Vahanari

Vahanari is a long-dead language, once spoken by the nomadic trader clans of the Bodmany Desert who crossed the Tremenydh Pass before the landslide that split east from west. Born of barter, movement and survival, it was a tongue made to be understood around campfires, over loud markets or across caravan lines. It used, long, rhythmic phrasing and physical gestures to reinforce meaning, and its script was typically tattooed on the skin; scrolls fade, but flesh remembers. Though few now speak it, Vahanari idioms and expressions still echo across Belerion. Scholars believe Vahanari was agglutinative in structure, building layers of meaning into each word. “Rashatak,” for example, could mean “I owe you protection until the third sunrise,” depending on tone and prefix. This complexity suited a people who relied on subtlety to navigate trade, politics, and alliances. Riverfolk retain this pattern in their shanties, while desert-dwelling Al-Qamari tribes use Vahanari numerals and celestial terms in ceremonial rituals. Even Goblin banking contracts carry traces—legally ambiguous clauses written in ‘Old Ledger Script’ thought to derive from Vahanari shorthand. Common idioms like “to drag the fourth wheel” (to be a burden), “night doesn’t lie” (truth always surfaces), and “blood before ink” (honour over bureaucracy) all trace their roots to Vahanari. Many are carved into trade-wagons or river barges, passed down not as lessons, but warnings. Though the language fractured with the landslide, it did not vanish. It lives on in the jokes of fishwives, the curses of smugglers, the tattoos of sailors, and the songs of desert nomads. Vahanari is the ghost tongue of Belerion—a mother language whose children forget her name but still hum her lullabies in their sleep, carrying her memory along trade routes older than history itself.