Celyn Teaches Izgil Sylvan
Celyn cocks his head to one side. “I can read Sylvan, yes. In its native form.” He flicks his fingers awkwardly against his knee. “It’s a complicated language to learn to read, which is one of the reasons that it’s usually written in Elvish. Elvish is written in sounds. Sylvan is written in ideas, arranged artistically.”
Though there’s an immediate smirk and, “You want to learn, though. I can see it.” He considers. “My apprentice master didn’t know. He wouldn’t have taught me if he did know. I had to trade with the fey for the knowledge.” He does not elaborate, but of course he is not in the habit of explaining details like that. “The script has to be magical— I can’t write that part— because the language is,” he frowns. He does not have the technical linguistics language for this, and scowls a moment before visibly having an idea.
The idea comes with scooping up a rock and gesturing with it. “So this rock,” he says in Sembaran, and then he goes through a sequence of words in Sylvan, all of them referring to the rock: the rock as the subject of a sentence, the rock as the object of the sentence, to the rock, from the rock, the rocky nature, and so on. “All of those are written the same. The magic tells you which one it’s supposed to be.” He tosses the rock lightly back onto the ground. “So learning to read won’t help write unless you figure out how to do the magic part, which I can’t do.” He wants to be clear about the limitations inherent in what he can teach.
“The danger is that because the text is magical and fey are tricky they sometimes layer more complicated spells into the text. It’s an art form, primarily, so most of these are for artistic effect. Love poetry that inspires feelings of fondness. Warning signs that make people actually afraid. There’s an encoding of intent, of desired emotion, not just grammar, often.” He flicks his hand lightly. “Or it could be love poetry that makes the reader fall in love with the author. Other enchantments. That’s why my apprentice master refused to learn how to read it, even in Tyrwingha where the fey mostly don’t mess with people too badly.”
He peers at Izgil. “So. That’s the risks. If you can read it, it can affect you. If you can’t read it, none of the enchantments that a fey might slide in there can reach you. That’s the bargain. There’s always a bargain, a trade; in this case, by reading you give your assent to the magic in the words.”
Of course, given Izgil is still interested in learning, Celyn shrugs cheerfully and scratches a character into the dirt with a knife. “Rock.” He adds three characters in a circle around it, and connects them with arcs; the effect is clearly assembled into a single aesthetic design once he finishes it. “Secondary characters are usually in threes or sevens. They connect to the central character. A single piece is a related concept, a sentence, a line of a verse. They can assemble much larger and more complicated to read, but you read from here,” he taps the top, “usually around this way,” tracing it clockwise, “unless of course it does something different. If this had the magic layer you could read that it’s ‘The rock, grey, rests upon the ground’.” He points at the characters, indicating ‘grey’, ‘rest’, ‘ground’, and says, “Rock is central, so it’s the focus point. If I wrote it like this,” he does the characters in a different configuration, putting a different one in the center, “it’s, ‘Upon the ground, the grey rock rests’, only the greyness is of equal importance with the rockness in implication.”
He stares at what he’s written, then smudges out ‘grey’, rewrites it attached with an arc to ‘rock’, and gestures. “So for a sentence this simple you might think you’d want to write it that way, so ‘grey’ is attached to ‘rock’, but it’s out of balance. Only two surrounding the center, only one satellite character with its own orbit, and also only one thing in orbit. Which you could do, but it’s deliberately unsettling as a writing choice. Better if we had a third thing to put in the core orbit and two more things to attach to the rock, at least, so it doesn’t look totally wrong. There’s whole realms of things in fey poetry about breaking the balance of the orbitals and the implications, or what it means if you draw the reading arcs the other way so it reads this way around, or—” He waves the tip of the knife counterclockwise over the drawing.
He gestures at it and puts the knife away. “Only of course without the magic layer it just reads ‘rock grey rest ground’ or ‘ground grey rock rest’ and you have to kind of guess what it means, whether the ground is what’s grey or the rock is grey or maybe the resting is grey in some sort of poetic metaphor…”