Alder Script

Journal Entry III: Alder Script—An Ancient Tongue and Its Lingering Sigils

Aien Ballen, Contract Archaeologist to the Dragon Imperium, Year 5330 of the Third Cycle

Abstract

Alder Script was the primordial language of the Ey’Feay, woven into every facet of their half-flora, half-fauna civilisation. Though spoken Alder has vanished, its written sigils survive in fragmentary form, underpinning both modern elven orthography and the arcane runes found in some ancient spellcraft. This entry gathers all known attestations of Alder Script, examines its writing system, and traces a handful of common idioms from their original visage into today’s elven tongue.

Introduction

Earliest accounts describe Alder as a tongue that resonated like wind through leaves, each utterance an echo of living wood. Inscriptions once sprawled across Sheywild groves and Wombwood’s root-halls, but only two classes of artifacts remain: brittle stone tablets carved with interlocking sigils, and fragments of vellum bound in charcoal-scorched codices. Where spoken Alder breathed life, only the faintest orthographic ghosts linger in modern dialects, soft sibilants and lilting cadences that hint at the language once sung by floral elves

Surviving Evidence

1. Granite Tablet of Serdeh
   Discovered amid collapsed root husks, this tablet bears thirty-two Alder sigils etched in tight spirals. The upper register reads a dedication to “The Wombwood,” rendered in pictographic strokes that later evolved into the modern elven runes for “mother” and “roots.”
2. Charred Vellum Fragment
   Unearthed within a sealed reliquary, this scrap contains a dozen lines of Alder verse. Though partly obliterated by fire, five complete sigils match those catalogued in the Alder Spell Script compendium, confirming their enduring use in Third-Cycle incantations.

Writing System

Alder Script functioned as a semanto-phonetic system.

• Primary Glyphs: Each base symbol represented both a phoneme and an elemental concept (e.g., “'ae” for “growth,” “shol” for “decay”).
• Ligatures: Paired or tripled glyphs combined to express abstract ideas, fertility, anguish, renewal, allowing a compact notation of complex rites.
• Directionality: Written radially, from a centre point outward in spirals, reflecting the Ey’Feay’s cyclical view of life and death.

In the Third Cycle, only a subset of these glyphs persists in spell sigils, their original spoken values forgotten.

Common Phrases: From Alder to Modern Elven

Cultural Emanations

The persistence of Alder sigils in magical lodestones and grimoire margins reflects a cultural continuum:

• Arcane Heritage: Spell-casters have inscribed Alder ligatures to tap primal energies once bound to Wombwood’s life-force.
• Linguistic Foundations: Modern elven phonology retains glottal inflections and lilting vowel sequences that mirror Alder’s wind-through-leaf origins.
• Esoteric Scholarship: Only elite archivists and dragon-imperial linguists command more than a handful of glyphs, treating Alder as both a sacred relic and a cipher to lost spells.

Hypotheses and Speculation

Given the radial orientation of surviving tablets, one might surmise that spoken Alder employed circular intonations—inflections that rose and fell as a spiralling cadence. This could explain why modern elves describe certain old songs as “spiral-voiced,” a descriptor found in Third-Cycle bardic treatises. Furthermore, the concentration of sigil finds near former Sheywild nexuses suggests that ritual scribes once sanctified groves in Alder before each great bloom, an act whose memory survives only in a handful of botanical maledictions.

Conclusion

Though spoken Alder has receded into myth, it remains indelibly inked into the bones of modern elven culture. Every “Aemishal” blessing and shadow-bound “Sholnutar” lament is a living echo of a language born in Wombwood’s sunlit hollows. As Dragon Imperium scholars continue to decipher stray glyphs, we edge closer to resurrecting the full lexicon of Alder—and with it, the voice of the Ey’Feay themselves.