TheHoverpope/InkWingsStory

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Yo.

This whole character is the fault of Wallace Stevens; I was doing one of his poems in class, when I thought "This needs to be a lunar." So now it is.

Which poem? ^_^
-- Darloth

Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. It's almost completely different from what I ended up with.-TheHoverpope

Ink-Blackened Wings

I have found a word that there is not. It is the word for the feeling of wind rushing through one's feathers. Were I to attempt to render it in Riverspeak, I would say Terano-Lam, that is to say "like swimming but air." That is the closest I can find in that tongue. I had thought that the languages of the old realm would have a single word that included the concept - they are thorough, and one can say nearly anything in that great language. Would that more in this age could appreciate the inherent poetry in it, the automatic euphonies and rhythms that made every word seem the word of a god. And yet that language is no joy to write in - it's almost to easy. I prefer to work poetry out of the less naturally lyrical languages.

I am flying over the ocean - I have been for three days. I am trying to find the right word, and am searching as broadly as I may. I have learned seatongue in my search, but it has rendered me nothing. It has a term for sea spray on one's face, Shabbathit, but that does not render the right meaning and the connotation cannot be changed. I could alter the prefix and make it mean skyspray, given the linguistic nature of the speech, but it would not be quite the right sense. Perhaps that could suit for the sensation of flight in a rainstorm. The south has failed me in this case, but there is much to write of the endless stretches of ocean below, the things under it if you look hard enough, and the nature of the language and its people. I think it is more intertwined with their nature than any other language since Old Realm.

High Realm is of no use. I flew into the realm, once, and learned their speech that I might find a different word, long ago; a word for the rush that one's exaltation brings, the flux of power that for the first time makes you more than you were. I had thought that of all of them, High Realm would be the language most likely to have a phrase or term for this. They did have one thing that served, and that I grudgingly used - 'the little birth', some of them call it, that surge into new life that is lesser and yet greater than one's first. I have used the term, but it did not serve me for my purposes then. Nor indeed does the language serve me now. It is a coarse language, and a brutal one; it takes all of the aspects of Old Realm, the grammatical structures, the rules, some of the vocabulary if you trace it far enough; and yet it is constructed wrong. It is as knocking great manse to the ground and using the gold and marble to build a charnel-house and a brothel. The speech is so far degraded in that tongue, so worked to utilitarianism and flawed colloquialisms made standard, that it is hardly worth considering it. I only use the tongue to write poems specifically to the dragons, to describe life as an anathema. I understand I have quite a following, but my poems disappear quickly, thanks ot the immaculates. Yet there is quite a readership, underground and in shadows, among dragonbloods willing to reject dogma for thought, reject stricture for my poetry. Many of my brethren have told me that I am a waste of a shard, that I neither protect creation from horrors assailing it nor try to tear down the decadent in civilization. And yet my poetry is doing more to change the world, quietly and from the inside, than their war-bodies ever will.

Skytongue is the language of my birth, and it is one that often serves to carry my words. It flows well, and it sounds graceful, quick, flitting like the winds and the light. It is a choice speech, but it will not serve me here. I write about the nature of what I am now, and that language cannot convey it. It is a language that is tied to my youth, my past. I was not a young man when I felt my little birth; my beard was not yet long and white, but my brush was already well-practiced. I walked out of my home town, for I wanted to climb a hill and look at the cherry-orchard in winter from above. I sat on the hilltop, and waited in the snow, crosslegged and watching. I watched for three days, looking at the play of the light, the sun, the moon, the stars and the clouds, off of the ice that hung from the branches, before Luna came and sat beside me. And she explained to me the nature of the trees, what they feel as a blackbird settles on their limb, what they sense as icicles weigh their branches down until the snap, the sweetness of a thousand cherries in their blood. We sat and I talked of many things. A blackbird flitted over to me, and rested on my shoulder; Luna told me what to do, and now I live in its body. I do not know if that makes us brothers, but it was just right. After a time I stood as if to return home; my parents would want to know me. But they have no wings, so they cannot; I have never returned there.

Flametongue is a beautiful thing, a language that in every syllable conveys the hardship of the south, the torture of the heat and the light inescapable. There are many words for the shadow of a stone, and there are many invitations to join under it. The language flows and bends, and it works in the mouth like a fistful of hornets. It is evocative and powerful, and I slip it into other speeches whenever possible; but there is no word for what I am looking for. I could use the word Skirta, to be bathed in an element, but it is too specific, indicating primarily the element of hot air, when I seek moving air.

I will use the low realm, Seralla Bal-enor Teth. "To be born again in the breath of the world." That is the meaning of the wind through one's feathers in flight, and it will suffice for my purposes. I will have the world know what I know, and I know a great deal.