Kogu 56, SP~5,021

Magistrate Weshem:

Thank you for writing to me. I am happy to answer your question as to the nature of the Undead.  As a member of the GERC Shadow-Inflected Energies Department, I have studied this matter in depth. I seriously hope you will never have one come before you in your court, but I can see why you would want to be prepared. Your city’s legal system is certainly… thorough. And yes, I do understand how access to the subject matter might not be easy to come by, even given Naldrin City’s prodigious libraries. After all, the bulk of our knowledge on the subject is quite recent, and resides here in our archives.

Before the Stillness Wars, I thought of Undead (I know I should refer to them with the technical term Stills, but after meeting them face-to-face, it no longer seems appropriate) the same way that every other member of the GERC does: interesting, admittedly dangerous, but ultimately unproblematic creatures. Of course there were reports of shells (or shufflers, if you prefer) cropping up here and there. Every once in a while, we’d even hear about revenants causing all sorts of problems. But militias were sent out, mercenaries were hired, or (in some extreme cases) the Enforcers were dispatched, and the problem was soon put right. But for all that we knew, and all that we thought we knew about the Undead, we were totally unprepared for what would happen when we met them en masse.

But you didn’t take the trouble to write to me to ask about the Stillness Wars – you wanted to know about the Undead. I’ll be happy to tell you about them, although I warn you that my theoretical perspective has been forever biased by my personal encounters. However, I’ve spent enough ink on preamble. Let’s get to the meat of the issue.

We are held together, as you no doubt know, by Spirit. Spirit is the binding force that glues the rest of our Energies together. Without it, we would just be five “clouds” of pure Body, Emotion, and so on. Spirit is adaptive — it can learn, change, and grow. What makes the Undead different from us is that they are held together by Stillness energy. Stillness, like Spirit, binds other Energies together. But where Spirit is movement and change, Stillness is inertia and stability.

This has good effects and bad. For instance, we know (now in theory and in practice) that the Undead, being bound by Stillness, cannot learn as quickly as we can. It will take them approximately twice as long to master any new skill, or to learn any new information. This great weakness is ultimately what we exploited to win the Stillness Wars. However, the unchanging nature of Stillness also gives Undead a great advantage — they are incredibly difficult to damage or kill. Because Stillness will continue to bind in the face of dramatic changes to the state of its attached Energies, blows that would kill a Spirit-bound creature will only cause moderate damage. Powers that might have an overwhelming effect on a living entity will only marginally affect the Undead. They can endure great extremes of cold and heat, go for long periods of time without food or water, and have tremendous stamina. It is known in theory (and hopefully never in practice) that this same effect means Undead creatures will live for an unnaturally long time before succumbing to old age.

I hope you find this information helpful. You are, of course, welcome to write again if you require any further assistance.

 

In Faith,

Grommakk Dakkar of the Fireforge Clan

Evoker, Station 3 Energetic Zoologist

Naldrin University

— Shellwan Wah, First Order Naturalist and Head of the Guild Department of the Natural Creatures of Tamarran Continent, Naldrin City University

Harmon 28, SP~5,018

Of the most easily recognizable creatures on the Tamarran Continent the hammool are certainly one.  They are truly gigantic; adults are about 30 feet tall and as much as 20 feet sideways, and stand on eight sturdy legs that give them enormous strength and speed in open spaces.  A ubiquitous presence on the streets of our cities, hammool carry passengers from far-flung areas of the continent and haul great masses of materials on their mighty backs.  They are frequently found on the Great Roads of Tamarra, as well as on the highways and local roads that bind together our cities, our communities, and the great regions of the continent.

The common traveler’s understanding of hammool rarely goes beyond their tremendous size and strength.  This is a great loss, for they are beings of great subtlety and complexity. They are some of the great communicators of the continent, although they choose carefully when to communicate.  This short article will attempt to provide the reader with a deeper understanding of this wonderful fellow traveler in our rich land.

The hammool are, at their core, a highly social creature.  From an early age, they are educated by their parents to know the history and genealogy of their immediate family as well as their entire species.  The bonds to their family, tribe, and species are very strong, and their loyalty to fellow hammool leads them to do almost anything to protect their brethren when they find them in harm’s way.

Given this interest in genealogy, it is a great gift that hammool are born with a considerable faculty of memory.  They can quickly retain an enormous number of facts in great detail.  When hammool encounter others they’ve never met, they are very soon able to place each other in the grander scheme of the hammool tribes that live on Tamarra.  As the saying goes,  “hammool know no strangers.”  In addition to family history, hammool retain a considerable amount of information about non-hammool creatures and events that they have collectively witnessed over many years.  Our colleagues who are scholars of history have spent considerable time with hammool families to piece together their version of historical events.  I will leave that for a separate telling, however ¹.

I will conclude this all too brief introduction to the hammool with a comment on their ability to communicate with each other from a great distance.  It is common knowledge among those who ride the hammool ² or work closely with them that they seem to be able to communicate with each other with remarkable clarity even when they are hundreds of miles apart.  From a pragmatic viewpoint, this allows hammool to be aware of events that may be taking place many miles away on the Great Roads or in the fields and farmlands.  They seem to know, as a species, what is going on across the continent.  

The source of this ability is not understood, although there is no shortage of speculation.  One theory put forth by our cousins in the Mentarch’s Guild is that the hammool have a powerful natural connection with Mental Energy.  Investigations by members of the Guild Department of the Natural Creatures of Tamarran Continent have had mixed results in verifying this.  The more credible, though still unproven, theory is that the hammool have great sensitivity to the vibrations of the earth, and that they are able to communicate with each other by pounding the land in particular rhythms using their great bulk.  There is no doubt that their great weight combined with their amazing speed and agility create a thunderous noise as they move across the continent.  Many scholars and naturalists believe that this seemingly random pounding is not so random after all and is actually a “language” that can be heard (or felt?) by their brethren many miles away.   Some scholars go so far as to conjecture that the hammool’s sensitivity to vibrations in the earth gives them the ability to find locations of geoanatomical mouths of the continent ³.

As the reader can see, there is still much we do not know about these magnificent creatures.  If I may, I note that this author is currently working on a publication that will go into a full and complete story of the Hammool of the Tamarran Continent.

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¹  I would recommend “The History of the Middle Years of the Third Age of the Tamarran Continent” by the contemporary historian Belwith Nodwink, who has worked closely with a number hammoolites, those non-hammool beings who speak the hammool language.

²  This includes the well-known hammool rider ushen, who probably know hammool better than any other living being on Tamarra.

³  The Guild’s Division of Geographic and Fexoanatomical Surveys and Research (the DGFSR, or just “Geo”) can provide more information on these “mouths’ of the continent.

– Excerpt from A Floating Mountain: The Rise and Fall of the Gguro Dwarven Navy, by Jon Tamm, Travelling Bard and part-time Professor of Linguistics, Naldrin’s First University

The savvy reader may notice a number of instances in which Dwarven words are transliterated using double consonants – the most common being “kk” or “vv.” This notation is part of the Barlant transliteration system, far and away the most common style of Dwarven language transliteration in Tamarra. The double letters are what we call “intoned letters,” and they are but the tip of the iceberg in what many linguists consider the most complex language widely spoken on Tamarra.

The evolution of dwarven language is wrapped up inextricably in the long history of dwarven singing. This singing, as readers no doubt know, is known for its characteristic, shudderingly deep bass notes. Now, these sounds are used not only in song, but as part of the dwarven language; consonants can be pronounced either with or without an accompanying deep hum (the vvo) in a dwarf’s chest, changing the meaning of the letter as completely as if a human pronounced “p” instead of “m.” The word “kkanif,” for instance, denotes a certain type of metal-studded shield, while “kanif” denotes a particularly aggressive cat.

As if this weren’t enough, dwarven is also a tonal language (yes, “intoned” means something entirely different from “tonal.” Take it up with Barlant). There are four different tones with which any given syllable can be pronounced regardless of whether its letters are intoned (it shares this with the dwaheely language, which has six different tones). That is, the transliteration “kánif“ means that kan is pronounced in a rising tone, while if is in a neutral tone. This particular tonality denotes the aggressive cat we’ve mentioned before, but “käníf“ (kän in flat, low tone followed by íf in rising tone) is a type of ladle. “Kkánif“ (notice that we’ve now included the vvo!) is a meaningless nonsense word.

Any letter in Dwarven could technically be intoned, but some intonations are found only in antiquated texts written in First Dwarven or Middle Dwarven[1]. For instance, Modern Dwarven contains no instances of the intoned pp, gg, or hh (among others); the most common intonations by far are kk and vv. Contrast this with First Dwarven, when the intoned hh was not only a common consonant, but also used as a vowel. Nowadays the vvo has also taken on a significant slang usage; introducing a vvo in antiquated letters like hh has become quite fashionable among the youth, perhaps denoting a kind of disdain for historically proper speech.

The particularly tricky thing for non-dwarves learning Dwarven, aside from the tonality and its exceedingly complex grammar (the topic for another book entirely, let me tell you) and mastering the connotations of intoning some letters over others, is that no other races can truly pronounce the vvo. This is on a simple biological level; dwarves appear to have some adjunctive laryngeal structures that allow for the possibility of the vvo’s pronunciation. Some ushens and ishiris – even some humans – can imitate the sound passably enough that a dwarf would know they were trying to intone their letters, but this is far from the real thing. The major dwarven cities these days are quite cosmopolitan, and thus many dwarves have learned to accept the un-intoned dialect that foreigners are forced to speak – but any rural dwarven population will find mistakes like “kkanif”/”kanif” absolutely hilarious.

It is worth noting that there is an exception to this: Soman training has been shown to allow true pronunciation of the vvo. Indeed, there is a specialized subset of translators within the GERC. The Voices, as they are called, have all transcended Barriers in both Mental and Body; the former allows for fluency in a simply tremendous number of languages, while the latter allows them to modify their body to accurately pronounce race-specific sounds: the Dwarven vvo, the four sibilances of the Crawn language Szastak, and many more.