Naming

DRAFT

Ur-Languages and Naming

The magical beings of this world have the ability to see and manipulate the fundamental nature of things; their languages are structured expressions of this ability. These are the Ur-Languages. To learn an Ur-Language is to learn to understand, control and invoke magic. For magical beings, this is a natural part of their growth and education. For the mundanes however, like Humans, learning an Ur-Language is an exceedingly difficult and demanding task and one that provides little benefit to those without an inherent aptitude for magic though there are exceptions (ooc: gifted, fey blood with elf magic trait/dwarf magic trait, etc.; summoning/binding without gifted)

Draconic, Elvish and Dwarven Runes are all examples of Ur-Languages. Of these Draconic is the most potent, complete and concise allowing the Words of Power shaped by the Ur-Mages to be harnessed by human sorcerers. Naming is the (mostly) human art of understanding and describing things in Draconic. Where a Wizard uses specific Words of Power to create reliable effects in arbitrary contexts, a Namer will form a deep insight into a specific thing and manipulate that one thing in varied ways.

Many Namers will have some divination ability: seeing/knowing the spiritual, past, or future makes it much easier to gain insight into a Name, and Draconic allows diviners a natural way to understand and express their insight. Similarly Namers often have one foot in the spirit world: spirits, particularly lesser spirits, have a far purer and less nuanced existence than the living and make excellent practice. Of course, understanding the Names of Deities or spirits of entire domains is only possible for the most skilled Namers.

Spirits

Named

Names reflect the nature of the thing in question and in general are dynamic both temporally and contextually; but the nature of Named Spirits is unchanging, they are always just themselves And as a result their Names are fixed and never change And if you somehow change them, you permanently alter the spirit For the restless dead, this can be as simple as laying them to rest, and they are no longer restless dead But changing a Daemonim's Name is an epic quest; changing a Deity's Name is shaking the very nature of the world

Nameless

Nameless spirits are in a sense those spirits that don't have a discrete nature Every flame can have a different spirit of fire inherent to it, and the nature of that spirit is as ephemeral as said flame And in some sense spirits reside within another, smaller parts of a larger whole The spirit of any given tree in a forest is part of the larger spirit of the forest

Summoning and Spirit Binding

Spirit Binding is the art of discerning a spirit's Name and then invoking it, most commonly through the Requestive tense of Draconic

Summoning is the art of figuring out how to speak Words of Power while also saying a name, without changing it often a mix of the Consequant and Requestive, forcing the entity to come to you, while also not angering it

Non-humans also engage in spirit binding and summoning, though do not usually refer to themselves as Namers - after all, for magical beings this is simply a manifestation of their natural understanding of the world.