‘They’ve got to be smelted from the same material. And then there’s a good deal of etymological symbol work – you’ll learn all of that in your fourth year, if you specialize in silver-working. We actually use an invented alphabet, based on a manuscript first discovered by an alchemist from Prague in the seventeenth century.* It’s so that no one outside Babel can replicate our process. For now, you can think of all this adjustment as deepening the bond of connection.’
