Aril is the most successful of the Arilar tongues, the High Tongue of Rowan, the language of trade and government all over the continent, the language of poetry where the bards gather, the language of emotions and shades of glory that no other race possesses. To try to trace every permutation of this tongue would be folly, but we can, perhaps, work out a general history of it, and show how it rose to be what it is today.
INCEPTION
Aril was born, as were all the Arilar tongues, in the speech of the land Elwens in the Rivadan Valley (Talos Rivadané) in the Age of Dawn, many millions of years ago. There, land Elwens were first born from the light of the stars- or the hands of Laerfren, Lord of Light- or from starfire; there are many different legends, and none of them agree. But land Elwens, like all Elwens, are the children of light and fire. And their tongue, like Primal, is birthed from Godstongue, the language that the stars and the gods and the moon-lords and the other powers spoke before the birth of Shadeemira.
Some of the pale-skinned people remain in the Rivadan Valley even today, and their speech is called Alúcani and sundered from the High Tongue. But many land Elwens wandered from the first. Some went north; and some went west, and built boats when they came to the sea, and went to settle other continents than Arcadia; and some went east, wandering in not only Cytheria, but all twelve provinces of Arcadia.
Many of those who went south clashed almost at once with elves. The elves are a people altogether different from Elwens, and especially from land Elwens. They treasure peace, and see death as the Enemy. They worship the Goddess, the Elfmother, and seek ever to find a balance between freedom and security; but if called upon to make the choice, they would give up all freedom before they would give up safety.
It is not surprising that the First War broke out, with the land Elwens leading the way. The land Elwens learned the secret of forging iron, and the elves retreated. Wherever land Elwens have gone since then, they have retreated before them.
The ancestors of those who would speak Aril dwelled long in the south, in the first city of Erinyiaa, and for a time had beauty and peace aplenty. But in time they left the city, and then began to wander east, drawn further and further and further onward.
A son of the Deerfriend line, Komas, was the first to cross the Acrad, the greatest river of the Tableland, and he found a secluded dell surrounded by bluffs, blessed with many miles of fertile earth and natural underground springs. He discovered as well the secrets of bonding sonor, a metal like silver, together so that it was no longer possible to tell one piece from another, but was possible to create giant sculptures of animals and plants.
Thus Rowan rose. For years, the people dwelled there in the aryn, their valley, and worked the land and sang their songs and fought in their wars. Aril shook off the bonds of its early heritage and became something like the tongue still spoken today, though rich with many cases and devices that have since been forgotten, and poorer in vocabulary.
THE AGE OF LIFE
During the Dark Domination, Tirosina, the Goddess of Ravens and Dark Magic, Dark Music and Dark Beauty and Pain and Torture, conquered most of Arcadia. Only Rowan remained standing, like a little isle of light, in the Tableland, and the language endured long isolation. Then, when the grip of the Music Mother was broken, the First War of Dark and Light resumed, and Rowan, sundered by many miles from either the River or its allies to the south, underwent still more isolation. Aril changed slowly, given the long lives of its people, as it always had, and grew ever more insular. It acquired many words for the strong emotions that its possessors felt as did no other race, and no other Arilar tongue was brought into contact with it enough to renew the old kinship. By the time of the Eya Sonora, the language had reached much of its present form.
Then came the silver unicorns.
As is told in the old song, the silverini, who had the power to take slaves with their gaze alone, conquered most of the land, and again Rowan stood alone. Then the silverini took the city by treachery, and only a few scattered survivors remained, teleported to safety in the hours before the unicorns conquered completely. Out of a city of more than a million, less than three hundred escaped.
Those three hundred eventually found each other, or most of each other, and took the Lady Denion Turnlong for their ruler. They called themselves the Cagliati, the Free Ones, and vowed they would remain so. Never, though it was five hundred Elwen generations before the War of the Falling and the end of the Empire, did they make alliance with the unicorns or treat with any group that did so. They remembered too well what had happened to their ancestors.
One of their main tasks was to preserve as much of Rowan as they could. That included Aril. They fought actively against linguistic change, and so isolated did they have to remain, so secret were they, and so small were they ever that they largely succeeded. The language that emerged into the new-built Rowan when the War of the Falling at last swept the land and the Empire and its Emperor died was not the same that had fled from it, but it was much the same.
Among the most pervasive changes were the growing losses of cases; the original sixteen that all five declensions possessed were reduced to four (the nominative, genitive, accusative, and dative) in three of the sets of nouns. One other declension, the third, retained sixteen, but only the first four varied in form from singular to plural; the other twelve resembled postpositions, and indeed were often used so. Only the fourth declension retained its full toll of thirty-two different forms, and these are not often used today.
THE HIGH AGES
With the Age of Isolation and the Age of Enlightenment following soon upon the War of the Falling, Rowan remained quiet for a long while. But, once again, another scion of the Deerfriend line arose to change things. When Yubro Deerfriend discovered the secret of making life, and subsequently used it to create horses and six intelligent races, the eye of the world turned upon Rowan. As Primal was at that time still the high and graceful language of thought, of treatises and scholarly commentary, and at times even of government- the "common language" Tema not yet gaining much pride of place- Primal came to Rowan.
Aril began to change.
The modern language exploded into being, stealing new Primal words whole, or crossbreeding them with existing ones to create new meanings, or borrowing variations on the Primal words in order to express new concepts. When the Age of Creation ended with the death of Yubro and the destruction of his secret, the new influx of visitors stopped for a while, but the growth of Aril did not. The land Elwen poets had discovered pleasure in making istari in their own tongue. The language grew, and grew.
Then came the High Ages, the long Age of Song and Age of Stars when the Lady Eleriad Deerfriend ruled in Rowan, and Aril grew like a sunflower towards the ariv. Visitors once more returned. New arts and sciences grew, and demanded words. Rowan grew great in war, in trade, in diplomacy, and in many other pursuits undreamed of before the Lady's time. The language changed and rippled, hardly the same from one generation to the next- still far slower than the tongues of the short-lived elves or unicorns, but swiftest of all Elwen speech.
THE WAR OF ACCEPTANCE
Two hundred years after the end of the High Ages, humans appeared for the first time. No one knew where they came from, only that they did not have their origin on Arcadia. They had no magic, lived hardly the drawing of a breath (only a few decades; even the elves lingered at least a few centuries!) and hated and envied the Elwens. They demanded land, and were given it. They demanded freedom, and were given it. They demanded political representation in and entrance to Elwen cities, and were refused.
They burned land Elwen villages.
Rowan declared war.
The War of Acceptance lasted three and a half centuries, while greater human numbers and the diseases they brought with them took their toll on the Elwens. In the end, however, the Rowanian people allied with their kin all over Arcadia, and a hundred races of Elwens forced the humans to a standstill. After three years of negotation, the Treaty of Lucinda was signed.
Aril was not idle throughout all this. It flew back and forth in messages between lords and ladies, was chanted in songs of victory, and was chattered back and forth in battle. In particular, seeing the human attempt to destroy all things land Elwen, other races of Elwens adopted the tongue from defiance. It ended the War as the lingua franca of Elwenkind.
THE GLORY YEARS
Since the assumption of the Councilmastery by the Lord Herran Turnlong, the successor to the Lady, Aril has enjoyed nothing but growth. It is now the most wide-spread language on Arcadia, and possessed of the largest vocabulary. It steals freely from Primal, from Tema, from the dragon languages, from the tongues of elves, from other Elwen races, and even from the humans at times. It turns back on its words and reinvents them. It takes up old words and finds new uses for them. Linguists who do not wish to close off the tongue, but tend it as they would a garden, take careful note of the recording of the tongue.
Aril's story has not ended. But we will leave it there, in the Twelfth Age, the Age of Arcadia, High Tongue of Rowan, sianleño of land Elwens.
