The oldest language in the world, and the mortal adaptation that preserved only part of it.
A Linguistic Overview
The languages of the Sundered Age form a family tree with a root that most modern scholars do not acknowledge and cannot read.
At the base is Vel-Drath — the Speech of the First Age, the language of the Drevari — which predates all other known languages by at least eight thousand years. From Vel-Drath, in the late First Age, elvish scholars developed proto-Veranthi: a partial transcription of Vel-Drath phonology adapted for quill and ink rather than chisel and stone. This process of adaptation introduced changes — primarily the softening of angular joins into curves, and the introduction of connecting strokes — that distinguish the mortal adaptation from the original. Proto-Veranthi was subsequently suppressed, partially recovered, misread, and partially suppressed again, in a cycle that reflects the general pattern of linguistic history in the Sundered Age: the closer a language gets to the First Age, the more aggressively it tends to be managed.
From proto-Veranthi, the elvish scholarly tradition developed the conventions that underlie all modern elvish writing. From elvish, through trade contact and political assimilation, common speech emerged: the lingua franca of Valdenmoor, which is not anyone’s first language and everyone’s most useful one. Dwarven and the orc shamanic tongue developed independently, drawing on different aspects of early contact with the Drevari.
The linguistic lineage matters because the Unmaking attacks it. Languages are not merely practical tools in the world of the Sundered Age. They are memory-systems — ways of holding what has happened in a form that can be passed forward. Vel-Drath is the most complete such system, because the Drevari are the most complete memory-carriers. As the Unmaking progresses, old words lose their meanings first. Songs lose verses. Records develop gaps. The corruption begins in language because language is where meaning lives.
Vel-Drath — The Speech of the First Age
Vel-Drath is, to the best of current knowledge, the oldest language in existence. It predates the Collapse by approximately eleven thousand years and has never changed — which is unusual for any language but explicable for this one. The Drevari do not adapt their language because they do not need to. Their inherited memory preserves the language’s meaning at every level, so that a word spoken by Vorrath today carries precisely the same meaning as the same word spoken by his ancestors before the first mortal race had developed speech.
The name translates literally as origin-speech (vel: first, origin; drath: language, speech-as-pattern). This is not a name the Drevari applied to their language from the outside — in Vel-Drath, calling a language by a separate name would be a category error. The language and the truth it carries are not different things.
Vel-Drath script is angular, geometric, and executed by beings whose hands are stone, which means every stroke is a straight line meeting at a precise angle. There are no curves in authentic Vel-Drath. Curves appear in proto-Veranthi — they are the signature of a mortal hand adapting a stone-cut script for ink. When you see a curve in a text claiming Vel-Drath origin, you are looking at an elvish interpretation.
The script is written in concentric rings, outermost first, spiraling clockwise toward the centre. The innermost ring holds the most important truth of a given text. Shorter texts occupy a single ring; longer texts occupy multiple nested rings. The concentric structure reflects the Drevari understanding of meaning: every truth has a core, and the path to the core is through the layers that surround it.
Compound glyphs are not two characters placed beside each other. They are single glyphs whose internal geometry embeds the forms of both root characters. To read a compound glyph, you must already know the roots. The language assumes the reader carries the knowledge. A language that encodes its own prerequisite is a language designed for beings who remember everything.
The ten identified Vel-Drath characters, as recovered from the ruins of the Karath Range.
Vel-Drath sounds like what it is: language spoken by beings of stone. Every syllable is fully enunciated. There is no elision. Stress falls always on the first syllable of each word. The R is always rolled. Long vowels: A sounds as “ah,” E as “ay,” O as “oh.” There are no consonant clusters at word boundaries.
Silence is grammatical in Vel-Drath. A short pause between sentences signals continuation. A long pause signals completion — the speaker is deciding whether more needs to be said. A very long pause signals consultation with inherited memory. What follows a very long pause is always the most important thing said.
Vel-Drath has no past, present, or future tense. Instead it uses aspect: how complete a thing is, and how permanent. The marker is always a suffix, and the difference between them is the difference between news, history, and law.
Selected Phrases
The following phrases appear in the novels or in Sable Dunmore’s records from the years after the Gathering. They are offered here with breakdowns to illustrate how the grammar operates in practice.
A Vel-Drath name is not a label. It is an observation — a description of what a person essentially is, made by someone who can see clearly. Vorrath assigned names to the companions as he came to understand them, not when he first met them. The names are listed here with their meanings.
Proto-Veranthi — The Elvish Adaptation
Proto-Veranthi is the oldest surviving mortal language — or, more precisely, the oldest surviving attempt to write down a language that predates all mortal tongues. It is Vel-Drath filtered through elvish hands and elvish assumptions, which means it is Vel-Drath with losses.
The adaptation occurred in the late First Age, when elvish scholars had enough contact with the Drevari to observe the script and attempt to reproduce it. What they produced was proto-Veranthi: a writing system that retained the geometric logic of Vel-Drath characters but replaced stone-cut angles with the curves and connecting strokes that quill-and-ink required. Seven characters were preserved closely enough to constitute bridges between the two systems — what Thessaly Vorn’s scholarship identifies as the bridge glyphs. The remaining characters represent either proto-Veranthi originals or Vel-Drath forms that could not be rendered in the mortal medium and were not preserved.
The critical structural loss was direction. Proto-Veranthi scholars, working from Vel-Drath tablets without access to a speaker who could explain the concentric ring system, transcribed the script left-to-right. This means that proto-Veranthi texts cannot be fully understood without reference to their original layout — and that generations of scholars have been reading the outermost layer of meaning while failing to reach the core.
The paper that Thessaly Vorn published — subsequently banned by the Grand Linguistic Archive and distributed through secondhand booksellers — identified seven characters that had been consistently mistranslated in the elvish scholarly tradition, and demonstrated that the mistranslations were not random errors but consistent misreadings arising from the left-to-right assumption. Her paper was correct. The archive knew it was correct. It was removed from the record because accepting it would have required acknowledging that four centuries of elvish scholarship had been building on a false foundation.
The nine proto-Veranthi characters. The seven bridge glyphs (amber) have confirmed Vel-Drath correspondences. The two unread characters (below) remain untranslated.
Other Tongues
The elvish spoken in the current age is a distant descendant of proto-Veranthi, shaped by three thousand years of institutional management. It is precise, structured, and built on a grammatical foundation that was designed for a world the scholars who designed it no longer had access to. Modern elvish is excellent for recording transactions, arguing precedent, and maintaining institutional records. It is not well-suited for expressing things that have not been expressed before.
Dwarven is a parallel development from early Drevari contact, taking the geometric logic of Vel-Drath script but applying it to a phonology that developed independently in the stonehalls. It is agglutinative — meaning it builds words by adding suffixes in long chains — which makes it excellent for engineering and record-keeping and somewhat challenging for poetry. Dwarven has no word for regret, which may be a coincidence and may not be.
The orc shamanic tradition does not have a single written form. It is primarily oral, transmitted by the same techniques used to read the land’s emotional residue: sustained attention, trained perception, and the willingness to carry what others decline to hear. What written fragments exist are in a notation system that has resisted decipherment by every non-orc scholar who has attempted it, possibly because the notation describes states of perception that those scholars do not have the training to enter.
Mara Ashbone has described it as: not a record of what happened, but a record of how the land felt when it happened. Whether that distinction is legible to non-shamans is, she notes, not really her problem.
Common speech is not anyone’s first language. It emerged from trade contact between elvish, early human dialects, and fragments of proto-Veranthi that had survived the archive’s management as loan words. It is flexible, imprecise, and useful. It has no words for the concept of inherited memory, no grammatical structure for the eternal aspect, and no way to express the distinction between forgetting-as-absence and forgetting-as-wound. These gaps are not accidents. They are a record of what the Sundered Age has lost.