the Chinese characters of my old life. My mother tongue.
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