Tales of the Five Kingdoms

Gara, Warlord of Thandor (Part One)

    Gara leaned forward over the table. "Will it tell me about steel?"

    "Shades, no. Even if I possessed such texts, they'd be too advanced for..." His eyes dropped by a hair, and he quickly shielded his eyes with a hand. "Shades, girl, mind yourself. You're indecent."

    Gara looked down. The collar of her loose shirt was hanging rather low, but so what? It wasn't like her pants had fallen down. Why did foreign men act oddly at the first sign of breasts? Were they infants?

    "You may look now," Gara said mockingly once she fastened up her lacings some more.

    Vaan cleared his throat. "No more stalling. The passage, girl. The passage!"

    Gara gave a sharp tsk before squinting at the runes. "Chunik mul rothar sul diin."

    Vaan nodded. "Excellent. The meaning?"

    "Hatred to char am I."

    He sighed, yet again. "That's a literal translation of the Aeldenn Tones. What does it mean?"

    "It's what the slavers chant as they pass through the fires we set to bar them from our villages."

    "True enough. This is an incantation, Chieftess. The first line for a basic fire-warding spell. The next four lines give the entire incantation, and if all five are spoken, an Aleesh witch is impervious even to dragon fire."

    Gara frowned. "It is not for me to use."

    "No, of course not. We are but daan and lack the power granted by gods to the Aleesh. No magic shall ever flow from your tongue."

    Gara hid her smirk. Well, he was half-right.

    "But, it isn't entirely useless to you." Vaan banged his fist against the table and raised his voice to a shout. "It's a valuable tool for instruction! Now give me the shades-forsaken translation, girl."

    Gara grimaced and looked down at the page. The Aeldenn Tones were all backwards, the object and subject of the sentence all flipped about, and things that should have been one of the two were neither, more often than not. The Aleesh language didn't have words to describe other words and instead personified such things. "Hatred" in the passage didn't refer to the feeling of hate, but served as an adjective. It meant that the char was hateful.

    "I hate being burned," Gara grumbled.

    Vaan clapped his hands together. "There! You see? Easy as dyeing."

    "Easy as...? Winds take you, male, death is not easy!"

    "Not dying, dyeing."

    "You lost me."

    Vaan rubbed his temples with his forefingers. "Girl... Back to the passage. Your translation is crude, but accurate. I would've preferred you put a little more... eloquence... into it."

    "You mean longer words that say the same thing but make it harder to understand."

    Vaan looked insulted.

    "Winds and storms, male. Your 'eloquence' misses the entire point of having a language to begin with. The point is to make yourself understood, and if you can't do that in as few words as you can, you failed."

    "That's..." Vaan hesitated. "Actually, a good argument. Fair play to you, Chieftess."

    Gara smiled and held her head a little higher.

    "Now, the second line."

    Gara scowled.

    "Don't act a fool, girl."