Cormelian Cypher

The Cormellion Cypher is an extremely complicated code first found engraved upon the walls of the Deep Maw temple, by the archaeologist Caleb Cormellion. In simplest terms, each pictograph or runes describes the shape of a word or letter, usually in an extremely obscure way, and also describes the method by which the next character describes the word of letter. Every possible method of inscription is used in these characters, including size, orientation, width of stroke, depth or embossing, cleanness of carving, time of carving (be that hour, day, season, moon phase and, very occasionally, the speed by which the character was carved.
A great amount of time, effort and powerful divination magic has been put into decoding just a small portion of the sample at the Deep Maw, uncovering what is believed to be a record of the last word and commandments of a dead primordial god.
The Deep Maw still contains the largest sample, but sizeable examples have been found throughout the northern half of the world, particularly in the oldest levels of ZavUmrd'rra. Most often, the Cypher is translated into Primordial, but occasionally other languages are encoded, including ancient dialects of common and extra-planar languages. Very occasionally sects and cults will make use of cypher as a means to encode messages, but as it is instantly recogniseable and so time consuming to create and decode, and impossible to correctly do without carving and embossing, it is rarely worth the effort. Professor Cormellion's publications on the cypher use different colours to get around the depth issue.

Writing System

Cormellion has described over separate 500 characters so far, with each having hundreds if not thousands of possible variations. A few icons have been found only in other locations, such as Vool, and often the code borrows characters that fit its fairly arbitrary morphology from the local language.

Phonology

The Cormellion Lexicon is based on the visual shape of words and letters, and has no influence on pronounciation.

Morphology

The icons themselves are usually relatively simple but very diverse, and usually have a central point that nothing strays more than twice the average line length away from. They are rarely symmetrical.

Syntax

The Lexicon shares syntax with whatever language it is encoding, using characters from the lexicon too describe punctuation marks the same way it would describe characters. Syntax is often the best way to determine exactly which language the is encoded in the Cypher.
The only syntax the language has of its own is the first letter in every code strand is clearly marked, and never uses the more complicated encoding methods like time, speed, and depth.

Phonetics

As the Cypher is based on shape rather than sound, there is no pronunciation that it has of its own.