Glossary • Worlds and Geographies • Na ~ Nz
nivehnen {nih-VEHN-ehn}
river on the planet khoyyohk
A meandering river of molten glass on khoyyohk that varies greatly in width and heat over the course of its crawl across a thousand miles of cataclysm-cracked country. The source, of course, for that famous phrase: “even glass can flow” which is now so common with humes across the Pleiades.
This idea is used to encourage even the most rigid, brittle, and otherwise fragile of folks to remember how everything can change and re-shape without requiring a harsh break that leaves jagged edges for everyone to cut themselves (so to speak) - and that this process often even holds its own beauty and magic often unpredictable by the initial circumstances.
Nulahm {NEW-lahm}
location on the planet khoyyohk
The ruined metropolis at the center of the collapsed carapace of a region now called almun-kho, ancient upon ancient, where a great library once stood.
Much of what once was, is buried; only pieces and parapets remain, projected upwards here and there at odd eroded angles, offering only tantalizations of the life, knowledge, and wonder that once was. The capital letter in the name - rather than the usual all lowercase situation usually seen on khoyyohk - tells us something of the true ancientness of this place; this practice of writing was released by the humes of khoyyohk long ago, indeed very possibly because of the cataclysmic event(s) which collapsed that civilization.
Excerpt from published Expedition Research Notes
"Recorded by Expedition Conductor lazanleza, in the lands of almun-kho and the ruins of Nulahm, by the banks of the nivehnen where we once wept together, that last night before the odyssey of our journey home began.
Eighth chamber entered today. Stunning samples in clear view. Language in use here used no plain letters, but instead symbols based in art. Examples range from a kind of quick cursive to the extensively intentional, the latter being both incredibly illustrative and quietly, casually mathematically complex.
The story depicted in the art speaks of something that certainly sounds like myth, but this far on from the events - for how far we indeed are! - there's no way we can yet know just how they themselves saw this story. Was it legend? History? Mystery?
Yearly they had to spark the sun to dance in order to end their winter. At first its flares would circumnavigate the night. But its cycles were not set by any cosmic law except love, and they say the sun sometimes had its own dreams, journeys, desires. The planet and its sun were, in the story of this art that speaks to some form of our true history, tragically out of balance with each other. When the relationship and ritual inevitably went awry - as there was only ever so much that could be done - after searing periods of increasing bright and dark, the flames hewed too close, spared no carbon, and left little more complex than stones alive in a great scar that spanned the planet and collapsed that civilization.
Yet the message remains clear as its moment of first fevered painting.
Extraordinary.
And more extraordinary still to be who we are, as we are, here and now, knowing what we now know came after them. Whatever happened, however it happened, we can write with rejoicing that after all this, from the lands beyond that vast burst of burn, from the stone beaches and the seas and the warm swaths of coastal jungle, life returned to these cataclysm-cracked quarters. The humes revivified, the snails adapted, life re-emerged, memory became myth, myth became more, and history continues to be written. Once by them. Now by us."