Sepal-Script

Sepal-Script is a form of short-hand used widely during the late Second Chaotic Period on Aren. The alphabet used contained 32 characters, named for the phases of Aren's Moon, and six more than Egregts used to write Common. Despite being technically more complicated, Sepal allowed scribes to record information more densely. While lacking much of the gravitas of Egregts, Sepal was especially useful because it was both faster to write and faster to copy. In common usage, a scribe would record events quickly in Sepal, then draw from the information to write a more formal account later in Egregts.

History

Stone tablets containing characters inscribed in Sepal have been dated to the late First Chaotic Period, an undated inscriptions on cave walls indicate it may be much older. However these discoveries create something of a mystery, as the character organization on these sources does not match how Common was typically inscribed in Sepal. In fact the documented tablets and inscriptions have never been successfully translated.

It is believed that the Sepal alphabet was created by some hitherto undiscovered civilization that arose within The Interior, and belongs to a now-lost language. All traces of said civilization were likely erased by the Marcon Alliance during the Dynastic Period(though no largescale archeological investigation of the region has ever been undertaken).

The characters survived and were adapted into a cypher-script during the Dynastic era, where various resistance groups used whatever they could find to facilitate communication. Sepal had the advantage of being commonly-known(the names of the characters being in common parlance as the days of the lunar month), easily "mapped" to a language most people knew, and plausible to disguise in any number of ways. A surviving example is found in the Xtzen Codex which disguised a report on troop movements as a series of numbers. The numbers could be decoded with fairly simple application of mathematical principles, which then produced a list of numbers 1-32, which in turn corresponded to letters in sepal. A fairly unsophisticated code, but effective.

By the late Second Chaotic Period "Modern Sepal" had evolved into a sort of short-hand. While Sepal had more characters than Egregts, they were easier to write(especially with improvised tools), which made it a popular shorthand. The prevalence of Sepal is owed primarily to the early Paladins, who traditionally learned it for its use in ciphers, but found it highly effective for journaling.

In A.Y. 140, Order of the Western Wind ceased teaching Sepal-Script as part of the standard training, and the other major Paladin orders quickly followed suit. By A.Y. 170, sepal had largely fallen out of use, replaced by modern shorthand scripts based on Egregts. Many highly important treatise on the end of the Mage Wars were written exclusively in Sepal.