Words of the Record

A word can be a law. Haudh-Gwenn ranks vigilantism with treason, which takes it out of the city’s courts altogether and puts it in front of the eight seats that govern everything else. In Idir an injury done to a person’s honor is answered with mubārazah, and the answer that costs most is the refusal.

A word can be a rite that falls on people who did not choose it. The last-born child of a Peren family gives up the family name at twenty and goes out into the world under the name of the rite itself. A Free Folk child is made a member of the community by being sent out of it, alone, for the whole of a year.

A word can be a craft that outlived the people who kept it. The dull gray, ore-veined stone the Mól built with still holds up the oldest things standing in Loshev, and no mason in the town has ever matched it.

A word can be an affliction. Mana burn takes a mage who was never taught to cast properly, the power going through the body and consuming it, and no cure was ever discovered.

And a word can be only a word, which turns out to be the kind that travels furthest. Every coin struck across Erôth answers to a nickname, and the nickname is what gets said out loud while the struck name is what a clerk writes down. Spell-monger is a plain description inside the Arcane Congress and an insult everywhere else, and the insult is traced back to the name of a demon.