The goddesses of words Loquea, Scriba, Lettra and Audia are in search of a world. They find it accidentally and call it Say, the world of the sayants, a place where words matter most. The story (re)starts in the office of Uvu Vasiour, a Public Rewriter, who receives a visit from Tops Fullstopson, Provider of Punctuations. After a heated debate about palaverology, the science of words, and the recent threats of the Prophecy of Consonantolam, according to which words will die, Uvu recalls a dream he had. The dream involves his grandson, the boy Reho, who cannot speak, and a talking animal, who “speaks, yes, but not like sayants do”. Announced in recurring and unusual graffiti in pink, the Prophecy’s effect on words is terrifying. Because of the prophecy, Reho finds himself obliged to do things he never thought he could. How do words die? That’s what Reho will find out, and that will cause him to feel terrorified. Thankfully, the little talking animal Sonant, with its unique expressions and its incapacity to produce sentences in the past, is there to help Reho, as is the Illustrated Almanac that Instructs on How We Are and Are Not. When the ‘Nac is not out of charge, it answers queries about Say and another (this!) world. And it’s a good thing that the goddesses are watching everything and sometimes can change the course of things.
GENRE
Fantasy, Linguistic Fantasy, Fantastic Realism, literary nonsense.
A Language Fantasy weaves its plot from the very words used in its narrative. It modifies them, it plays with them, and it makes them an important part of the story. Words are not characters; their spelling, structure, root, position in the sentence – in short, their morphological and structural traits – become an unexpected part of the narrative, forming the fabric of the language-fantastic text.
