Maggram

The book was imprecise by all account and provided a limited comprehension of the nature of Maggram. A lot of apprentices were heavily burned, buried alive or lost their lives trying to apprehend the limits of what Magramil called runes. A second work came a few years later, thought to complete the compendium but remembered as the true reference work: First Addendum on the runic laws governing life and reality, by Magramil Stekenson and Alara Optili.

Mae is the fundamental rune of fire. Alone, it births a small flame in the caster's magical appendage, which is for most people their dominant hand. The flame is flickering and prone to die at the slightest gust of wind. Duration variation will be the topic of a later chapter, as it requires a more complex construct.   As we saw earlier, nde is the targeting rune for singular you, meaning a single target different from the caster. If you wish for some reason to put yourself on fire, dera would be necessary. Thus, Maende will create a connection between the caster and the target, as long as the distance is less than 49.3m by default. Then, a burst of flame will appear from the caster's magical appendage and propagate to the target, assuming the shape of a cone whose end encompasses the target whole. Thus, the closer the target, the wider the cone. For an exhaustive table of accessory runes altering the shape, distance and origin of the flame, as well as the various combinations, please refer to the next page.   As a note, some specific formulas have unsuspecting effects, in that they work as a shortened version of a much more complex sentence. For example, Maende Ralkor is a spell able to awaken a target volcano and immediately trigger its eruption. Despite Ralkor being the fundamental rune for mountain. The exact amount of existing spell and their distribution is an ongoing research. Refer to the end of this book to find a list of known spells related to the runes presented in this addendum, as well as their effects.

— Extract from the first Addendum to the Compendium

With the first tome of the addendum series covering little less than a hundred runes and the main connectors introduced in the Compendium, a lot remained to be explored. What is now called the Compendium is not the original work, but the complete collection of 13 lengthy volumes with detailed information about the initial 700 runes and an additional 400 discovered during the redaction of the series, as well as a full book dedicated to the connectors and complex formulas. All in all, it was the lifelong work of Magramil Stekenson, acknowledged as the father of structured magic.

High Maggram

The main gripe that people had with low Maggram, then called runic formulas, was its cruel lack of sentence structure to make a proper language. The way runes assembled, their logic made it feel like a language, but one that could only vehiculate very basic meaning, with limited complexity. The absence of verb was a notable trouble for practitioners.

There wasn't a major figure to introduce High Maggram as Magrami had been. Instead, a collective of mages set out to extend the formulas beyond the identification of novel runes, now that near 1800 had been described. They founded the base of a full blown language, one with an extraordinarily complex conjugaison system and grammar.

To their own admission, the complexity of this initial draft was to keep the language of runes from the uneducated masses and especially rogue mages, who failed to have the same upbringing as regular ones. As it turned out, their system was too convoluted for even other mages to grasp properly and was nearly abandoned. Through perseverance and compromises, they dumbed down some fundamental rules and lightened the amount of cases.

With more and more mages adopting High Maggram as their first language, the simplification went a step further, to the point basic expressions pervaded to the common folks. For a time, it was the tongue of kings and diplomacy, the only one that recognized no frontiers.

End of an era

When mages retreated to The Land of Mages, the Inquisition took great care to eradicate all remnants of Maggram in the popular culture. Numerous diplomatic relationship broke due to lack of understanding as a result. A necessary evil, as it was professed while all books written in Maggram or whose topic was the use of runes were burned, even the unique tomes.

However, the ruthless inquisition could not erase all the traces of the magical tongue. Quantity of formulas had become idioms for common folks, slightly twisted over the years. "Silwende Terren", which means to be silver-tongued, to lie a lot, was initially a formula to compel someone to tell the truth. Silwe is the fundamental rune of speech and Terr that of truth. The -en suffix was appended by a local dialect that spread afterward.

In modern days, every non-mage have forgotten about Maggram. People of different horizons are always astonished when they discover that they share common idioms while using widely different languages. A few linguists have tried to unearth this worldwide mystery, but each time their effort were cut short by the inquisitorial censorship. Even they don't remember any more why they prevent this historical research, but they bar any attempt nonetheless.