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Common had always sloshed about in Caleb’s mouth like dirty water, or perhaps like a bad beer, all fizz and fuzz with no depth. Speaking it was a journey — one had to sit about and construct feelings and sensations, when in Zemnian he would have plucked the perfect word straight from the air. In Zemnian, Caleb could sit for a moment, think of the feeling, then snatch it up from the ground before it ran away — a hawk scooping up a field mouse fleeing for the safety of the briar patch but just a smidge too slow. In Common, the moment had passed by the time he had charted a course to the feeling he meant to convey. His companions raced on, turning somersaults and cartwheels in their language while he waited, tossing insufficient words aside like components gone bad until he found just the right one.
Truthfully, his second language was magic. He learned Common, Celestial, and other tongues all through the delicate game of casting and transcription, where a small error or incorrect word could send the fireball backward instead of forward. You learned to choose your words carefully when they might cost you your life, or at the very least, your dinner. Celestial, for him, was a language of peril, despite its divine origin. Celestial was a language spoken at knife-point; a language of shaky hands writing notes by candlelight, of hidden knowledge and all the excitement and risk it implied. Common was utilitarian. It got him from place to place, from concept to concept, without fuss. Over time, he started to enjoy its texture — the second, third meanings layered into its words as they were passed among his friends — it would always be Caleb’s language, but not quite Bren’s.
Undercommon wasn’t like Common. He learned Undercommon from luck and love — it was like blundering through a field of flowers where even his mistakes usually led to something good. There were no vocabulary books, no instructor telling him how to order a meal or inscribe a runic circle — he skipped straight to the fun stuff, the dirty language books he had giggled at with other students in stolen moments between lectures and practice sessions. He heard Beauregard once say that Undercommon felt harsh and academic to her, but to him it had always been a sibilant, sensual language, spoken so much farther forward in the mouth than his own Zemnian. Speaking Zemnian to Essek always felt like there was a hook attached to his heart, pulling his love from his chest, through his throat, out his mouth — painful but real and true. Undercommon felt like a secret, like it could only be whispered — and it often was, at least to him — words falling right off his tongue as soon as he had begun to form them. Or perhaps it was that Essek so enjoyed his stumbling Undercommon that he seemed to want to eat the words straight from his mouth, hardly letting him finish one before he devoured it. He supposed he too would be starving for his language, in Essek’s position.
With time, they developed their own tongue, a strange, abbreviated mixture of Common, Zemnian, and Undercommon spoken mostly in a single region, a humble house in Rexxentrum where it became the lingua franca. It annotated spell books, bookshelves, spices, and alchemical reagents within their home, where the most frequent user of the item got to choose its name through sheer repetition. Caleb did not expect to have his spellbook analyzed and preserved like the great mages of old, but in a moment of vanity, seeing his and Essek’s spellbooks side-by-side, annotations a matching mix of their shared tongue, he thought that this slow merging — the gentle accumulation of Undercommon in his spellbook and Zemnian in Essek’s — might be the best romance novel he had ever read.