Tag Archive | reiassan

Otondyoo was not pacing.

Otondyoo was not pacing, because they were close enough that they could see the foreign ship, and that meant the foreign ship could see them.

Otondyoo wanted to pace, because the foreign ship was crewed by – not Bitrani, they didn’t look quite like Bitrani, but still – by tall people with sun-chapped redness over pale skin, hair in brown and blonde and a fiery red Otondyoo had never seen. Their clothes were in blue and grey and green, cut in strange ways, the pants only to the knee, the shirts leaving their arms bare. They must be freezing.

The Emperor was smiling, and if anything, that made Otondyoo want to pace even more. It was a vicious smile, not a diplomat’s face. “Did you know, Otondyoo, that there’s a particular artifact in the imperial treasury that claims to be able to read the color of a person’s aether?”

“But people don’t have aether, sir. The scholars determined that…”

“Indeed. Of course.” The Emperor’s smile grew. He passed the telescope to Otondyoo. “Tell me, what do you think they’re feeling right now?”

Otondyoo had already looked at all of them. “I think they’re cold, sir.”

“Look again.”

Obediently, Otondyoo looked again. “Their leader… I think their leader is worried. He keeps looking at us and then back to his first mate. And to the Calenyena-looking one they’ve got on the aft rigging.”

“Indeed. Do you think they were expecting to find someone else?”

Otondyoo dropped the spyglass down to study the armament. “If they were, sir, they might have not been expecting them to be friendly.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1036689.html. You can comment here or there.

Last Lexember Word: Birds

Dec31

anke asked for birds.

I already have kahger a hunting bird of prey and kyahg, a nuisance scavenger/carnivore bird

There are, of course, dozens and dozens of birds. But I’ll pick out one for fun.

Tiez is a bird, in general – winged thing, feathers, lays eggs.

TiezLibbaa is a songbird.

And TiezLibbaa Ekondonkee-rul, Ekondonkee’s songbird, often called the tiez-kon, is a bright blue songbird who nests in the northern reaches of the continent. They are known for springtime song, and a family of them nested in the tent of the warlord Ekondonkee, who has since been forgotten except in the name of the bird.

/’tēz lib ‘bä ‘e kōn ‘dōn kē ‘rəl/

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1035795.html. You can comment here or there.

Candles and Cons, Lexember day 30

Dec30

Let it Shine, Let it Shine, Let it Shine

I already have the word for shine! It’s -lar

(I did the beginning of a series of conlang exercises here

And a lamp is Tezhet; the lamp shines – Tezhet alaraak.

But before there were lamps there were candles: dapairdie /da ‘pīr dē/, from pair, light, -do, to give, da-, a thing that does.

and inventrix asked for Cons.

iekiekyent is a known fact, a part of existence.
telnyent: truth-known, i.e, “the sky is blue.”
Kelnyent is the sort of truth that you’re pretty sure about

So a confidence game is a turning the truth sideways.

To turn sideways is gazh; to turn something else sideways is ragazh.

You end up with Kelneyt ragazh, a turning-sideways of your perceptions.

And, like con, this gets shortened to kelryag, a con.

Above list reproduced here – http://www.incatena.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=40026

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1034221.html. You can comment here or there.

Lexember Day 29: Colors

Dec29

The Calenyena love color, really, really love color. Everything about their world is bright and colorful.

Here are just a few color words:

I have already kat, red, len, orange, and paato, yellow.

gomol, from the old gom, means green. It is speculated the the -ol brings it closer to the Bitrani word for green, miagermo

Tien, from the old teetaanzhun, sky-like, is blue, a broad term encompassing most shades, as are kat and gomol.

And just because we only had it tucked into another word -liz means “brightly rainbow-colored.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1033705.html. You can comment here or there.

Discovery, Part Four

Dec28

Discovery
Discovery Part II
Part III

Captain Titrian and his first mate spent a few moments staring at the ship coming out of the harbor.

It was flying a flag, that much they could tell, and although it was no flag they recognized, Titrian at least had not expected it to be. Over a thousand years had passed; nobody still flew the same flags or bowed to the same kings.

It was also flying pennants in every color known to mankind; it was painted in horizontal stripes of red, blue, and green; its sails were red, blue, green, white, pink, teal, and black. It hurt Titrian’s eyes to look at, but he looked anyway. Because under all that brilliant color was a sleek, pointed ship unlike anything he’d seen before, and he could count, painted to match the stripes on the ship, at least ten cannon.

This gaudy thing was a warship, and it was coming out to meet them.

That itself was cause for alarm.

Standing at the helm of the ship, however, dressed in as many colors as the ship if not more, was a man who looked to be a hundred years old if he was a day, his beard and hair both white and both braided into many tiny strands. In the spy-glass, Titrian noted a crown. He also noted that the man – king, what have you – had dark brown skin and a face far more like the Ideztozhyuh than like Titrian’s own people.

“‘What happened to the lost colony?'” he muttered. It was the question everyone had been asking when this mission left. “Clearly, they were lost.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/1032193.html. You can comment here or there.

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!

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

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.

Alder's Grove Fiction

The Worlds of Lyn Thorne-Alder