Old Speak

"the harsh battlefield creed of the first human knights". Latin-flavoured.

Script and inscriptions

The faith

The faith of Luna's humans and its symbol, the Oathstone, are on the oath faith page. The Creed's tongue is High Elvish.

From the books

The outcast knights' oaths

At Oakren's grave, Usso leads the joint oath of the outcast knights in Old Speak, "effortless" on his tongue, and Fi repeats it after him. They need no translation, but he gives a rough one anyway: a promise to stand for justice when it is trodden down, for the chained and the crushed, and to walk into the dark so that others need not, until death. He then adds a quieter private rite, "In tenebris veritas revelabitur, in iustitia dolor convertetur", and Fi answers it in the common tongue. The appendix reads it as a promise that grief will one day become righteous vengeance.

After the ritual at the Eye, Usso climbs alone to the highest parapet of the castle and roars the same oath into the scorched-purple sky. He then repeats it more softly in the common tongue for anyone still listening.

A tongue of power

Old Speak can act as a ward. Facing the plague-blood monstrosity, Fi speaks "Vox Veneni Obscuro", "Voice of the Dark Venom", and the words roll out "like gravel and smoke". A thin, sickly-green barrier snaps into place, the creature's black blood sizzling where it touches. The appendix calls this an old ward from pre-Luminarite crypt scriptures. Balorin regards it with mixed gratitude and revulsion, telling her that although she turned her back on the Light, she had stood in its place.

On the night before facing Alerion, Fi whispers a personal vow of vengeance, a knight's vow, and repeats it until it feels like something being reforged inside her. In the arena she speaks its lines under the clash of steel. The nobles in the stands had once ordered Old Speak speakers flogged in these very streets, and now they hear the forbidden words spoken as judgement. Her final line comes out heavier, vibrating through her sword, and for the first time real fear shows in Alerion's eyes.

In the cellar where Eamon's father, a Godless priest, performs his rite, Old Speak symbols crawl across the floor in lines of dried blood. Eamon does not know the words, yet somehow understands them.

The appendix describes Old Speak as harsh, consonantal and direct, the language of human knights and of early resistance scriptures. It was once used in the original scriptures of justice and protection.

Beyond Luna's humans

Old Speak is not confined to humans. In The Channeler, the Luminglade Veil-Sister Nyssa swears in Old Speak at Liora's death, and the words taste to her "like hot iron".

In The Godless Priest, the knife that wounds Lysa Farthing bears a Luna maker's stamp, filed almost smooth, and a line of Old Speak etched beneath the hilt. Lysa translates it as "A door remembers the first hand". She had learned the language from Manus Farthing.