You must focus. Dull your worldly senses and feel the River flow around you; through you. Sense its ebb and flow, the direction of its currents. Now, set a simple charm with which you are familiar upon some nearby trinket and set it some distance from you. Begin your meditation once more. Now sense the distortion to the River as you had just felt it. Reach out to the charmed object and find the root of this distortion. Become familiar with the spell's signature -- every small, seemingly insignificant feature of it. Once you have done this, trace the shapes that come to your mind. Do not think, do not act of your own will, but allow the pen to move of its own accord as you focus, ever harder, on solving the mystery of the charm. When you have finished, if you are successful, you will have extracted your first arcane rune.
- Excerpt from Elementary Spellcraft by Lobor Quitzling
Nothing is simple about the so-called runic speech. Neither is runic a true language, nor the runic alphabet any sort of alphabet as is used by Common or its sisters. There are those who spend their whole lives studying this ancient universal construct, searching for new runes or combinations of them. Runes are quite complicated. Understanding runes takes many an entire lifetime, and being able to discover new ones is a talent possessed only by a scant few. The experiment quoted above seems simple to the initiate, but was meant to be performed only by a second-year student, who was expected to take at least three months to repeatably replicate results from it. We see then that even the most basic task of extracting the runes of a simple charm is not easy, requiring years of practice and study to accomplish. It should therefore be said that I am no great authority on these things, but I have consulted with the arcanists of my time to produce the best description of these base elements that I can.
First, let us define our subject. At its base, a rune is just a codification of a particular arcane pattern (or disruption, as it is sometimes called) in the River's flow. The shape and look of a rune are not dictated by some linguist for form or function, but are extracted from the universal fabric itself. Each rune exists, and has always existed, independently of any mortal ability to recognize or record them. An aside: some speculate that the runes were created by the Primordials at the dawn of time, while others maintain that the runes do not exist contemporaneously with the universe, but that they ARE the universe. In other words, it is possible that the runes themselves are the base elements upon which reality is constructed. Returning to the extraction of runes: each rune, or "letter," in the runic alphabet is assigned a sound. This sound helps novice mages focus when casting spells by verbalizing the runes they are attempting to conjure, and generally eases communication regarding runes in general. By combining different runes (order matters), spellcasters can form "words" from the runic sounds. We refer to the collection of runes, their sounds, and the infinite words that can be created from them as "runic speech." When someone is "speaking runic," they are simply conjuring a spell of some sort.
Every spell is cast using runes, whether the caster is aware of this fact or not. Formal education in the magical arts is but one way to familiarize oneself with runic speech. Anyone can be taught basic runes and words, memorizing all of the spells that are useful to them. However, a formal education is not a prerequisite to casting a spell. Those mages who are informally educated and those educated not at all tend to have a basic grasp of certain words which somehow become familiar to them. It appears that "natural" spellcasters seem to have an innate understanding of certain arcane words (even runes, in some cases) which allows them to cast spells even without formal magical training. This innate understanding even extends to certain animals in our plane, which we often consider unintelligent (the basilisk comes to mind). We know, too, that many extraplanar entities cast spells, and they assuredly don't have any education on the subject (I imagine that many an interesting drama could be written of a devil forced to sit through lecture). But how can this be? How can runes be at once incredibly difficult to discover, yet come naturally to certain people and not others? This is a subject of great study. One hypothesis supposes that each creature born possesses a sensitivity to the River. Those more sensitive become natural spellcasters, and those less must be educated and taught how to hone their dulled sense. This theory does not attempt to answer why natural spellcasters can each learn radically different spells, or why some even learn runes and can put their own "short" words together. Here, there are many theories in conflict. One proposes that the spells learned by a natural are a product of the arcane environment in which they grow, somehow relating the River itself to the spells which a natural will innately know. Another proposes that it is rather a function of what spells are cast in the presence of a natural. The role of the divine in such matters is also unclear.
Why, my dear reader, do I tell you all of these things? I tell you because I desire that those among you who find interest in this subject become students of it. I cannot give all answers here, and I cannot provide a full picture of runic speech, but you, if you study this fantastical "language," may succeed where I have failed, and you will have done the world a great service for having done so.
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