we called it snowscript, because we invented it cold. we didn’t think it’d ever get loose, or what it would do when its habit took hold.
this was when winter was weighty, slow-moving, an inertia too strong to oppose with human movement; out there, we could hardly work up a sweat. so we’d huddle inside and compose, he and i, and after straining against the limits of old vowels, we decided we’d build up our own alphabet.
it was he who drew the first letter, sharp and [str]angled, pronounced like a thorn. i did him one better with our beta, called in, and the rest were as suddenly born. we argued over order and division, practiced the penmanship ’til our hands were quickened with scribe’swift precision. we kept all of it always in hardspace, burned our keys and maps of correlation. we put it in the world slowly, left our marks first in quiet places, then crossroads and churches and classrooms and stations.
finally, i saw it written—well, copied—poorly and with gaps, but somewhere neither he nor i had been. i filled in the missing curves and jots and caps, wrote my reply in red pen. from there it was a matter of time, and little of it. by the time spring should have started, our city’s vandals and vagabonds had come to know and love it. we corrected where we could, Jack and i, and the collective caught on quickly.
stomping thickly through snowdrifts, breathing clouds and shivering in May, the officials spared few words about this trend. “we’re busy, as you know, with the matter of this weather,” as though a vote would make the frostime end.
but newsmen are more curious than cats—much more so, for they’ve fewer lives than nine—and they made our symbols their story, putting it in print, and in vision, and on the endless line. codebreakers caught word and set themselves to the task, compared and calculated and cracked. truth told, their analysta[c]tistics were more than our cipher asked: the messages weren’t the secret, but the elements these tokens would attract. they appealed to those who felt left in the cold, outsiders by their circumstance or choice; somehow, they felt those silent sigils gave them stronger voice.
it was a fashion, swift to start, and it should as soon have faded. but it didn’t take long ’til, from Canton to Cairo, that chill out of season invaded. we called it snowscript, and didn’t know how right we were; now, half the world fears the death of fire, clings to fur and wool and folded fleece. we called it snowscript, and were proud, for a while. now we shiver, and scratch out new letters, cough out new sounds, searching for reversals to the runehand we’ve released.