Chapter 1-15: The Power of Words (1/2)

Valences clean and full. I’d be ready to Slot new spells upon Renewal.

I didn’t actually have that many Valences, so I didn’t need much time to recharge. Just something else that would improve with time...

The other soldiers recuperating were watching me in interest and envy. Obviously they weren’t Casters, and a casual Assay confirmed they weren’t Forsaken. Just Warriors, not-very-willing combatants putting in their time and hoping to get out of this alive.

I frowned to myself. Staying Primos was bound to create hard feelings between those with magic and those without it. Obviously this world hadn’t developed ki or soul magic techniques to the required level, or possibly even learned of Forsaken.

Hadn’t developed... or had suppressed development of? After all, anything that gave power to the masses diluted the power of the Powered. People who wanted to hold onto their power could be very nasty about it, even if it impacted the survival of humanity as a whole.

Still, they couldn’t resent me completely, because I was halvyr, born with magic. I wasn’t ‘lucky’, I just had the magic.

Father Bower was at his desk in a side tent, and came out when he sensed my Draw end. He cleared his throat, waited until I put my finger in my ear, and said, “<You’re quite gifted at that.>”

“Necessity.” And a +3 Talent, but hey. I pulled a Mason jar out of my purse. “Holy water. You take donations?”

He lifted an eyebrow. “<We stockpile the stuff. It supplies the Soakers and water cannons.>” I pictured long squirty-tubes filled with holy water hitting ghosts in the face like acid, and a tanker truck full of the stuff hosing down whole phalanxes of undead. They could run through a lot of it pretty fast. I imagined that most of the churches regularly sent gallons of the stuff to all the hot zones.

He accepted the jar calmly, fingers sparkling a second to confirm what it was, and sighed as he set it aside. “<Might I ask why you are having trouble with our language? You don’t seem unfamiliar with it, and your accent sounds like you came from America.>”

“When my Bloodline Awakened, it turned out I had two that were in opposition to another. I had to destroy them and mix them up back into a standard Arcane Bloodline to balance out. There were significant magical implications to this, including rewiring a portion of my head. My language centers were part of it. The languages I knew were dropped and replaced. I am absolutely sure I did not know Elven before, as it is a hideously difficult and complex language to learn. As for the others... well, learning them challenges your sanity, but I basically just know them because something wanted me to know them.” I rolled my eyes at the clouded sky, as did he.

“<But I’m having no trouble understanding you,>” he noted, frowning. “<You’re using a Cantrip to translate, I understand that, but it should not be translating for me...>”

“I’m speaking Human.”

He blinked. “<What?>” He was incredulous. “<There is no human language!>”

“Obviously there is, because I am speaking it.” I inclined my head. “Humans are magical, just like elves and dwarves. Why wouldn’t you have a language attuned to your Life Spiral, just like them?”

He stared at me in disbelief. “<This... the old stories, from before the Shroud... they said that we all spoke one language, before the fall of the Tower of Babel...>”

Confirming that magic had definitely not been here all the time. “Entirely possible that you had magic in the ancient past, and its weakening cost you your genetic tongue.”

“<This...>” He seemed quite excited. “<There are old things and races waking up with the return of magic, proving it was here long ago. To think we had a unified language!...>” His eyes fixed on me. “<Can you teach it to me?>” he asked urgently.

I lifted an eyebrow. “Father, it is your genetic language. I don’t believe there’s any possible way to stop you from learning it, even if you don’t want to.”

He blinked at me, then turned and looked at the other three soldiers, all looking and listening in curiously. “<Lads, gather around.>” He walked back into his office, came back with a simple chair, and set it down as the soldiers all gathered to sit down on cots, eyes bright as they looked at me.

“A moment.” I began to arrange my thoughts, spread them in a Visual File I brought up on Holo to the side of me. “Can you all read this?” I asked, as I began to put nouns onto it, starting with fruit. Apple, Banana, Cantaloupe, Dewberry, Elderberry...

“<Yes!>” they all said together.

“Yes!” I corrected them, spelling it out on the Holo.

“Yes!” they repeated, staring at the words.

“Then repeat all these after me... Apple!” I put up a picture of one.

“Apple!” they all repeated dutifully.

--------

I think it frightened them with how fast they learned it. Once the connection of object, word, sight, and sound came together, it stuck like glue. After a thousand words drawn from everything around them, I was on to verbs, demonstrating with the Holo what I meant, displaying the words in the proper script, and they were nodding and picking it up with amazing speed.

Then it was on to sentence structure, conversation, and as the akashic links solidified, soon they were getting ahead of me, starting to blurt out phrases that came to mind, shocking even themselves as they did so.