Character Histories: Nimlo and Theril

(Pronunciation: Nimlo: The first, stressed, syllable resembles the first syllable of "nimble;" the second syllable is pronounced like the English word, "low." Theril: The "Th" is pronounced as in "thank" or Scottish "thane;" the name in full rhymes with the precious stone, "beryl.")

Theril doesn't remember her mother at all, and isn't sure that the man she knew as her father was any relation to hers. Dark of skin, with long, black hair, perfectly straight, brown eyes near to black, and sharply defined features, he shared nothing of Theril's appearance but the bright intensity of his gaze. Even in her earliest memories, Theril recalls him not as "father," but as "Dein," a diminutive of what she learned was an elven word for "teacher."

She remembers the woodland elves who were her earliest peers, and the breathtakingly beautiful elven lady who called her Dein "Alcronast," and whom he called "Elhuvin." She remembers the day when her Dein sent her to Elhuvin with an urgent message in a language Theril could not read, and told to stay with Elhuvin a while and obey her as though she herself had been Theril's Dein. She remembers the thunder in the distance not many days thereafter, sharp and clear, and Elhuvin keeping her close and the feeling in the air of great preparations being made, and power, and silence, and fear -- of speaking of these things, and Elhuvin hushing her.

The fear and tension slowly waned in the days that followed among the elves, but they weren't many before Theril started asking about her Dein. Again Elhuvin hushed her, perhaps more urgently than before, and Theril soon came to know that she would never see him again.

There was little time to mourn -- perhaps a single season -- before the rainy night when Elhuvin woke Theril from her bed, and put a newborn baby boy into her arms. The child squalled in silence, his sounds lost in a spell woven about him, and Elhuvin said that he was Nimlo, a name whose meaning Theril did not know. Elhuvin whispered, "Yu must go, and carry Nimlo with you. This forest will be safe for you no more. I will send a fox to guide you to the far edge of the woods, and then you must follow your wisdom and the high points of the land, and make your way to the city named on this map." She put a paper into Theril's hand.

She held it awkwardly with her arms around the baby, but read it and listened to Elhuvin's instructions, and understood the words that were written there, and the name to whom she was to give a second paper, sealed with wax and magic. She stood still while Elhuvin strapped a knapsack over her shoulders with all the supplies Theril would need for the first stage of her journey, and took the papers from her again and put them in the knapsack, and held tight to Nimlo the whole time. By the time Elhuvin began to lead her down by little-watched ways to the forest floor, the baby was silent without need of the spell around him.

In a night-shadowed thicket, Elhuvim bade both children a tearful goodbye, and embraced them, and kissed Nimlo on his baby brow. Her last word to Theril was, "Hurry!" before she disappeared on her way back to the home they had shared for so long. Theril watched her go, and looked to the fox with shining eyes that Elhuvin had left behind, and followed it only a little way, into a deeper and lower, more shadowy part of the thicket, before she told it to wait without knowing if it would listen, and sat down beneath the sheltering leaves of a giant fern, and set Nimlo down in her lap. She shrugged off her knapsack and carefully went through it, examining its contents and cataloging them in her mind. She didn't wonder at the time that she could see everything so clearly and know what it was, and hadn't wondered since until the Fall of Isiyes, many years later, when she saw and knew at once, with the vision of her childhood restored. At the time, she only made sure of her supplies, and asked the fox, which stood waiting, aloud but in a whisper, "How does the baby get milk?" The fox only stood and waited with its bright eyes, and Theril sighed and closed her eyes, and with her knapsack packed once more and on her back, gathered up Nimlo from her lap and followed.

Theril soon had her answer; the first time Nimlo started bawling with hunger, the spell of silence long since fallen away, and Theril sat with him in her lap once more to try to find some way to make use of what she had in her knapsack for him, the fox approached, and proved to be a vixen, and nursed the little baby patiently. Theril still remembers frowning at that. There were spells enough on the fox, certainly, but it didn't change the fact that in Nimlo's first days, he was being raised on fox's milk. For her part, Theril husbanded her food carefully, and stopped to refill her water flasks at every stream. She didn't know where the fox was leading, nor how long the journey would be.

It led her to the forest's edge, far from any habitation, and looked out from under the eaves at the wind-weathered brush that covered the hills beyond. Theril followed its eyes and frowned and sat at the edge of the woodland with Nimlo in her lap, looking over her map carefully. Towns and villages, inns and houses, were marked, and Theril chose the nearest, searched for landmarks, found two, and hesitantly placed herself and the direction she would need to travel. The fox kept looking out at the hills, and the path she had chosen appeared to be in the direction of its gaze, but the village she had chosen was still far off if she understood the map properly, and she remembered that the fox was to lead her only as far as the forest's edge. "You'd better come over and feed Nimlo," she told it. "I don't want him to get hungry."

The fox didn't respond, so Theril took Nimlo up in her arms again, approached it, and sat down right beside it, positioning Nimlo in such a way that the fox had to move at last, and did, and nursed the baby one last time. Then Theril gathered everything up once more, and holding Nimlo tight in her arms, started away from the woods. Before long, the fox slipped away into the underbrush, and was gone.

Theril carried Nimlo far over the hills, checking her course against her landmarks and her map each time she came to a crest. When Nimlo grew cranky, she bounced him about and sang to him, or rocked him to sleep, and tried with little hope to figure out what to do if he grew too hungry to be calmed by anything but milk. It was a great relief to her when she finally reached a hilltop that needed no landmarks to show where she was, as she looked down across the plains below and saw the tiny, distant rooftops of a village.

Nimlo was crying continously before she came near the village, and she approached an outlying farmhouse just to avoid drawing too much attention. The woman of the house appeared at the door while Theril was still approaching, to see what was causing all the noise. It didn't take Theril long to explain that the baby was hungry, and that was all she would say or explain until the woman agreed to feed him, stubbornly refusing to answer questions about where she had come from, or whether Nimlo -- his elven blood clearly visible in his features -- might be a changeling. "He's hungry," she kept insisting, plaintively, and the woman from the farmhouse at last let her motherly instincts overcome her fear and uncertainty.

While Nimlo was quietly nursing, the farmer's wife repeated some of her questions, and Theril answered with modestly-spoken, completely invented stories. She couldn't speak of Elhuvim or the terrible fear and urgent secrecy in which she had sent the children away, or risk leaving a clear trail to be followed by the nameless object of Elhuvim's fear. She therefore decided that Nimlo had been left on the doorstep of her imaginary parents' house, and when they saw he seemed to have elven blood, had sent Theril to return him to the people from whom he came, whom they thought would hear a child's entreaties before that of a grown man or woman. The story wasn't perfect, and Theril would have preferred one that would be more ordinary, but it was the best she could do, and simple and backward enough, she hoped, to at least hope to keep the matter to occasional gossip, and as best she could, to conceal her destination and identity.

Perhaps the farmer's wife, and her husband when he returned from the fields, felt it was irresponsible to send a child off on such a mission as Theril had invented, or perhaps they simply wanted more young children in the house than their own, and decided Theril's imaginary parents wouldn't be expecting her back for some time, and might blame the elves if she disappeared along with Nimlo. They might have supposed a child with elven blood would bring good luck enough for them to scoff at any consequences. At all events, they decided to keep the children for their own. Theril accepted this, and after carefully concealing the papers she had been given by Elhuvin, did her best to help around the house, glad to see that Nimlo was being nursed properly. Many days passed, and Theril was so cheerful in her captivity that farmer and wife relaxed their guard ... and as soon as she saw an opening, Theril took up her map and letter again, and what supplies she could gather quickly and silently, lifted Nimlo from his cradle, and hurried away into the night, not toward the nearest village, but toward another that, by her map, she hoped she could reach not too long after daybreak.

For months, she crossed the countryside, now welcoming the hospitality of a family that didn't try to hinder her departure with more than promises of welcome in their home, now spending the night with a strong, single woman who asked no questions at all and expected no explanations, now traveling for as much as a month at a time with nomads or a merchant caravan, made much of for Theril's helpfulness and childish beauty, and for the obvious signs of Nimlo's elven blood, until their paths diverged or Theril worried that she'd been among them too long, and slipped away again with Nimlo in the night. She crossed the breadth of a great Human kingdom of the Fire Coast with a helpless child to care for, and nothing but her map, her wits, her duty, her bright eyes, and her will. So at long, long last, she came to Venighas, her destination, and made her way to the place named on her map, its largest orphanage. And so she showed up on the doorstep, with Nimlo in her arms, and gave the sealed letter that Elhuvim had prepared to the man who was named above its seal, and she and Nimlo were welcomed there, and more than welcomed. Children and adults alike were awed by her appearance, her boots and cloak muddied with the soil of half the kindom, and the baby alive and healthy because of her care, though she was only seven years old, and had been traveling for the better part of a year. She was beautiful and graceful and self-possessed, seeming to many or most like a higher order of being. So she arrived, so she met Dargon and Quix.

Character Histories: Grynne and Matrix

(Pronunciation: Grynne: Just like the English word "grin." Matrix: Like the English word meaning a setting or source.)

Grynne would say he was an opportunist; others, less charitably, would just have called him a petty thief. He always kept an eye out for the unguarded prize, the distracted owner of a bulging purse, the door accidentally left ajar by someone hurrying out of the house, the handbag accidentally left behind. He hated avoidable risk even more passionately than he hated the idle rich -- idle and rich at least by his standards -- who lived in the great houses in and about his chosen home town, but loved the thrill of split-second action, of careful plans and swift execution, of reacting to the unexpected instinctively. He ran away from home at so young an age, he no longer remembers the reason; his parents might have thwarted some little whim, or he might have been bored and seeking excitement, or he might simply have struck out for himself for the thirtieth time to try and fend for himself and learn the streets, and never gotten around to returning. No doubt his parents searched for him, but by the time they knew he was gone, he was well on his way down the road, and would soon be two or three towns away.

He finally settled down in Venighas, the largest and most important city in its region of the Fire Coast, when he was still just a boy, living on and off the streets. Resilient, crafty, and adaptable, he had no trouble finding and stealing -- or buying with stolen money, or money made from the sale of stolen goods -- what he needed to eat, and scrounging places to shelter and sleep. He found the best and easiest place to "work" -- relieving the wealthy of a small portion of their riches, and providing it to the impoverished, primarily including his impoverished self -- and the tricks that would best keep him from being seen. Of these, one of the most reliable became shadowing Matrix.

Matrix got started on her career when her father, desperate for work, managed to persuade a prospective employer to visit his home. Matrix liked the sense of wealth and ease about the stranger, and displayed her interest in ways that got his attention; he said he liked her spunk, and his lecherous eyes said they liked everything about her that could be seen, only wishing they could see more. Well into her late teens, she was already used to getting whatever boys near her age could offer just by asking the right way and moving the right way as she asked, and from the way the wealthy stranger reacted to her silent encouragement, she supposed the same ploys would work on him, all the more since he seemed to have so much to give.

Of course, it wasn't that simple. Her father didn't like what he was seeing at first, but eventually came to terms with it as he landed an easy job, paying more than a fair wage, and his daughter seemed to enjoy his employer's attentions and the gifts she received. As for Matrix's mother, she was glad to be rid of the dangers of poverty, and helped teach Matrix how to keep the old lecher interested as best she could. It didn't last -- the father's employment little longer than the employer's infatuation -- but Matrix learned from the experience: What went wrong, what went her way, which of her mother's primitive suggestions worked best, and how to improve upon them. By the end, she was disgusted with the old man, but not with what she'd done. She felt that if she chose younger men, more vulnerable, trusting, and faithful -- if she avoided lechers and other scum who knew what they wanted and had a price already in mind, and worked instead on twisting otherwise scrupulous young men into a kind of faithfulness to /her/ and their secret trysts, she could gain more from each, with fewer dangers and more security. It would take more work, more planning, and greater subtlety, but she had no objection to any of that, if it would grant her the independence she desired, and the means of escaping the impoverished home and parents whom she blamed for goading her into the lecher's despicable embrace.

By the time Grynne spotted her, she was working on her own, having more or less abandoned her parents to their own devices. She had perfected ways of dressing and walking and behaving that would capture the senses and imaginations of the kinds of men she wanted without getting her into trouble with their consciences or other passers-by -- and hidden ways of defending herself from approaches of the wrong kind. She already had a few reliable "customers" and was able to get by, so she was patient, and let her potent beauty work on the next customers-to-be, working at a kind of performance art to arouse their curiosity and interest so they could tell themselves there were other reasons for their eyes to follow her than the deep, animal, instinctive ones that ensured they always did. It was this first stage of captivation, the one that seemed to affect almost everyone at least to some extent, that got Grynne's attention. He noticed her, and noticed that wherever she went, moving and behaving the way she did, eyes followed her, and heads turned, and footsteps slowed, and attention on everything but Matrix herself and her actions lapsed. Cutting purses was child's play when Matrix was working her spell; Grynne could all but steal the shirts off of young men's backs sometimes while they stared and lost track of time and space, as long as he didn't obstruct their view of her. She had honed her craft to the point where just passing by, doing her thing, was enough to break certain men's hearts.

Perhaps Grynne was still too young to be affected, or perhaps Matrix's carefully-honed act really did work most powerfully on the faithful would-be victims she preferred, but Grynne was never really interested in Matrix's allure except as it affected the people around him. Perhaps he simply recognized her traps for what they were, and saw a kindred spirit in her rather than a beauty to be pursued or an evil to be shunned. Whatever the reason, he often cheerfully followed in Matrix's wake, looking everywhere but at her, awaiting the moment when no one was in sight but Matrix herself and various men unable to turn their eyes or an iota of their attention anywhere else, so he could rob them blind, picking targets of opportunity or of course those that seemed to have the greatest wealth. It worked like a charm for a while, until Matrix herself happened to spot him in the act of stealing a purse, and narrowed her eyes dangerously. He reacted at once with swift signs for silence and friendship and pause, and she made a split-second decision and went on with what she was doing instead of alerting their mutual victim to his danger. Perhaps she too saw a kindred spirit in Grynne, or perhaps she simply decided it was better for her victim to lose his purse than to call his conscious attention to the fact -- and its consequences -- that she was dominating his gaze and his thoughts. She made her decision by instinct, and let Grynne go, and moved on.

She didn't expect him to actually track her down and meet her, or to look at her in the open, cheerful way he did, but then she didn't realize that he had been shadowing her for some time already, and that he wanted to preserve her as a reliable distraction for his victims, without risk that she would call out the next time and see him caught. She was used to men and boys offering her gifts, but it still caught her by surprise when Grynne met up with her later that day and said, "Fair's fair; the decoy's as important as the knife," and gave her a share of the money from the purse he'd cut. He was so young, it was hard to take him seriously, but he was sharp and cunning and had picked up a thorough knowledge of the streets, and Matrix liked the open, unassuming way he talked to her, without trying to show off or impress, without a hunger in his eyes ... and the things he said made sense. So a tentative working relationship began, already developing into the beginnings of a friendship. Independent as both had become by then, and willing as they both had been to leave their real families behind, they filled a void in one another's lives as they came together: He as a brilliant little brother to her, she as a clever, appreciative, street-smart older sister, like nothing and no one either had ever had before.

They worked well together for a few weeks ... then for months ... then for years ... coming up with new schemes and trying them together, relying on each other more and more. Toward the very end, Matrix began working on wealthy men who made easier but less lasting and useful prey, persuading them to tryst with her in their own homes when everyone else was away. With the help of the master of the house to ensure there would be no interruptions, and Matrix commanding his attention as only she could with intensely close contact, Grynne could go through the house with complete security, seeking the most valuable things to steal as if shopping at a store, then split the take with Matrix as he had been doing for years. It couldn't last though; one evening, a too-suspicious wife came home early with her entourage, caught Grynne in the act of theft, and caught her husband trying to conceal Matrix from her. Their marriage was destroyed in that evening, but one thing did unite husband and wife one last time: The need to squash the potential for scandal and blackmail. Unfortunately for Grynne and Matrix, they had aimed too high at the wrong moment, and their wealthy would-be victims had the necessary pull to arrange exile for them without public trial. So it was that, not long after they began to achieve the greatest success of their dubious careers, Grynne and Matrix found themselves aboard a ship bound for Lost Souls' Island. They could have blamed each other, and many would have in their places, but they were practical people, both individually and as a team, and they'd gone into "business" together with open eyes. They knew the dangers they'd be facing in exile, especially as a dangerously attractive young woman and a youth still in his teens, and having worked so well together for so long, they preferred to face those dangers together, relying on one another still more than they ever had to before.

Character History: Glaxtiks

(Pronunciation: Just the way it looks -- like the start of the word "GLAd," running into the word "AXE," running into the word "STICKS". Stress is on the first syllable.)

Glaxtiks saw his parents killed in the street by town enforcers when he wasn't yet in his teens. His father's only crimes were the Fire Coast equivalents of petty theft, grand theft, robbery, various assaults with deadly weapons, battery, murder, (he considered it to be "accidental death," not having intended for the man to bleed to death of his wounds) and (fatally) resisting arrest when he was finally run down. He had never considered himself a public menace: Just a man without a job doing what he had to do. The authorities, those of his victims who survived, and the friends and family of the deceased, might have taken a slightly different view of the matter. Glaxtiks' mother hadn't been much involved in criminal activity at all, except for reaping its limited fruits, and -- at the end -- attacking the enforcers, with intent to kill, as she saw them fighting her husband to his death. Glaxtiks knew he could do nothing, and so he stayed in the shadows and watched. Another child would have sworn vengeance, but Glaxtiks was more concerned at the time with tactical matters of survival - he had every expectation, however false, that he too would be killed if the enforcers found him, and wouldn't have liked the alternative they did intend if he found out. One of his primary sources of food and shelter was gone, and he knew he would have to work harder than ever to keep meat on his bones in the future; his parents had done little to raise him, and seemed to forget about his existence as often as not as he grew older; increasingly, for years, he'd been more or less looking after himself.

Glaxtiks knew the local gangs of thugs and young troublemakers, and steered clear of them as asiduously as he avoided the town's enforcers. He didn't like the looks of them, and he didn't like to live under anyone's authority but his own. His gutter's-eye-view of the world suggested that human life consisted of purposeless violence -- like his father's against his mother when he was drunk -- lies, cheating, betrayals, and structures of authority designed to crush the compliant for the enrichment of those at the top. Animals could be trusted, when they weren't broken and ruined by a human master -- not to be his friends by nature, but to respond to him in a fashion he understood -- but humans could not be trusted at all.

Glaxtiks was entirely unlike his father. He abhorred drunkenness and the pointless violence to which it led, but welcomed violence as a means to any end he deemed worthwhile. His father had avoided fighting anyone who could be expected to fight back, except in the last necessity -- even Glaxtiks had ceased to be a target a year or two before his father's death -- but Glaxtiks willingly did anything and everything necessary to acquire what he needed to survive. As he grew older and more capable, and started doing his larcenous "work" less often, with more dangerous and lucrative targets -- he was coming to understand that falling into habits, and continuous risk exposure, brought greater risks of getting caught than any short-term ones he might undertake head-on -- and he sometimes needed to kill in order to open an avenue of entry or escape, or to eliminate a witness, he killed without a qualm or a second thought. He was skilled and clever and lucky, and he had reliable friends: With meat as his introduction and careful work after that, he taught the stray dogs of his town's streets to take him as one of their own, and an alpha male at that. He befriended other strays as well -- cats and rodents and racoons and every other wild animal he found sneaking about the city at night -- and though they weren't as loyal as the dogs, and couldn't be trained to make useful diversions and the like, he won their trust, so they wouldn't react to his presence, and by watching their behavior, he could tell when other humans were nearby, long before his own senses could detect them -- though knowing when and where to look helped him train those senses to a fine pitch as well. Unlike his father, he was an utterly cold-blooded killer, who would refrain from murderering a man for his purse only when he thought the risk too great for the gain -- and unlike his father, he was always master of himself, and never, except in self-defense, hurt anyone he loved.

There were girls, but his feelings never lasted -- he would long for one for a while, holding her in his heart, and follow her in secret, hoping to defend her in case the need arose, but also watching her, making sure that he could trust her, always, always, learning some reason that he could not, and turning away from her forever. Still, he did not blame the objects of his brief infatuations for failing to live up to his hopes and desires; he had loved them, and if anything, to Glaxtiks, that was his fault. So there were girls he would not harm ... there were girls, and there was the child, whose story must wait for another tale.

Character Histories: Dargon and Quix

(Pronunciation: Dargon: emphasis on the first syllable, which rhymes with "bar" -- the second syllable is pronounced more or less like the word "gone". Quix: Just the way it looks. If "quick" were a noun, his name would be pronounced like its plural form.)

Dargon and Quix would never admit that their friendship and rivalry developed over a girl -- least of all over a completely platonic relationship -- and they may not even remember that it's true. They were apparently-unexceptional children lost among hundreds of others in the largest orphanage in Venighas on the Fire Coast, and had no more interest in one another than in any of the other children until the stranger showed up on the ophanage's doorstep with a baby in her arms. She was beautiful and graceful and self-possessed, younger than either of them, but seeming -- not only to Dargon and Quix but to everyone at the orphanage -- like a higher order of being, a childish heroine out of a fairy tale. No one knew whence she had come, or how, or why, and she never spoke of her journeys, but rumors swirled endlessly -- not only rumors of noble birth, but the stuff of fantasies. Her boots and cloak were muddied with the soil of half the kindom, and the baby was alive and healthy because of her care, though she was only seven years old when she came to the orphanage. She had come the long way from lands unknown without the help of any grown companion, and it was soon known throughout the orphanage that the babe she had helped along the way, still too small to walk on his own, was as much of elvenkind as human.

From the moment of her arrival, she was the most popular child in the orphanage, with no rival worthy of the name. She had a way with the adults that no one else could match, and the novelty of her appearance never wore off as she retained her independent ways of thinking and her casual, almost-unwitting leadership throughout her time with the other children. Her approval, her attention, were the chief prizes to be won in the little world in which Dargon and Quix lived, and they strove like all their peers for the twin prizes ... and earned them, again and again.

Neither could say just why it was -- she herself might have had no inkling -- but the beautiful storybook heroine whose arrival had brought new life to the drab orphanage was drawn to Dargon and Quix more than any of their playmates. She spent time with them, and smiled at them often, as though they were old friends, and as they triumphed, they turned more and more of their efforts to outrivaling each other in her eyes -- and to cementing their positions as the only significant rivals for her attention. Everything at which each excelled, the other strove to match; Quix learned to play King's Men to compete with Dargon at the game; Dargon developed his own form of wit to compete with Quix's own; they drove each other to learn to write more beautifully, to read with more expression, to dance with grace and skill. Everything of which she approved, that won more of her friendly attention, became an opportunity for each to prove that he was the best in the orphanage at the things that -- to her -- mattered most. The little part-elven child developed two staunch and clever defenders, conspiring with each other to keep his infant mischief from getting him into trouble with the other children or adults, then telling the story together to the child's first protectress, each emphasizing the things he did, proudly pointing out the ways he cleared things up or planted false evidence to point in the wrong direction or at least away from the far-from-innocent child. They went on daring raids together to sneak cookies and other treats for her or for the child when neither could devise the means of succeeding on his own. As they saw the way her eyes shone when they cooperated and described the ways they helped each other, as her smiles accompanied their signs of friendship, her quiet frowns their signs of mutual distrust, they came to work together more and more -- at first purely as a false front, then more and more out of habit and as almost second nature as they grew together and found they could depend on one another, both when working together to increase the standing of each and when competing as rivals driving one another to improve just to keep up the pace. As time passed, and the beautiful new girl became less of a novelty, the boy who came with her less of a helpless child and more simply the smallest in a group of four fast friends, the friendship between the four them grew, as -- increasingly for its own sake -- did Dargon and Quix's rivalry. As the girl who had awed them changed in their thoughts to just a close friend, a child at the orphanage on whom they could count when it mattered, they became still fiercer rivals, as the judges of their success became their surest friends and harshest critics: One another and themselves.

Thereafter, though they always stuck by the pair that had brought them together, Dargon and Quix were more in each other's thoughts than the girl who united them. Even in adolescence, though one or the other gave her long looks from time to time -- for she was very beautiful still -- and they developed an interest in girls as objects of desire and conquest, they never again competed over her. She knew them well enough that she would never have given in to their suits -- knowing half of their wish to attain her might come from showing the other up, and wishing to be loved only for herself -- and they knew her well enough to see that it was so. Besides, by that time, they had other things on their minds, especially where she and the little boy over whom she still watched were involved: Hopes and opportunities for such power as put mere mortal desires to shame.

But that is another tale, for another day.

Grat'han Language

We haven't yet described the Grat'han language in detail, but I figured I might as well post what little we have in a nice central location (i.e. here) to keep things semi-consistent. Note that ambiguity, homophones, and synonyms do muddy the waters (e.g. make it possible for us to sort of ignore this when it makes for good names and/or storytelling) but I kind of like having this around for reference.
In general, the Grat'han language is rich in sound and texture, with a non-universal tendency toward multisyllabic compound words, and toward hard consonants in male names and soft consonants in female ones. A simple "dictionary" follows -- these words are significant only in the sense that they happen to have come up in the course of the game.

English - Grat'han:

black = Thah

both (prefix to certain compound words consisting of two nouns) = T (T' when preceding a hard consonant)

bud (a plant's shoot) = Neyl

dance = Ahren

dew(drops) = Nisin

dusk jay (a kind of Grat'han bird) = Rovaru

entry = Thestrin

feather = Lacreth

fire = Reyla (sometimes spelled Reila)

gift = Felis

green = Leth

home = Mona

laughter = Alimna

point = Krendas

river = Alua

sun = Narra

tide = Arten

treasure = Anyoth

water = Sefi

weapon = Volk

Grat'han - English:

Ahren = dance

Alimna = laughter

Alua = river

Anyoth = treasure

Arten = tide

Ato = Living (things)

Felis = gift

Krendas = point

Lacreth = feather

Lamna = Searching

Leth = green

Mona = home

Narra = sun

Neyl = bud (a plant's shoot)

Nisin = dew(drops)

Reyla or Reila = fire

Rovaru = dusk jay (a kind of Grat'han bird)

Sefi = water

T or T' (prefix to certain compound words consisting of two nouns) = both

Thah = black

Thestrin = entry

Volk = weapon