Ritual Casting (10 minutes)

The caster seats themselves comfortably and places the material components — soot and salt — in a small mortar, grinding them together in a slow, meditative rhythm. As they grind, they begin humming a droning tone that shifts in pitch, cycling through the harmonic patterns of known languages before reaching into the unknown. The caster then dabs the mixture on their tongue and behind each ear, and closes their eyes. The remaining minutes are spent in a state of receptive silence, during which the world's languages seem to wash over the caster like overlapping waves — fragmentary voices in a hundred tongues, gradually resolving into meaning. Each caster experiences this differently: some hear the voices of scholars long dead, others feel words form as colors or textures. When the ritual completes, the caster opens their eyes and the world's written and spoken words become as clear as their mother tongue.