glolos

A Cartography of Forgotten Tongues

— Compass of the Atelier —

The chart you are about to unroll was inscribed by a hand that has forgotten its own name. Read slowly. Some glyphs do not wish to be looked at directly.

II. The Glyph Atlas

Specimens collected, classified, and never quite understood.

An inventory of marks gathered from the margins of unattributable codices. Each entry has been catalogued in the manner of the naturalist's drawer: bordered, labelled, and accompanied by a brief field-note. The taxonomy is provisional; entries have a habit of rearranging themselves between visits.

Specimen i. Lacrimal Sigil

Vae‑khoth

Found inscribed on the underside of a copper bell. Said to mark the passage of weeping. The mark is read downward; reading it upward is considered improper.

Specimen ii. Watcher's Tine

Orelh

An eye that looks upward through a triangle of bone. Recovered from a stylus impression in dried river clay. Disturbed sleep is reported in households where it is rendered uncovered.

Specimen iii. Compass of Misalignment

Threnn‑sar

The four lines indicate not directions but the absence of them. Cartographers using this glyph reportedly returned with maps in which north pointed inward.

Specimen iv. Triple Wave

Mor‑mor‑mor

A repetition glyph used in pre-coastal litanies. Repetition is itself the meaning. To copy it twice in succession is permitted; three times is to summon what cannot be named.

Specimen v. Sealed Quadrant

Kal‑aen

A grid that closes. The four arms denote thresholds; the central diamond is the place beyond which questions are not answered. Often found scratched into doorframes.

Specimen vi. Hooded Mask

Ssereth

A face that has not yet decided whether to remain a face. The two pricks above the curved mouth are eyes; the curve is, conventionally, a smile, though scholars disagree.

III. The Marginalia Corridor

Where the principal text is overrun by the hand that could not stop annotating.

The margin, properly understood, is not an ornamental fringe of the page but the frontier of its sense. In the codex from which the following passages are drawn, the margins overflow into the gutter, cross the binding, and resume on the verso in mirrored hand. The scribe — for there appears to be only one, despite the impression of conversation — addresses the central text not as a reader but as a correspondent, sometimes patiently, sometimes in evident alarm.

What the principal text describes as the seven coastlines of the inner sea, the marginalia insists are eight, the eighth being a shore that recedes whenever observed. The cartographer's note in the lower bezel of folio 47 reads: "I have drawn it; it has not consented to be drawn."

The annotations escalate in the second quire. Symbols are crossed out, then reinstated, then crossed out again. A passage on the migration of glyphs across linguistic boundaries is overwritten with a single sentence repeated in twelve hands, all evidently the same hand at different hours of the same long night: they came back through the page.

Toward the end of the corridor the principal text becomes terse — a single line per page — while the margins thicken until they devour the column entirely. The final folio bears no central text at all. Only the marginalia remain, a circulating chorus of miniatures, manicules, and warnings, none of which permit translation in any conventional sense.

manicule — points to nothing presently visible

see fol. 47 (~~contradicts the index~~) confirms the index

memento — the skull was small, perhaps a child's

they came back through the page.

hourglass — turned at midnight, not earlier

~~delete this entire paragraph~~ ~~do not delete~~ read aloud

ouroboros — the tail re-entered yesterday

eye in triangle — closed at the time of writing

cf. orelh, ssereth, threnn‑sar (mutually inhospitable)

moon — waning, ink unsteady

IV. The Palimpsest Chamber

A vellum scraped, rewritten, scraped again — and still legible to the patient.

Beneath the readable surface there is always the residue of the previous text. The vellum, having been a sheep, then a sheet, then a chronicle, then a household ledger, then a treatise on glyphs, refuses to forget any of these lives at once.

— Tabula Incognita, drawn from a place that does not exist —

The map above charts no real place. It is a faithful description of an imagined coast, prepared in the manner of a faithful description, with all the conventions of cartography lent to a country whose only verified inhabitant is the cartographer's persistent dream of it.