this a draft of a chapter, work in progress

When we were discussing Water, we approached the Laguz rune but did not have enough tools and context at the moment.

Let's get back to Laguz and see how it complements the role of the Sun we just discussed in the previous chapter.

You may have noticed, our world was a pretty dry place up to this point.

Water was separated upward at the beginning, then it tried to come back to the scene but was evaporated at first touch, so it's again isolated by the pillow of the Air.

Laguz starts with a vertical bar, shared with our central Naudiz; it means the Laguz rune resonates with all five worlds, including Fire.

And now look—something steps down from the world of Water to meet the Light in the Air.

Wunjo Rune

See how the descending bar of Laguz touches the top ascending bar of Sowilo? There is a rune for this — Wunjo. It means Joy, Bliss, and I call it also Love and Mercy in a wide sense.

Raido Rune

We started from Laguz, stepped down to the top of Sowilo, and found Wunjo.

Let's make one more step down over Sowilo and consider its middle descending bar. We now have the rune Raido:

It means ride, journey. Digging deeper into Proto-Indo-European, we come to more general meanings: "move," "flow," "stream," "pour," and even "rain."

To further highlight the relevance to Water, it's worth mentioning the English 'rivulet' derived from the Latin 'rivus' and Proto-Slavic "rěka," which means river in all the modern Slavic languages.

From a Runic Alchemy perspective, the 'leg' we added to Wunjo to get Raido represents the descent of transparency from Emptiness to the Earth, the same as in Sowilo and Naudiz.

So this is our interpretation of this rune:

• The journey to the light takes place in the Earth on its way to transparency.

If we recall that the transparency of Earth comes through ordering raw chaotic Earth, just as in physical crystals where chaotically placed atoms are aligned into a crystal grid, we are meeting the 'navigational' aspect of the rune Raido in the sense of helping Light find its path through the dark Earth.