Thousands of years ago the Navippan tribes (Classical Salvian navihpās “perennial wanderers, path-walkers”) who first came to the Salvian peninsula learned to trace patterns from the phoenixes, creating simple but potent spells for themselves. They could not trace them through the air, as the firebirds did, but instead carved the symbols out of the ground. In the semi-arid scrubland of the Colonnade and the North, it was often sufficient to leave depressions in the earth, but in the cenote-filled rainforests of the West and South (and the monsoon gales of the East), something more permanent was required. And so came the tumaris, the white-stone roads acting as conduits between stone pillars onto which the geoglyph symbols (salvis) were carved.
And from those symbols arose the written language of the Salvians: every glyph representing a root word, with additional lines for derivations. Sometimes the rebus principle applied, but after three thousand years and with numerous new methods of writing made available (birch bark, tapir vellum, papyrus from Hercua, the fabric of reality) the glyphs slowly began to change. Concentric style involved drawing the symbols in a spiderweb pattern; block capitals preferred pictograms carved in jade, or painted on pottery.
These two symbols are the name-glyphs of Visauru and Salvi, in Neoconcentric style (dating back to the 29th Century). These are usually drawn in the air, then imprinted onto an object–paper, stone, metal, flesh, it really doesn’t matter. They can also been drawn using calligraphy brushes, although it’s usually helpful to superimpose the circles before that (there’s a very helpful spell for that, and believe me when I say that the Tanatapa family still makes a mint off it).
Glyph Gallery
All glyphs are given in Neoconcentric style for ease of reading.
Midnight Sun 