The Common Language

What The Common Man Knows

Onisol is the trade-talk, merchants all seem to know it. I suppose they need it to talk to foreigners with their silly babbles. I don't see why the whole world doesn't just speak our tongue,  it would be so much easier.

What Wealthy Merchants And Nobility Know

Onisol is a remarkably simple language when compared to others. A fluent speaker can teach it to someone completely virgin with only a few weeks of dedicated study. Everyone who needs to talk to foreigners learns it by default; sailors, traders who visit foreign ports, mid-to-high ranking nobility, and so on.

Florian Herold

Occasionally you hear stories of novices who dream on some restless night of falling out of their beds and up into the sky, landing on some distant star. There they find a tower of slick black stone. Inside they go through many constricting passages with walls detailed by intricate golden filigree. They lead deep underground and finally come to a chamber greater than the greatest cathedral hall and twice as opulent. At the center, on a plinth, they find, well that's where they can't recall, nobody can. Then they wake up in a cold sweat and suddenly they're speaking Onisol fluently like their father had been whispering it to them through the wall of the womb.

What Post-Graduate Philosophers Know

The tower that appears in these dreams is called the Tower of Lech-Chesed. Also known as the pillar of communication. The formalists claim it is a representation in the world of forms. An inaccessible and non-physical place where pure concepts are held and of which our world is only an imperfect reflection.

More literal theologians claim it to be a tower of heaven where the Powers of the Astral Host placed the secrets of communication.

Others say the dreams show no signs of being in the world of forms and the descriptions of the landscape do not match any scripture on the shape of heaven. The descriptions of physical travel to the tower are just that. During these episodes the soul left the body, drawn by the power of the tower to its place on a celestial wanderer.

What Master Philosophers Ponder On Sleepless Nights

If Lech-Chesed was created by the Powers then why did they leave the process so incomplete ? If dwarves are ordained to speak dwarvern from birth and all the spirits know their tongues intrinsically, why must some humanoids be separated by language at all ? Are others set to greater struggles for some great purpose, or as a punishment ?

Bruegel

If there is a tower in the world of forms is it natural or was it created ? If it is possible to create in the world of forms, to enact change upon the universal and eternal, then might it be possible to create something else ? Could the tower be destroyed and would Onisol go with it ? How do you visit or act upon the world of forms anyway ?

If the tower is physical, if it is real, by what method does it act ? What magic could be so great as to create knowledge of language from across the stars ? Are its builders still living ? If we found a way to go there what wonders would they reveal to us ?