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Discovery Three, a continuation of a story of Steam!Calenta

Dec25

after Discovery and Discovery Part II

The Emperor’s secretary was having a hard time understanding. “Sir. Sir, if you go out onto the ship, you’re at risk.”

The Emperor shrugged into a heavily-embroidered vest. “Exactly. Otondyoo, if I don’t go out there, what kind of ruler am I?”

“An aging one, sir?” Otondyoo had not gotten to the position of Emperor’s secretary without learning how to be very very blunt with the monarch.

“But one that can still sit in a saddle with the best of them. We’ve forgotten a lot lately, in this long era of peace, but I believe we’ll never forget that.”

“…But it’s a boat, sir, not a goat.” Otondyoo tried to sound reasonable, even if the Emperor was being anything but.

“The theory still holds. I will be on the boat that greets these visitors. And if they attack us and I am killed, my heir will have sufficient diplomatic reason to kill them all and begin war on whence they came. But Otondyoo? If it comes to that, tell her to save the boat. You’re going to need it.”

The Emperor was smiling. Otondyoo had not seen that in quite a while. The Emperor’s secretary bowed deeply. Let him have his boat ride. He had been cooped up in the palace for far too long. “Of course, sir. Give me a moment to leave those notes with my assistant. I’m coming with you.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1031838.html. You can comment here or there.

Day and Night, #Lexember day 24

Dec24

Day and Night!

[personal profile] rix_scaedu asked for Day and Night, which is coincidental, because tomorrow’s Edally holiday post is IetTienaabaa, which means “The Day of Tienaabaa.”

Iettie, actually, is day in the sense of a a whole day, from sunrise to sunrise, while Ietta is most often day in the sense of “day of;” birthday, gods’ day, coronation day.

The time from sunrise to sunset is anez /’a nez/, meaning, from sun to stars, and the word for night comes from the old phrase Odyidai ahkaarununu, “demons come.” While the word for “demons” in this sense is lost to history, it is still seen in words like dyid, darkness, and odyaikaar, night.

(If you are guessing that the Calenyena historically had an unpleasant relationship with nighttime…)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1031215.html. You can comment here or there.

Light a Candle for me, a story of Edally Academy, is up for Patrons

Dec24

Light a Candle for Me

In Calenta, there was an old tradition – born out of a much older story, and that itself born out of an ancient event – that you did not count the dead as gone until the cold season had passed without them returning to life…

(read on…)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1030862.html. You can comment here or there.

Discovery, Part Fnarg

Dec23

Tangential to but concurrent with Discovery and Discovery Part II.

The miners had found the bones, and at first, nobody had thought anything of it.

They had been following a newly discovered vein of prime silver, accessible only due to new machines and techniques and so heavily loaded with aether that it seemed to vibrate. They’d cracked open a cave and found further veins of silver running down below the cave, and then their first crack at the ground had revealed bones.

It didn’t take a doctor or an anthropologist to determine that the bones were human; when they called in two of each, what they could say was that the bones were very old indeed, female, and they did not know how she’d died. They could also guess that the bones were from a full-grown adult, although she would have only reached the shoulder of most women.

A lone woman dead in a cave nobody had known about was a mystery, but not so strange as to halt digging of aether-rich silver. The miners had let the doctors and scientists take away the bones, and then they’d begun digging again.

That was when they found the second skeleton. And the third. And the fourth. And the fifth, sixth… at ten, the miners threw up their hands in frustration.

By that point, the scientists had begun the serious examination of the first set of bones.

next: http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1080795.html

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1030274.html. You can comment here or there.

Lexember Day 22: Paaaar-taaaay

Dec22

[personal profile] rix_scaedu asked for parties!

To begin with, we’ll want the word for party, which comes from lok, meal, and rook, tribe or family group: lok-ryu-rook (meal for the whole tribe), Lokurook. From this word you get Lokook, /lō ‘ko͝ok/ party, as well as lokozh, a grand festival or large meal at a gathering.

(See the post on trade).

Recently, the term lokurdin – from derdin, friends, from diednerdin (obsolete), who who trusts another, from ner, trust – has risen to prominence. A meal-for-friends is a completely social gathering, often with alcoholic drinks featuring heavily.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1029847.html. You can comment here or there.

Lexember Day (20) (Yesterday) – Fancy Pants

Dec21

The Calenyena have two words they use to mean “over done, gaudy, frivolous.”

The first comes from the Tabersi {Bitrani} words for “wide-brim”, fanada lerjo.

Although the Tabersi use broad-brimmed hats for a number of sensible reasons, not the least of them being that they are a cold-weather-adapted race that migrated south and tend to sunburn, they also wear some pretty ridiculous hats, at least by Calenyena lights, and thus “wide brimmed” became a term of disparagement. In Calenyen, this became baanaadaaler /’bän nä ‘dä ler/.

The second term comes from the West-Coasters {Arran}, from the city of Sheburri, which was known for being a fashion hub. To be immensely overdressed for a situation (“silk in the goat pen” is another phrase for it) is to be like someone from Sheburri, zhebburnon.

If you are thinking you have to be pretty overdone for the Calenyen to find you ridiculous… well, that’s not entirely inaccurate.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1029201.html. You can comment here or there.

Lexember day 21: Grooming

Dec21

Today’s words focus on basic grooming, combing and brushing:

lool, to pull apart

dalool /’da lo͞ol/ a tool for pulling apart, a comb

dalooltez, a goat-hair comb

lurret, to smooth (from lur, smooth, easy)

(-ret is often used to mean “to make this [adjective]”)

Daluret, a tool for smoothing, a brush

Daloolza, to use a comb; dalurretza, to use a brush.

(-za is often used when using a tool)

Hair, human hair, is piem, so you can end up with a sentence like: Taikie piem-ba uveedalurretzaak; Taikie hair-her (pastperfect)-brush-(subject/verb agreement); Taikie had brushed her hair.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1028982.html. You can comment here or there.

Lexember Day 19: “I made a sentence”

Dec19

[personal profile] thnidu responded to yesterday’s post by asking me to create the sentence “I made a sentence”. So!

laar, I

taar, you, subject

taarte, you two, and so on.

baar, he/she (person pronoun)

baarrte, those two, and so on.

archaic: baan, baante and so on (she, a group of only women).

gaan, it (animal/thing pronoun)

laanaan, me

taannan, you-object (taannante, you two and so on)

baarnan, her/him

gaanran, it-object.

Okay, phew, there’s pronouns, so.

I made a sentence

Make, to create, to craft: Tair (this word, from an old word meaning “skill,” which can also be seen in -tairook, “with care” or “with practiced care. Throwing something together or making something that isn’t perceived as needing skill is died, from diedie, toss, this from the same root as dudiedah, tumble, from the loss post.)

Sentence!

we start with

iekiek, this exists (See also iekiekyent, a known fact.)

tel-, that which voices

teliekiek, that which give voice to an existing thing

telkiek

Need a break for some tea…

(This is the part where I need a punctuation to suggest the beginning of a sentence in my con-script, since I don’t have capitals.)

Laar telkiek ezhtairak: I sentence (past tense)-make-(subject agreement)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1028533.html. You can comment here or there.

Discovery, Part two

Dec18

after Discovery

If pressed, the captain would never admit it, but Titrian had always been skeptical about the concept of the Lost Colony. Ships just didn’t go over the Fire Sea.If they were only now figuring out how to safely navigate north of the Fire Sea – and that only by using dirigible technology in tandem with new boat designs – there was no way that that their ancestors more than a millenium in the past had managed to work it out.

So Captain Titrian had always believed. But when the gods and the government paid your salary, there were times that you had to go against your own beliefs.

Since he’d never told anyone that he didn’t believe in the lost colonies, Titrian had nobody but himself to know his uncomfortable shame when they found themselves looking up at a fully-developed city. A garishly-colored city, he noted, with even the cliff face covered in paintings.

His first mate coughed. “That, sir, uh. It doesn’t look like a Tabersi city.”

Titrian had to agree. It didn’t look like anything he’d ever seen before. “Signal the admiral. This might be more complicated than we thought.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1028023.html. You can comment here or there.