| abstract | - Also known as kormahn in D'ni language, a Descriptive Book contains the primary description of a world written according to the principles of the Art, establishing the founding link to one of the infinite Ages in the Great Tree of Possibilities. Infinite worlds of the Great Tree can match any possible written description, and a Descriptive Book would "choose" one of the possible Ages that most closely match its descriptions. There is an obscure chaotic element in how the Book selects which of those many worlds it will link to, and the D'ni people theorized that this chaotic element was influenced by the unique physical properties of each book. The process of describing the Age focused on avoiding written contradictions which would result in a link to an unstable Age. A Book with contradictions would attempt to link to a quantum reality that matches a contradictory description, and the closest thing it could "find" would be an unviable or unstable Age. No two Descriptive Books could link to the same Age, nor a Descriptive Book could be duplicated (although it would have multiple Linking Books linked to it). Even if two Descriptive Books had the same content of text, they'd still link to similar, but separate, Ages, chosen per their own chaotic elements. As the chaotic elements that established a link had to do probably with the unique physical properties of each book, no two Descriptive Books could be exactly indentical, thus their differences would provide different links. The D'ni made experiments to prove this theory by producing identical Books, but they were never successful. The above means that if a Descriptive Book was damaged, the link would be lost for ever; even if the Book was rewritten, it would be unlikely that it'd link to the same previous Age, but to a similar one. Descriptive Books have always been written in the D'ni language, believed to be appropriate to routinely handle complex descriptions. For this, no attempts have been known to write a Book in any other languages.
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