The Asho-Kochi monks of the planet Ada-Shim in the Galaxy known as The Shroud of Kastafron were a race of fish-like sages in my pilot Skyborn.
Their written language consists of a series of base gestures and glyphs that can evolve into an infinite number of characters and variations. It is free-flowing and without grammar, the sequence of characters and meaning is conveyed entirely by the arrangement and flow of the characters on the page. The language uses cartouches not unlike the pictographic language of the ancient Egyptians, but occasionally these are empty or occupied by glyphs with no apparent order.
The Asho-Kochi language resists all efforts at translation and cannot be "learned" in the manner of a conventional language. The writing of the Asho-Kochi can only be understood by a reader through meditation on the initial emotional state caused by the totality of a document. At first, full comprehension requires days of fasting and silent contemplation, but as the reader becomes more and more used to communing with the language, the amount of time it takes to comprehend shrinks until it is no different from any literate person's perception of their own language.
The Asho-Kochi language first came to me in the summer of 2015 as i was in the early stages of conceiving the Skyborn pilot. This unique form of expression became one of the primary motifs in my compulsive doodling for years, even after the Skyborn project died in the wake of the COVID lockdown.
I am not entirely certain that I understand the Asho-Kochi language and occasionally believe that the monks themselves may have sent the following to me as an enticement to tell their story via the medium of television. While the Skyborn project will most likely never see the light of day, I retain hope that I will someday fully understand this message.
