Author’s explanations brings together Nareon’s scattered remarks on the words of the cycle: letters to translators, answers at readings, and notes in working materials. They help reveal how the language works, but do not replace the explanations woven into the novels themselves.
Comments in Letters
The most reliable explanations survive in correspondence with translators. In answering questions about arkivit, the line, and correctors, Nareon usually quoted a nearby line of dialogue or gave an everyday example, then asked translators not to make the term more precise than it was for the character in that scene. These letters explain why the same root can shift slightly in meaning from one book to another.
What Nareon never produced
Nareon spoke more than once about a glossary of his own for the cycle, what he was collecting, what he was preparing, what he wanted to "release with the sixth book and not before". The sixth book remained unfinished, the glossary unreleased, and everything that survived of it entered circulation by roundabout paths: quotations in letters, notes in margins, asides in rare interviews.
Working Variants
Notes on drafts preserved discarded word forms: nor-line beside the later “line,” plost beside “threshold,” and two stress patterns for the name Norven. Their provenance is not equally well attested. Matching records in editorial archives are generally treated as working variants; isolated appearances in fan compilations remain hypotheses until a second source is found.