PALAVER: AN OVERVIEW

//BEGIN TRANSCRIPT // PROFESSOR SYLVESTRE STAMP // RIME // DEPARTMENT OF RHETORIC // INTRODUCTORY SEMINAR

It is not my — simmer down, all of you — it is not my task, here, today, to compel you to believe in magic, to pry such an impossibility from the wide-eyed yesteryears of your youth. My task, and indeed the task of all professors at this institution, such that it is, is to teach you how that magic is framed, and channeled, and employed.

There are six schools of speech in that course of magical study which we call palaver, six irrefutable facets of nature in which all palaver can be classified.

Hoa, the will to halt.

Kon, the hunger to know.

Mel, the spirit of life.

Ord, the drive to create.

Vis, the power of force.

Ket, the totality of decay.

Each of the six has an opposite, a dramatic foil. Mel, for example, the sweetness of life, is countered by its shadow, Ket, the inevitability of decay. For Kon, a spirit of knowledge, Ord, the act of creation. And for Hoa, the immovable object, there is Vis, the unstoppable force.

We do not encourage the digging of one's heels in wholesale into one school of speech or the other. Just as to strengthen one's body through the preparation of a hot meal is an act of Mel, so too is the destruction of that animal or vegetation an act of Ket.

There is no good or evil in the ways of palaver. There is only truth. The honesty of a world well-lived, well-trodden by our kind, by those who speak our language. This language has been passed down by our mothers and their mothers before them, and so on back to the dawn of the human race. What words remain known and not lost to time are compiled by the magistrates of this institution into the official Rimestock.

Any student of palaver compiles their own rimestock, over time. It is nothing more than a collection of words, infused with magic strong enough to warp the world around us, to create and destroy, to summon knowledge and banish ignorance.

Yes, you, third row.

// You say "infused" — how, exactly?

The infusion of palaver — or, if you would rather, the creation of what might rudimentarily be referred to as a "spell" by the untaught masses — is a process simple to understand, and nigh impossible to manage. It —

// Impossible?

Nigh impossible.

// But manageable?

Please refrain from further interruptions, back row, or I shall show you firsthand just how flammable these facilities are.

May I continue? Thank you.

In the days of yore, magic flowed freely, the nectar and ambrosia of this world. But as mankind grew in arrogance and the natural innocence of the world grew tarnished and rusted, magic itself began to fade. Nothing can stand strong without support, not temples nor their gods nor even the fabric of magic itself. And so... now we have only the remnants, the wells and marshes of magic left behind. We draw it out, as best we can, into crude buckets. But the buckets must be empty. And this is palaver — these words are our buckets, hollow vessels which become words of power when infused, over time, with magical meaning.

Existing words that have fallen out of use through the natural dissolve of one form of language into another — these are the most manageable to transform into palaver. They maintain some of the electricity of old world magic, but have no strong identity. The magician presses into it, sometimes over the course of months, even years, a new identity, an action, a request.

Scintilla.

Ho, ho, back row, stay where you are. I do not make empty threats, it is true, but it takes more than a handful of rowdy greenhorns to push me to act upon them.

This is a particularly weak spell — a spark of a flame, enough to light a candle, perhaps see a few feet into the darkness. It is too closely related to its austere cousin, scintillate, which is still in common parlance — and thus can never achieve true power.

Gnast.

Notice the quickness by which it is extinguished, how even the smoke and the scent of the flame are gone. Gnast is no great incantation, but its usage has faded more than scintilla, and so it leaps to the foreground, eager for action.

Our words hunger to be used. The magician who studies these schools of speech must control that hunger, must not fall prey to it. Our actions must control our words, and not the other way around. For down that dark path lies the true madness, lost to the siren song of some abyssal rimestock.