In Writing two sets of characters are used. There are the garohevtee which we have all heard of it seems that they are the synthesis of label and idea not only in the now but in a temporal sense, they seem to define not only what a thing is but how it flows. Then we have the use of the normal D'ni single word characters (like "island") of which there are many (best guess is more than 22000) that every D'ni child learns from the rehevkor. Both are required to create an Age, or at least one with any hope of survival due to the fact that an Age is not a snapshot in time as it would be if only labels were used but an ever changing description in time, this is why the garohevtee are needed and this is their power. In the matter of the preciseness of the description to say there is a "green hill" with purely labelling words is to leave a lot to variance. The Garohevtee may be precise yet the labels can only be so to a certain level.
In general the D'ni covered their kormahn from leather, in fact they covered most of their books in leather this was probably (due to the scale and degree to which they used this material) not a prerequisite of the kormahn creation process but I wouldn't want to hedge my bets on this one. Size, The kormahn seem to be all very thick and quite blocky yet again this is more due to necessity than actual design although further information concerning this may come to light (hint hint nudge nudge).
The paper was created from the special trees but was then treated with various chemicals and perhaps was lain onto a special layer so that it would be within each page giving it some of it's special properties when joined with the ink such as recognising the characters that a imprinted upon it.
The Writing is to the Art what the frame of a harp is to the strings. It is the structure that supports and shapes the world it describes, that allows the Art and the Books to interpret it and fill in the blanks to create an real place. Through this structure alterations can be made even after an age has been visited, yet I would expect that such changes would be accompanied by and appropriate time lapse so that they could have been physically brought about. The D'ni rules that describe how and Age might be created have been shown to be conservative and rigid yet there is more than can be described at their limits. The rules were probably first implemented for safety when the D'ni civilisation first discovered the power, I would expect they have changed very little in the time since they came to the age of Earth since no change was needed after the exodus from Garternay, so the focus would have been on creating great Ages within the rules not challenging them.
The whole of the art is bent upon describing a world at a single point in time, a beginning if you like, and from there onwards. What the books do is select the world within the stretches of the cosmos and possibly the multiverse within the reaches of the entirity of time (as we have no evidence that there is a limit to the temporal span of the books) which most conforms to that beginning "snapshot". This snapshot is not just a point in time, like a photograph. It is more like a hologram, capturing not only where things are and what things are but also what they are doing, and it is that which requires such great complexity. The D'ni rules aren't there as ironclad descriptions of the limit of The Art, but as guidelines as to how the book and Writer can interface to the maximum efficiency to produce a world which won't shake itself apart. Thus the Art is actually a power within itself not bound by the D'ni rules which are far more likely to be a set of precepts created by the D'ni to give structure and safety to their use of it instead of being part of the Art itself.
| Page | Quote | Trustability (1/10) | Information |
| ? | Consider the Whole | 10 | Anna's Father/Anna |
| HB1.50 | Checking he had the complex figure right. | - | Atrus being taught the first of the garohevtee by Anna. |
| HB1.51 | "Well, just as those words that describe ideas are a level above the words that are simple descriptive labels, so there's a further, more complex level above that" | 9 | Anna describing the Garohevtee to Atrus. |
| HB1.51 | Atrus: "...but surely such a word would be a label?" Anna: "Not this word, this word does more than simply describe" | 9 | (see above) |
| HB1.90 | leather-bound books | - | Gehn showing Atrus the kormahn |
| HB1.90 | richly bound spines. There was no writing on any of them. A few had symbols, but none made sense | - | (see above) |
| HB1.90> | The left hand page was blank, but on the right... He gasped, amazed by the clarity of the picture in that small rectangular box. Why, it was like staring through a window | 9 | Atrus' first experience with a linking window. |
| HB1.91 | Atrus felt the skin of his palm tingle as though a faint electrical current had passed through it. His hand seemed drawn to the image on the page, attracted to it... Then with a sudden sickening lurch he felt himself sucked into the page. Or rather it was as if the page grew suddenly huge, enveloping him in the weave of it's fibers. At that same instant he felt a curious shifting sensation. It felt as though he were melting, the fragile shell of him imploding, collapsing back in upon himself, and the blackness seeped through. As he finally surrendered to that blackness he found himself back in his body | 9 | Atrus' first sensation of linking. |
| HB1.92 | "We, two, and the worlds we shall make" | 0 | Gehn to Atrus. |
| HB1.93 | "Perhaps a little over elaborate...remove those two descriptive words...embellishment, that's all they are" He began to copy out the D'ni phrase, taking care to leave out the two words he considered served no purpose. | 0 | Gehn getting it wrong again. again. |
| HB1.93 | Big leather-bound book | - | Another kormahn |
| HB1.94 | began to sketch out a D'ni word, taking great care as he did to demonstrate the flow of each stroke | 9 | Gehn showing atrus a D'ni word. |
| HB1.95 | "each double-page spread contains a single D'ni word and shows clearly what penstrokes must be used and in what precise order" | 9 | Gehn showing Atrus the Rehevkor |
| HB1.96 | "large-extremely thick volume" | - | The rehevkor. |
| HB1.96 | "concentrating on twenty words a night to begin with" | - | Gehn giving Atrus homework. |
| HB1.103 | "you said they can't make them anymore" | 9 | Atrus asking Gehn why they need go hunting for more books. |
| HB1.118 | seven, no eight of the big leather-bound books | - | Atrus looking in the Common Library Book Room. |
| HB1.119 | Atrus reached up and pulled one down, a red-covered book, surprised by how heavy it was, as if it were made of something more than paper | 10 | Atrus marvelling at the kormahn, always observant. |
| HB1.122 | "you have spent 6 weeks now learning how to copy a number of basic D'ni words and have discovered just how complex and beautiful script it is" | 8 | Gehn recounting Atrus' work to him... with a little embellishment. |
| HB1.122 | "Those characters also mean somthing. They were developed over tens of thoousands of years for a specific task - that of describing Ages...of creating other worlds" | 9 | Gehn decsribing the words in the rehevkor to Atrus. |
| HB1.122 | "Writing is the science of precise description" | 5 | Gehn's opinion of the Art. |
| HB1.122 | When we begin there is nothing... But as soon as the first word is written - just as soon as that first character is completed, the last stroke set down upon the page - then a link is set up to that newly created world" | 6 | Gehn talking about Writing, the first part seems right although I doubt the section about the newly "created" world. |
| HB1.123 | Within the thick, yellow, glass like walls of the container, was a fine black liquid." | - | Gehn Showing Atrus the Ink. |
| HB1.123 | "not just any ink. It has special powers that ordinary ink does not possess. So, too with the pages of the book. They are made of a special paper, the formula for which was kept a secret by the guild." | 10 | Gehn recounting to Atrus aboud The Ink and the Paper. |
| HB1.123 | a D'ni character - the word "island", Atrus noted - began to form, it's intense blackness burned almost into the pure white surface by the pen" | 9 | Atrus watching Gehn begin his demonstration Age. |
| HB1.123 | Gehn wrote another dozen characters onto the page. | - | (see above) |
| HB1.123 | "It exists, yes...but as yet it is very crude." | 9 | (see above) |
| HB1.124 | "There are special formulas you have to follow, precise laws to obey" | 9 | Gehn on writing, it seems a true enough comment, why would we expect otherwise. |
| HB1.124 | "Every aspect of the Age must be described, each new element fitted in. But that is not all" | 9 | (see above) |
| HB1.124 | "Each linking book refers to one of the larger descriptive books. You might say that it contains the essence of the larger book - certain phrases and words that fuses it to that book and no other" | 9 | Gehn describing how the korvahkh are related to the kormahn. |
| HB1.125 | "For a Linking Book to work it must also include an accurate description of the place one wishes to link to on that particular Age, which is recorded by writing a special D'ni symbol, a Garohevtee" | 9 | Gehn finally reveals the Garohevtee to Atrus. |
| HB1.124 | "and a Linking Book must be written in the Age and location it is meant to link to" | 10 | Gehn discussing the creation of korvahkh with Atrus, I count this as trustable as it is agreed with from so many other sources, even if Gehn said it. |
| HB1.124 | "You can make as many Linking Books as you want | 10 | Gehn telling Atrus there are no limits to the number of korvahkh that can be written to a particular age. (or maybe not a limit they have found.) |
| HB1.124 | "If the Descriptive Book is changed then all Linking Books associated with it will link to the changed world" | 10 | Gehn telling Atrus that the korvahkh link to the world and not the Book once the initial link is made. |
| HB1.137 | "Were they another variant, or had Gehn Written them in specifically" | 9 | Atrus pondering upon the hill features of Gehn's 37th Age. |
| HB1.137 | "he hadn't begun to try making Ages yet" | - | Atrus after 3 years of learning under his father. |
| HB1.144 | "were they elsewhere in that vast, star-dusted sky, or was he somewhere else entirely, in another universe perhaps" | 10 | Atrus looking for constellations he knows. |
| HB1.144 | "And yet the more I discover about Writing, the more I challenge my father's view that we are creating the worlds we travel in. What if they weren't so much making the worlds as linking to pre-existing possibilities" | 10 | Atrus wondering about the eternal question, Link Vs. Create. |
| HB1.144 | "At first he had dismissed the notion as a foolish one.... How else could they come into being in such precise and predicatble forms? Besides, it was simple not possible that an infinite supply of different worlds existed out there" | 10 | (see above) |
| HB1.147 | "Gehn had created it only a matter of three years ago at most. But what about before that? Had it existed in any form at all? Did these people have any memories of a time before Lord Gehn had come among them...he knew from his studies that you could not actually write such things, not directly anyway. Yet when you created an Age with all of it;s complexities, then a great shadow of cause and effect was thrown back, such that the Age, though newly created still had a history" | 9 | The ponderings of Atrus upon the creation of Ages and the causal realtionships surrounding them. |
| HB1.147 | "What did he write?...Or had he? What if this wasn't deliberate? What if it was an accident?" | 9 | Atrus looking at the bird's in Gehn's 37th Age. |
| HB1.150 | "You see, while out Art is a precise one, it's effects are often quite surprising, owing to the complexity of the web of relationships that are created between things. The meaning of an individual phrase can be altered by the addition of other phrases, often to the extent that the original descrption bears no relation whatsoever to the resultant reality. That is wy the D'ni were so adamant about contradictions" | 8 | Gehn on the Art again. |
| HB1.151 | "He knew how important the underlying rock and soil was to the kind of age that resulted, especially the soil. A good rich soil, full of nutrients and minerals, would produce good harvets...would quickly develop a culture." | 9 | Atrus explaining cause and effect in Age 37. |
| HB1.151 | "A narrow chasm about six feet across and twelve or fifteen feet long" | - | Atrus observing the breakup of the 17th Age. |
| HB1.158 | "Fish that had an oily fat for fuel. A plant that could be woven into clothes. Such things, when writte n in, would allow human life to thrive in a place like this." | 9 | Atrus observing Gehn's writing of Age 37. |
| HB1.166 | "The problem was a simple one - he knew it instinctively. It has something to do with underlying structures" | 9 | Atrus pondering the downfall of Age 37, which structures? The words or the rock? (or both) |
| HB1.166 | "Far from having grasped the solid principles beneath it all he was a far from understanding it as he ever had been" | 8 | Gehn's self examination. |
| HB1.167 | "the Guild Masters had been too clever for that. Such secrets had been passed down by word of mouth from generation to generation. The book did not exist wherein those formulas were writen....but nothing ever said just why this phrase worked and that one did not" | 8 | Gehn showing us that the power of writing is in the style of the Writer. |
| HB1.168 | "His own first attempts at D'ni writing" | - | Atrus trying writing 3 years after he started learning. |
| HB1.175 | "He had not found it in a book, he had worked it out for himself from first principles after studying the matter for nearly eight months" | - | Atrus thinking about the genesis of his work in comparison to Gehn's. |
| HB1.175 | "he had tried to look at the whole picture...and it had worked" | 9 | Atrus seems to have discovered what Gehn would not and could not. |
| HB1.176 | "One had to build worlds from the bottom up, beginning with what was below the soil" | 9 | Atrus looking at the Whole. |
| HB1.179 | A big leather-bound book | - | a kormahn's dimensions. |
| HB1.179 | "you must check every word, every phrase after you have copied it." | 9 | Gehn teaching Atrus how important accuracy is in their work. |
| HB1.179 | empty descriptive box on the right hand page. Until he linked it would be blank - or almost so, for there was a chaotic swirl of particles, like a snowstorm, yet as soon as he emerged into the new Age, the image would appear, as if by magic, on the page. | - | Atrus recounting linking window mechanics. |
| HB1.181 | was very different from how he'd imagined it - how he thought he'd written it | - | Atrus comparing the Age he observed to that which he described in the words. |
| HB1.181 | The greatest trouble he'd had was in finding the right D'ni words to express what he wanted | - | Atrus describing his new Age. |
| HB1.181 | It had taken him a lot of time and effort choosing the precise soil type and the balance of minerals in the soil, but it had worked | - | Atrus describing the creation of his newest Age. |
| HB1.181 | "birds? I didn't write birds?" | - | Atrus ruminating on varience in Writing. |
| HB1.181 | Oh, he knew this Age was simple, but he had planned to take one step at a time. And this world wouldn't fall apart.. | 9 | Atrus proving his understanding surpasses Gehn's. |
| HB1.185 | "small changes that you cannot see" | - | gehn showing off to Atrus |
| HB1.188 | - | What changes are possible without breaking the Link. | |
| HB1.196 | cross out the last few entires in the book, using the D'ni negating symbol | - | Gehn "fixing" Age 37. |
| HB1.198 | "I am in another universe entirely, in another Age; one that my father tampered into existence. No, that's wrong. My father didn't create this - this was here all along, merely waiting for us to link to it." ... His Father's erasures in the Book had taken them back down the central trunk of the great tree of possibility and along another branch entirely. | 9 | Atrus Struggling to undertand the changes wrought on Age 37 in the wake of his fathers alterations. |
| HB1.199 | "you don't understand the Whole." | 9 | Atrs criticizing Gehn (rightly). |
| HB1.200 | "how unnecessarily ornate it is" | -8 | Gehn showing us all how not to do it. |
| HB1.200 | began to delete symbols here and there using the D'ni negative simplifying the phrases Atrus had spent so long perfecting - phrases which Atrus knew, from long reading in the ancient D'ni texts, were the perfect way of describing the things he wanted in his world | - | Showing us that Atrus having studied the texts had gained an understanding that this style gave greater stability. |
| HB1.202 | The bridge between the Ages was destroyed. | 10 | (self explanatory) |
| HB1.217 | possible contradictions Gehn's particular wrting style threw up. | 8 | Atrus showing Gehn is too ecnomical with words. |
| HB1.222 | the basic elements from which the complexities of such cultures developed. | 9 | Atrus on the web of probability. |
| HB1.235 | a large blue book | - | A kormahn. |
| HB1.241 | "no one but D'ni can write... the Histories confirm it. Time and again they stress the fact" | -8 | Atrus being wrong about Catherine's ability to write. |
| HB1.242 | "the writing's wonderful. It's poetic. But in practical terms... it's riddled with contraditions, I'm afraid. It breaks almost every single law od D'ni Writing. It has no structure, no architecture. And some of these symbols... I've never seen them before" | -7 | Atrus's criticism of Catherine's work, he still has much to learn. |
| HB1.243 | "It simply wouldn't work Writing isn't like that. It's a science. A precisey Structured equation of words" | 5 | Atrus recounting the D'ni philosophy. |
| HB1.246 | "Did some other set of laws - laws not discovered by the D'ni - prevail here?" | - | Atrus staring in wonderment at Catherine's Age. |
| HB1.249 | For he knew... that if it existed then there was a physical reason why it existed. This did not break the D'ni laws, it merely twisted them; pushed them to their limits." | 9 | Atrus beginning to understand the Writing of this kind and the ages it could produce. |
| HB1.252 | changes he sought to make in the orbital system of Age Five. | - | Atrus testing the range of action of the books. |
| HB1.252 | he was experimenting with the structure of the tectonic plates beneath the planet's crust, the type and strength of the oceanic currents, fluctuations in gravitational fields and the compositiion of the crust itself. | - | Atrus experiments leading up to the changes in Age Five. Showing what could be affected by the books. |
| HB1.257 | the sudden restraint in the Writing, the deep understanding of D'ni principles that surpassed even his own. | 9 | Atrus seeing what he thought was Catherine's work but was actually Anna's. She still understands more than he. |
| Page | Quote | Trustability (1/10) | Information |
| PB2.46 | "His view was that the climatic conditions are ideal for the development of an indiginous species" "And on what did he base this claim?" It seems that all four of them have seen copies of the Book" "The Book of Earth." | N/A | Aitrus and GM Telanis in discussion. |
| PB2.132 | "Their morality is not innate but taught" | 5 | Veovis remaking on age-worlders. {Only morals that are taught? i.e. do they influence the development of species?} |
| PB2.179 | "He had not meant to tell her about the D'ni lexicon" | N/A | Master Haemis remarking abot how he let slip about the rehevkor to Ahna. |
| PB2.223 | "It was a big-square-covered book with a dark amber leather cover." "Here. This is the key to all." "Inside, on heavy vellum pages were set out columns of beautifully intricate figues - more like designs than letters" | 7 | Aitrus about the rehevkor. |
| PB2.229 | "a huge leather bound book" | N/A | more about the size of the linking books. |
| PB2.230 |
"The left hand page was blank, but on the right... Anna gasped. "It's like a window" | 10 | Anna seeing a linking window for the first time. |
| PB2.230 |
"Anna felt the surface of her palm tingle, then, with a sudden sickening lurch, she felt herself drawn into the page. It grew as she shrank, sucking her into the softly glowing image. For a moment it was as if she were melting, fusing with the ink and paper..." | 10 | Anna experiencing the link. |
| PB2.232 |
"a small, leather bound book"- "seeing it contained D'ni Writing" "but different from the one we used to come here. This book is a linking book back to D'ni." "The words in that book describe the place to which we link back - the study in my families mansion in D'ni. It was written there." | 10 | Aitrus describing the Korvahkh to Anna. |
| PB2.232 |
"But where exactly are we? Are we in the pages of a book, or are we actually somewhere?" "There is, perhaps, some way of calculating precisely, where we are...In all likelyhood we are on the other side of the universe from D'ni." "This world is the Age that is described in the book back in the room in D'ni. It conforms precisely to the details in that book. In an infinite universe, all things are possible- within physical limits, that is - and any book that can be written does physically exist. Somewhere. The book is the bridge between the words and the physical actuality. Word and world are linked by the special properties of the book." | 8 | Aitrus speaking to the best of his knowledge about the workings of the Art. |
