- Name
- Tarethic
- Language type
- Lost written and spoken language
- Overview
- Tarethic is the forgotten language of Vael Tareth, the Moving City. Once employed by its cartographers, scholars, priests, and navigators, it was devised to describe places that ordinary speech could not encompass. Unlike most languages, Tarethic does not treat location as fixed. A single word transforms meaning depending on where it is read, who remembers it, and what has been lost nearby, making accurate translation nearly impossible. It survives now only in fragmented form—preserved in ancient maps, relics, prayers half-remembered, and inscriptions that exist more in memory than stone. To speak Tarethic is to acknowledge that geography itself is mutable, that roads can remember their travelers, and that some sentences are still being written.
- Status
- Dead
- Writing system
- Curved symbols resembling roads, coastlines, knots, and compass markings
- Appearance
- Written Tarethic employs thin, curved symbols that echo the forms of roads, coastlines, knots, and compass roses. The letters connect into continuous lines, transforming a sentence into something resembling a small, intricate map. On aged parchment, Tarethic script possesses an unsettling quality: observers report that the symbols slowly rearrange themselves when unobserved, as though the words themselves are wandering, searching for their true positions. What was clearly written one day may have shifted imperceptibly by the next, the meaning drifting with the ink.
- Sound
- Spoken Tarethic flows soft and uneven, marked by repeated sounds and deliberate pauses that seem to hold weight. Listeners often describe hearing it as strangely familiar even when incomprehension clouds their understanding—like a childhood song carried through fog, almost remembered but forever slipping away. Some words are not fully spoken aloud. Instead they are completed through silence, memory, gesture, or the speaker's hand pointing toward a distant place. The listener must supply what is missing, must remember what was never said.
- Grammar features
- Tarethic contains no simple past tense. Instead, it separates events into three temporal states: Held (something remembered clearly and fixed), Drifting (something uncertain, half-forgotten, or perpetually changing), and Returned (something once lost that has become real again). A single sentence in Tarethic can simultaneously imply that an event happened, is happening, and may yet happen again—time itself becomes mutable, subject to the vagaries of memory and the city's movement.
- Spoken by
- The cartographers, scholars, priests, and navigators of Vael Tareth. Now extinct as a living tongue, though fragments persist in the broken prayers of the Way of the True Horizon and in the obsessive notes of those who have glimpsed the Moving City.
- Common words and phrases
- vael — city, vessel, hidden place; tareth — true road, moving path, remembered route; orun — lantern, guide, witness; mere — still water, pause, waiting place; sai — name, self, mark on the world; luma — map, memory, drawn truth; esh — loss, absence, open door; kavren — danger, hunter, thing that follows; thalen — horizon, boundary, beyond; mirai — one who searches, one who is remembered. A phrase appears repeatedly in certain texts: "Mirai sai vael"—approximate meaning: "The seeker's name belongs to the city."
- Secrets
- Tarethic is not merely a language used to describe Vael Tareth. It is one of the mechanisms by which the city moves. When a complete Tarethic sentence is inscribed correctly upon a map, it can alter the route it describes—roads shift, coastlines change, and the world redraws itself according to the grammar of memory and loss. This truth is known to few, and fewer still understand its implications. Most dangerous of all: some sentences remain unfinished, waiting only for the final word—a name, a place, a choice—to complete them and set their transformations in motion.