| Meaning | "the eating-speech" (a Worn-Tongue name, see §5) |
|---|---|
| Other names | Demonic (kingdom scholars); the Aelduin will not write it at all |
| Speakers | Demons. No mortal survives true fluency. |
| Type | Anti-language; meaning by removal |
| Voice | Diphonic: an under-drone carrier plus the spoken top line |
| Script | None of its own; mortals impose capitals and word-breaks |
| Seam mark | None. No boundary at all. |
| Places | Gehennath, Arinoth |
|---|---|
| Family | Languages |
No mortal record agrees on what to call it, because the demons do not call it anything. A thing that consumes does not name itself; it is named by what it has eaten. Scholars of the kingdom log it as Demonic; the Aelduin will not write it, only point to the place where Arinoth used to be. Even the name Khaurzhûl is a mortal one: it carries the diphthong au and the liquid l, both impossible in the true tongue (§4).
The setting holds three tongues that each make something:
Demonic does not make. It takes: speech as consumption, a mouth opened onto the void. To the demon, the building-tongues are all just different ways of holding on; Demonic is the tongue of letting the nothing in.
Demonic is front-empty and throat-full: pharyngeal scrapes, glottal closures, and a clicking intake made by pulling air inward past a constricted throat. A mortal can imitate these the way one imitates a death-rattle: briefly, badly, and not for long. Sustained, they bruise the throat.
| Sound | Written | What it is | Why mortals fail |
|---|---|---|---|
| ʔ (the stop) | ʼ or doubled vowel | a hard glottal slam | mortals soften it; demons land it like a closing door |
| ħ / ʕ (the scrapes) | kh, gh | pharyngeal friction, deeper than any dwarven kh | the dwarven kh is the closest and still far too high |
| ǁ (the in-click) | zr, tzr | air pulled inward, a swallowed click | mortals click only outward; inward feels like choking |
| r̥ (the void-rasp) | rh, rr | a voiceless throat-trill, gravel with no tone | mortals voice it, which makes it merely ugly |
A demon speaks with two voices at once. A low throat-drone is held continuously underneath while the upper voice articulates the words. The drone is the carrier. A demon speaking without it is whispering, lying, or dying.
A human reciting Demonic from a grimoire produces the top line only: words stripped of their carrier, a song with no breath under it. (The echo is deliberate: the elves' guttered song is speech with the life-carrier missing from the other side.)
A scholar who has "learned Demonic" has learned to read the top line. They have never once spoken the language. The demons find this funny.
Because the language is an extension of the void, speaking it correctly opens what the words are made of. For a demon this is native. For a mortal who forced throat and drone into alignment, the language pulls back, drawing on the speaker the way Namaeh's Void Barrage drew on the singers of Arinoth. Perfect mortal fluency is self-erasing; the only mortals who truly spoke Demonic did not survive having done so.
The dwarf pays a fixed price; the elf spends a finished grief; the demon's tongue simply takes, with no ritual and no consent.
| Sound | Written | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| ʔ | ʼ / doubled vowel | the void's full stop, mid-word |
| kh, gh | kh, gh | pharyngeal scrapes, the load-bearing consonants |
| zr, tzr | zr, tzr | the inward swallowed click; the most "demonic" sound there is |
| rh, rr | rh, rr | the voiceless void-rasp |
| z, zh | z, zh | struck sibilants (forbidden in elven and dwarven sacred sets) |
| n, m | n, m | the one concession to being heard |
| h | h | a hard exhale, the carrier surfacing |
| the under-drone | (unwritten) | present under every true word, never spelled |
| Vowel | Sound | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| a | /ɑ/ | open back |
| o | /ɔ/ | rounded back, darker |
| u | /u/, /ʊ/ | deepest; the void's home vowel |
| â, û | /ɑː/, /uː/ | "swallowed" long vowels, pulled inward during voicing |
The circumflex is the opposite of dwarven deepening. A Durûm û lands and stays; a Demonic û lands and is gone, like ground giving way. No diphthongs. No bright i/e in true words.
Durûm joins with a hyphen. Sael'aurin marks the break with an apostrophe. Vox Caravela runs smooth. Demonic fuses with no boundary at all, and the absence of any way to tell where one word ends is itself the mark.
Mortal capitals and word-breaks are a mortal lie. A name that can be cleanly cut into parts is not yet fully Demonic: it is a name in the process of being consumed.
A root begins as a maximal form: the whole of a thing. Grammar eats pieces of it:
To speak of destruction, you destroy the word for it. A demon says the city's full name and then says it again with its sounds eaten away, and the diminishing is the sentence.
| Form | Sense | How |
|---|---|---|
| full root | the thing entire | maximal form |
| eaten once | the thing being taken | drop the final scrape or stop |
| eaten through | the thing mostly gone | drop to the core scrape |
| bare consonant | the thing erased | the residue sound alone |
To the void there is only how much is left. This is why demon-speech feels like a threat that is already happening: there is no grammatical room for "later."
Who acts and with what intent rides on the drone. A steady low drone under an eaten word is a flat statement of ruin. A sinking drone is a working: the void actually opening. A broken drone is fear or weakness, shameful among demons. Mortals, having no drone, speak the menu, never the meal.
Seven tests, the inverse of the Durûm and Sael'aurin gates. They are strict: a name that fails is not true Demonic. It is a mortal corruption (Worn-Tongue, §5), a loanword, or a name still being consumed.
The elf asks of a name: does it hold grief? The dwarf asks: will it last? The demon asks only: does it eat?
Every demonic name the mortal world uses is Worn-Tongue. None of them passes all seven tests, and that is the point: the true forms are not recorded, because no mortal can write or survive them.
The Drone-Tongue (true Demonic). Full diphonic speech, the void answering. Only demons. Only this register works magic.
The Top-Line (grimoire register). The words with the drone stripped. Inert but informative: it carries the what while losing the who and whether. A summoner reciting it is reading a recipe aloud and hoping something hears. Sometimes something does, and that is how most summoners die, because the thing that answers supplies its own drone.
The Worn-Tongue (mortal Demonic). Names filed down by mortal fear until they can be said: Malnaar, Gehennath with its scribal break, Zarathos with a clean opening z, Rhaghoth, and the very name Khaurzhûl. The register of every human curse and frightened prayer: Demonic with its teeth pulled. The Aelduin consider even the Worn-Tongue unclean; the kingdom uses it daily without knowing what it is filing the edges off of.
Three tongues hold the world together; one tongue holds the place where the world was eaten. You can learn to read it. You must never learn to speak it. The ones who learned to speak it are the silence inside Gehennath.
If a mortal could pronounce it comfortably on the first try, it is too soft. Eat a vowel and harden the ending. For a name that mortals in the story actually use, build the true form first, then wear it down deliberately.
Sample coinages: zhurrakh (a void-wound), ghaztûn (the sound of something being unmade), tzraghon (a hollow that hungers), nakhûrr (the silence after eating). Eating-form: zhurrakh → zhur → zh.
Source: Demonic_Wiki.md (project file, 2026-06-08), the canon record, and the lore check of 2026-10-12.