Sona are drawn, not written. A master clears a patch of damp Kalahari quartz sand, presses a lattice of dots with his fingertips, then drags one continuous furrow at forty-five degrees that bounces off walls nobody can see until it closes on itself. How many strokes a figure takes is decided by the greatest common divisor of the grid.

The system takes that literally. Every rule is monolinear: constant stroke weight, no fills, no calligraphic swell, the dot lattice always laid first and always left visible. The page is the ground — pale sand with a dried ridge of displaced grain catching light along the lower edge of each line.