The dying of a language, or perhaps the evolution of a new one, is a slow process, but a constant one. Every day, the language you speak dies a little more and the language your grandchildren speaks grows a little more from the seed of society's brain. This is what causes such idiotic names as 'Sinse river' or 'Angebak mountains'. They are the same. Old names for river and mountain. 'Angebak', a mountain range in the north of the Sevil continent, what is now Orman land, comes from the Ancient Devic name for mountains, 'Enchebokr', meaning 'God's Spines', a name which you will understand if you gaze upon the cloud-breaking peaks of the mountain range, and the Sinse, the second longest river known to man, comes from an old Dwarvish tongue, perhaps Andri or High Caulic, we linguists have never been sure as to which one came first or was prevalent in which areas, they seem to be in most time periods and regions but never change. Either way, these natural features may once have had a true name, one to call their own, but this is the way of life and death. Your name will be forgotten, and you will be given a new one, from, in my case, Toby, to Tobias, to Teacher, To Headmaster, and one day I will simply be a tattoo on the holy hand of a child. Names are not permanent, and change like the winds. This is the first lesson a Mage must be taught.
Excerpt from page 1 of Names: A Guide, By Tobias Anrun, 33rd Headmaster of The School.
The closer to the river they got, the stronger the smell got. Juniper, nutmeg, hot peppers fried in Canner oil. It was unmistakable, the spice market was on the other side of the river. And it was burning. Stands of dense honey cakes were glazed in a thin layer of blood that made them look black under the night sky. Bastard and the girl looked in mutual horror at the scene from the bank of the river. The screaming was beginning to die down now, and an undertone that had always been there, just unheard before, was taking root. The hissing of predators. Bodies lay face down and face up in the river, bumping into each other like rotten driftwood. Only 5 paces to their right was the wall, 10 metres high and sheer. Impossible to climb. But the water gate. It was closed and clogged with bodies. Ordinarily they might have been able to fit the girl through one of the holes, but even then Bastard would have been stuck. He was too fecking big. And now, not even the girl would be able to get through, all the holes in the water-gate were covered with aforementioned corpses. The only way to open it was with the pulley rope, meant to be pulled by 5 men at a time to allow the thin, squat canal boats through, no masted ships could get under the bridge. They were finished. Bastard knew he was strong, but he wasn't that strong. No one was. They were dead, even the girls eyes couldn't get them out of this. He looked down, hopeless, and tried not to weep.
His arms twitched, and Bastard felt a familiar warmth run down them. Feck. The Change was back, and it could not have come at a worse time. "Girl," he said hoarsely, placing her down with some urgency, "step 10 paces away and do not approach me until I'm down, understood?"
She shook her head angrily, "No! You're going to leave me here! You're just like Eimen! I wont let you." She set her eyes on him and he could see they were steel, strong and unbreakable. The Change was building now, like a tidal wave rushing down his arms, at his elbows now and he was holding, but the gates were buckling, and the Change was seeping through. The panic was setting in now, and he had to find a way to release it, some way that would not hurt the child, but she stuck to him like glue-sap, gripping the fabric around his knees tight. Feck, Feck Feck Feck Feck! Why now, out in the open with the spider-things around every corner? It had never been like this before, he'd always been somewhere secure, private, where no one could see the devastation or link it to him, aside from the boy outside the Green Lady, and he had somehow vanished when Bastard woke up.
"Girl, please, let go!", Bastard begged, but she ignored his pleas, gripping tighter and tighter, shaking her head as if to dispel his words. No choice then, if she held on he didn't know what would happen to her, but it would be nothing good, and she was important, he could tell that much. An unpleasant way to get her off, but it would have to do. He reached down and grasped her hair, pulling on it hard until she yelped and let go of his leg, clawing at his arm instead. Bastard threw her some five metres away, doing his best to gain some distance without injuring her. He turned, and sprinted towards the river, feeling the Change advancing quickly, it was all the way to his wrists now, and his sleeves were rotting and falling away, tatters in the ashen wind. A broken howling built around him, almost drowning out the sounds of spiders and last wails of Ardorf. He reached the edge of the corpse-laden river, the Change at his fingertips, and jumped, hearing the girls little legs chasing him desperately from behind, just over the howling that he had been holding back until now. But he could no longer, and his whole body seemed to shudder with power as he knelt on the surface of the water, not sinking, just kneeling and shaking for what seemed to him like a millenia until the Change was released, and finally he felt himself loosen, in a blissful calm, completely unaware of the effect the Change was having. All around him, as he knelt with his eyes shut peacefully, a howling, not the wind, something more than the wind, like a Beast was tearing its way out of him, was wearing away all sound, breaking it down and crushing it, as the corpses in the river seemed to rot, decades of decomposition happening in seconds as their faces turned to skulls and their skulls turned to dust. The water-gate was breaking down too, the Iron bolts holding it together rusting just as fast as the wood became nothing but mould and rapidly shrinking sticks. Even the stone was not safe, cracks rapidly forming as moss and roots grew from it at breakneck speeds, channels of green sprouting from the uniform and perfect grey. The girl stared at the carnage around Bastard in horror, covering her ears to protect them from the sound which she was convinced must have been heard down even in Vant. The sound was beginning to die down, but still, she was too scared to get any closer, she had stopped running when she heard the shrieking erupt from him. It terrified her, and she wanted to run away from it, as far away as she could get, but farther away meant to her father, and that terrified her far more than any magic.
She waited for the sound to completely go and for the destruction to cease before she got any closer, which took only a few seconds, but immediately Bastard stopped floating, collapsing face down in the water. She looked at him for only a second before she dived in after him, her small body paddling towards him with all the grace of a lame horse. She reached him quickly, the river was only a few metres wide, and tried to spin him over, noting with some surprise that he had four arms, a second set that sprouted from his ribs and that were clasped together with his normal arms, searching for some degree of warmth in the freezing river water. No use, he was too heavy to push, thought the girl helplessly, as she heard the spiders move behind them.
She hadn't noticed, but the destruction Bastard had caused had broken down the water-gate, and they were flowing downstream, south and away from the spiders. But they would be seen, the spiders were on top of the wall, and she knew they would follow her to the ends of the earth if her father commanded. In a desperate gambit, she took a great breath of air, and dived underneath Bastards body. She scuffled around, finding a non-eroded pocket in his trousers, and placed her gold watch inside. HEAVY, she thought, pushing the command towards the pocket watch the way Eimen had taught her, and her and Bastard suddenly sank like a stone, away from the temperature sensitive eyes of the Spiders, down into the cold dark of the river.