Zarph Mograyn

Zarph Mograyn is a book of magic generally attributed to the pseudo-historical thaumaturge Morogyad. Written in the Insular dialect, it is part of the 'Tyros canon' of books thought to have been written during Morogyad's mid-career sojourn in the city of Tyros. The book is noted for its elaborate and magniloquent composition, to the extent that modern commentators have never agreed on a standard translation of its title.

Content

Zarph Mograyn is a book about metallurgy as both an art - that is, an activity in which the chief determinant of success is the creativity of the individual practitioner - and a craft - an activity that relies on the careful repetition of specific utilitarian techniques in each instance of its practice. Morogyad in fact spends the first, lengthy chapter of the book to drawing this distinction, filling almost a hundred pages of parchment with a painstaking and verbose explanation of the point before explaining - again in great detail and considerable length - how the forging of metals is a rare example of a human pursuit that can genuinely be described as both.
Thereafter comes a relatively short chapter in which he describes the importance of metals to human society, producing a history of the advances in metallurgy in the Eleven Cities. He discusses the utilitarian properties of iron, privileging its use in ship's compasses and indeed in shipbuilding and sailing in general, although the whole essay is discernibly weighted towards coloured alloys such as brass, bronze and electrum - though not, interestingly, gold. He makes no reference at all to silver in the entire book.
From then on Morogyad ventures into the thaumatological meat of the book, according each of the three 'Blue Metals' - blue steel, blue brass and blue gold - their own chapter. He writes ornately and reverently about the process for formulating these alloys, discussing these processes as the most perfect and ennobling examples of metallurgy as both art and craft. The prose in these chapters is especially abstruse, and features a number of essentially untranslatable references to the power of the human hand in ennobling traditional alloys and transmuting them into blue metals. Morogyad is firm that the mere existence of these metals is of greater importance than any utilitarian purpose, but he describes them as being wondrous to work with, being fabulously ductile and responsive to annealing when molten and yet resilient when solid and capable of being polished to remarkable shines and sharpened to formidable edges.
The book concludes with a lengthy chapter on the formulation of fluxes, which again is written in a highly discursive, allusive style which makes it very difficult to distinguish factual formula from poetic metaphor. Exactly what these powders are to be used for is not made clear either, but it is widely speculated that they have something to do with the creation of the Blue Metals.

Commentary

The compositional style of Zarph Mograyn is such that the title of the book is difficult to translate into modern languages with any specificity. As such its title in the antique form of the Insular dialect is usually retained in modern discussion. Attempts to translate it usually amount to titles such as "The Elucidation of Metals" or "The Ennoblement of Metals," though these tend to raise more questions than answers since it is not clear if it is the metals or the smith being ennobled.
It is generally agreed that The Blue Trident of legend was made of one or another of the Blue Metals discussed in this book. Since this artefact was canonically lost, however, this is impossible to prove. One of the more promising avenues of inquiry in unravelling the secrets of this book are the Morogyad pieces found in the upper crusts of the insular cities, though the rarity and prestige of that jewellery makes it hard to convince anyone who owns it to consent to allow it to be studied.
The possibility has been mooted that Zarph Morgayn is not a book of magic at all but some sort of philosophical treatise. The popularity of the book among those who work with metals, however, counts against this.

Availability

No particularly credible modern translation of this is known to exist. Morogyad's discussion of the philosophical implications of his craft are abstruse enough to make such translations enormously difficult. Fragmentary copies, including pamphlet-like copies of the chapter dealing with the Blue Metals, are fairly common, but not much use by themselves. Quite apart from the lack of context for that discussion, some of these pamphlets are outright forgeries, often presented as meaningful modern translations of the book but actually consisting of nothing more than appropriately high-flown mumbo-jumbo.
A wholly intact, authoritative copy is known to exist in the library of the Alchemist's Guild of Dypholyos, who are engaged in an apparently intergenerational effort to learn how to formulate the Blue Metals. Whether they have succeeded or not is not known, though their library must by now contain several decades worth of notes and extrapolations on the matter. Such information would be of great interest to many thaumatologists, but few organisations guard their professional secrets more jealously and savagely than the Alchemists.