Widsith spoke, unlocked their wordhoard, they who sent upon us wellcloud of wordpour, abundance — we who were made to grow out of the earth and return to it; so in the six-hundredth year of our life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month, the windows and the fountains above the great deep broke open at once and the words rained down upon us for forty days and forty nights, which is to say much, but in the words that we used then. What was the matter with us that we did not fear such breaking? What became of all that we did not say with those words before new–fallen ones washed them away? The world as in the beginning become wild and waste, the face of words not separate, and then separate; words from words as, too, the waters from the waters. And all the while the runic wynn changing to ruin. Even as she-dove showed us a well and therein the we, and a mouth breathed out a pale blue moth, and from the whorl of a whelk a newborn elk stepped impossibly out, blinking. All the earth was made wet and webbed-wide, a well and a wellspring, a worden, the sluices of heaven wording as we stood in that great rushing wind within, yet without name, turning.