A cover for a book I will never write.

Not because I don't know what to write.

It's a fictional ethnography. The "Saonyak" are the "Bluff People". They live on fantastically tall, isolated mesas, and communicate by messengers who travel by hang glider. They can't travel down the mesas because, firstly, it's a long way down and there's not always a safe route and they don't have the metals to put pinions and footholds in the steep parts; secondly, the bases are buried in a thick mist that covers a poisonous/undesirable/dangerous bog... and further out from land it's just mist.

The Bluff People's initial method of encoding language was to knot leather scraps in distinctive ways to represent words. These could be tied onto the messengers' clothing and read while the messenger was still recovering from the wind and cold exposure from flying so high.

Eventually the Bluff People found a paper equivalent and used that to write instead, though their glyphs are still reminiscent of knots. However, the leather knotting tradition lives on as a decorative art. One of the purposes is to decorate those about to be married. The partners in a marriage are called the "windblown" and "pillar" partners instead of "bride" and "groom". These two roles are not connected to gender identity. Matches will often be made for alliance and trade. The partner deemed more dominant, wealthy, or important to their family will be the pillar and set up a new household on their home mesa. The windblown partner is uprooted from their family and travels (often their first time making a long-distance journey) to the pillar's home. They go through a transition period for a few weeks to up to 3 months (equivalent time; their calendar is different). During this period the windblown wears a decorative veil provided by the pillar's family over the upper half of their face. This veil is delicately knotted thin leather strips (thinner than shoelaces), and its oldest parts are often an historically important message carried by a family ancestor, and incorporating the family motto. There is only one veil, so there can only be one windblown marrying into the family at a time.

During the liminal period the windblown may only speak using words knotted into the veil. This is viewed as part of the process of becoming a member of the pillar family. Like Chinese and Japanese script, each knot/glyph may represent more than one word; additionally there may be an archaic word that the glyph used to represent but is no longer in common use. A creative windblown may thus have a vocabulary of hundreds of words from a single knotted square about 1' by 1'... but it's still rather limiting and often has the effect of forcing the windblown into a submissive position. It is also the job of the pillar family to get to know the windblown despite these restrictions, so questions and answers during this period may often be cryptic and poetic. The pillar family may have annals that describe clever responses from past windblowns who have married in; thus a history of codes arises which it is the windblown's task to learn if they are to assimilate successfully.

On larger mesas windblowns marrying into different families may live together in a "blown-over house". This reinforces their liminal status before they join their new families, but often also creates community between the individuals staying there at a given time. Friendships formed in the blown-over house may be strong and last the rest of an individual's life, but have also been the seeds of intra-mesa drama.



And yes, those are all ampersands. Even the big lines that the tiny ones are following along in the foreground. They're just joined. Knotted. lol.