An old poet from Caernarfon, when shown the text, laughed darkly. “That’s no code,” he said. “It’s a spell broken. ‘Thmyl’ is a mishearing of ‘thymial’ — thimble. ‘Fyd myt’ — ‘my foot’ in a dialect dead four centuries. ‘Asdar’ — as in ‘as darllen’ — ‘for reading aloud’. And 261 steps from the old Llandrwyd well to the yew tree.”
thmyl — no dictionary matched it. fyd — Welsh for “would be”. myt — perhaps a mutation of “myd” (my), or a scrap of Latin “mitto” (I send). asdar — close to Persian ashtar (star), or Arabic asdār (chests/volumes). thmyl-fyd-myt-asdar-261-llandrwyd
In the archive’s deepest shelf, dust had settled into the grooves of a wooden box no one had opened in eighty years. Inside: a single scrap of vellum, inked in faded brown. An old poet from Caernarfon, when shown the
He poured his tea. “Then Llandrwyd returns. And so do the ones they buried there without a name.” If you intended it to be a puzzle to solve, I can also try it as a cipher — just let me know what system you had in mind. ‘Thmyl’ is a mishearing of ‘thymial’ — thimble
261 — a grid reference? A page number? A year (AD 261, when Rome was crumbling and British tribes whispered old names)?
This looks like a coded or structured string: "thmyl-fyd-myt-asdar-261-llandrwyd" .
“And if you walk those steps at midnight, speaking the words backward?”
