The Runes of Norien

Lurien. A name like a reluctant whisper, teeth, tongue and palate barely touching, as if in mortal fear of one another.

  Once the Sphere of Untouch was created, said the legend, the Original Language, the part of the Original Substance that gave names to things, was rapidly consumed by the distant worlds of darkness, for they knew not themselves, leaving only a small number of words for Lurien. But this was evidence of its supremacy, because what is a word but an immaterial rope that ties two formerly free entities – a thing and a thought – together, weighing them down with a crude, specific sound? To need as few words as possible, to set your mind free from their restraints, was one of the highest virtues; the Sages of the Circle prided themselves in using no more than a few hundred words.

  Yet of these necessary if ignoble clusters of mind-sound, there were two which were held holy in Lurien, believed to be directly derived from the Original Language: Substance and milk – for these made up the essence of the Pure Realm’s dwellers.

  Peculiar creatures, the Lurienites; born out of the Sacred River’s milk, and thus so very much resembling it: their skin, pure white, with the merest rosy sheen, their eyes like beads of an unbroken opalescence, their seldom-parting lips like petals carved out of snow-coloured, yielding marble. And the course of their lives, an immaculate cycle.