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Author's Notes

# The Living Word

Story
When the Decree of Pure Speech was passed in Albirica, few thought much of it.
The law was simple: all contracts, sermons, and education must use the Imperial dialect. The old Caerduin dialects, thick with metaphors and double meanings, were deemed “unfit for clarity.” The priests called it a mercy, the scholars called it progress. Only the old called it theft.
Children had to be given Imperial names, in what they called "civilization". To complain or resist was to invite soldiers.
At first, it changed little. The markets still buzzed with chatter, children still shouted in the streets. But little by little, the words began to fade. The vowels of Caerduin speech, once soft and rounded, grew sharper under Imperial schooling. The names of hills and rivers were corrected on the maps, their old sounds replaced with smoother, more obedient ones.
Then the land itself began to follow.
The hills once called Mornach, “mother’s arms”, lost their gentle slopes, as if the name that held their shape had been forgotten. The river Lethane, “the whispering,” fell silent, its waters thick with silt. In the northern woods, where people once greeted trees by their old names to keep safe passage, travelers began to lose their way. The trees, unnamed, no longer listened.
Farmers complained that the soil felt heavier. Rain came later each year. The weather lost its rhythm, as though the sky had forgotten how to speak to the ground.
In the capital, none of this was believed. The governors published new glossaries and grammar books. They praised how the city’s towers no longer leaned, how the streets straightened, how order reigned. They said the world was finally learning discipline.
But in the border villages, people whispered in secret. They spoke the old words to their children in the dark, afraid but unable to stop. They swore the air felt warmer when they did, the fire burned cleaner, and the shadows softened.
Sometimes, when the wind moves through the fields, it carries sounds that do not belong to the new maps.
And the people know the land remembers the words that once named it.

A merry song makes for a merry journey

## Description

In the beginning was the Word. From the Word, the world was created.

In this version of Heroica, words are not merely sound or symbol. They are substance. Every word carries weight, every phrase leaves a scar or blessing on the world. Language is the hidden machinery of creation, a living force that shapes all things that hear it.

To speak is to change. To name is to define. To sing is to move the unseen. The world is not built from stone and law, but from meaning, constantly reshaped by those who speak it. The greatest power in Heroica is not steel or sorcery, but language itself.

### The Power of Speech

Every utterance leaves an imprint. The common tongue dulls its edge, but still echoes faintly through time. The purer forms, poetry, song, command, prayer, resonate with deeper force. Words spoken in rhythm or conviction ripple outward, altering emotion, thought, or even the air itself.

To praise is to strengthen, to curse is to rot. Words of love draw warmth into the speaker, words of hate fester like wounds. Even silence has its own power, the power to erase, to deny, to unmake.

Some scholars believe that language is the world’s first element, older than fire or water, born when existence first named itself. Others say that language is a parasite upon creation, rewriting reality in endless self-reference. Both may be true.

### The Souls of Dialects

Every dialect carries a soul of its own, a kind of living aura that shapes the land and people who speak it.

Elven dialects coax harmony and life. Forests bloom brighter where their songs are sung, and rivers run clearer beneath their verses. To hear elven speech is to feel the world breathe.

Halfling tongues soothe and settle. Their villages hum with peace, and even beasts grow docile when addressed in their soft cadences.

Imperial speech imposes order. Its rhythm stills chaos, aligns structures, and carries the weight of authority. Cities built on it become geometries of control.

Draknir’s runic dialect grinds like stone, summoning endurance and wrath.

The Desert dialects stretch like wind, filled with metaphor and longing, shaping illusions and distance.

The Trader’s Cant binds through repetition and agreement; it makes promises harder to break.

Even dead tongues are not truly dead. When spoken aloud again, they stir ghosts of the world’s memory.

### The Shapers of Meaning

Those who study the deeper laws of language are called Wordwrights, or Architects of Speech. They are not magicians in the common sense, but engineers of the unseen structure that underlies existence.

They study syntax as one might study alchemy, breaking language into phonemes, rhythm, and meaning until they find the fault lines that connect thought to form. To them, grammar is geometry, and etymology a map of power.

Their spells are not inventions, they are refinements. A Wordwright does not conjure; they correct the world’s language, rewriting flawed phrases in creation’s script. But every correction carries cost. To change one word is to alter countless others. Some Wordwrights disappear into their own lexicons, lost in infinite revisions of being.

### Conquest of the Tongue

In this world, language is not culture, it is conquest.

To rule a people, one must master their words. Invaders outlaw native speech, enforcing their own, knowing that as long as a conquered people whisper their language, the land itself resists.

Each phrase in a forbidden tongue becomes an act of rebellion. Secret songs spread in underground taverns. Mothers teach their children old words for the world’s forgotten gods. Empires send inquisitors to root out language itself, fearing that every word spoken in defiance reshapes the land.

The greatest generals are poets. The most feared assassins are rhetoricians. The most dangerous heresy is not faith, but vocabulary.

### The Voice and the Heart

Even among ordinary people, language holds power.

A lie spoken with conviction leaves a residue of corruption. A promise binds more than pride. Lovers reshape one another through affection and insult alike. A curse muttered in despair may wound deeper than steel.

The world listens, always. Its soil remembers oaths, its stones echo grief. Over time, a village filled with praise grows warm and golden. A city steeped in cruelty grows gray and cold, its echoes bitter.

In this world, the truest measure of a soul is not deed, but word.

### The War of Words

As the power of language becomes more widely understood, nations wage not only wars of swords, but wars of speech.

Empires issue decrees written in their dialects, their language carried by banners and law.

Philosophers duel with words that can twist reality, their debates echoing as tremors in the earth.

Libraries become fortresses, each one a vault of linguistic weapons, guarded as zealously as gold.

There are whispered legends of the First Name, the word that once defined the world entire. To speak it aloud would be to command all creation, or erase it. No one knows whether it still exists, or if every language merely gropes toward its echo.

### Faith and Heresy

The priesthoods call language the breath of the gods, claiming that all speech descends from divine revelation. The skeptics counter that gods themselves were merely words that grew too loud to forget.

This conflict burns quietly beneath every culture. The devout speak in reverent tones, fearing misuse of sacred speech. The philosophers argue that divinity itself was grammar, a structure, not a being.

To speak a word in vain is heresy. To invent a new word is rebellion.

## The Tone of the World

The Living Word reshapes Heroica into a world where sound and meaning are substance. It is an age of poets and tyrants, of language as weapon and salvation.

Here, truth is mutable, shaped by whoever speaks loudest. Words outlast cities, promises outlive kings, and the air itself hums with memory.

### Themes

- Power Through Speech: Words are the truest form of creation, the force behind every law, faith, and spell.
- Language as Control: Conquerors rule not only by sword, but by rewriting what their subjects can say.
- Faith in Words: Religion has a strong language power, its prayers half-linguistic, half-political.
- Silence as Rebellion: To refuse to speak is to deny creation itself.
- The Fragility of Meaning: If every word can reshape the world, then truth is always temporary.

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