ii. audio. after dark. both courts.

[vrykolakas]

[If anything, the Brucolac's voice sounds worse than ever, painfully scratchy and distinctly weary. The reception isn't perfect; he's sitting in the garden of the fortress at Redgate, where the lockets work, but the blood granite is still causing some interference.]

What languages do you speak? And what language would you say I'm speaking right now?

Comments

[vrykolakas]

Ah. Haha. It's based off a garbled kind of Quiesy. Archaic by now, too. It's a bastard, stubborn Dead language. [Literally. It's got dialects of silence and gesture so even liches with sewn-up mouths can speak it! ...hurray.] I was speaking it to the quivering Latin-Franconianist before.

[ziggyzoggy]

[Dead languages, eh? Fun times. Of course, it would make sense that a language could die, if no one was around to speak it anymore, but it's hard to have dead languages when the people who would speak in ancient tongues are still kicking around--literally, after multiple millenia.

He scratches his jaw.] For the dead, or it be dead itself?

[Latin Franconianist? Never heard of it.]

[vrykolakas]

Bit of both. The dead are its main speakers and the dead tend to stay in one place and last a long, long time. So the language stills, curdles, spoken by the same people for centuries. As slow-moving rivers are thick with filth, so Quiesy is sluggish with dead pomp.

[ziggyzoggy]

Heh, ya poet.

[He smiles.] We got a few like that. Mostly from the Elves, an' Draenei...[His head tilts, shrugging.] Anybody who lives for a long time, really.

[vrykolakas]

[—he's a little startled by that accusation, but alright. Wry pleasure is hot on the heels of his surprise.]

Forgive. Once an orator.

What are draenei? And elves, for that matter. I've heard the word in stories, but they're almost assuredly non-existent at home.

[It's bizarre to talk of the entirety of Bas-Lag as home, but that's what this place does to you. He doesn't like it; doesn't want to lose his varied loves and hates of his homeworld to the generalising force of distance.]

[ziggyzoggy]

[No trolls and no elves? What an odd world. He hums. How to describe Draenei...]

Tall, blue skin, human faces--'cept for the big horns an' tentacles. [And he wiggles a couple fingers near his jawline in illustration.] Cloven feet and tails. They came from another planet.

Elves mostly be pricks. [AGHKJHGKHAHAHAHAHA.] Long ears, long eyebrows, meddle in things they ain't go no business in, resultin' in catastrophic destruction, [-waves a hand; etc. etc., you know the type. A brief pause, then:] Think they know better than errybody.