* * *
The river of Avalyr now flowed wild and free with the rebirth of that eternal spring. But into its sleepy river had fallen the grim head of Ama. It had rolled down over the waterless cliffs and into the quiet river below. There it floated on the still waters as it made its way to the seas. But the gentle hand of the river-child named Atar had rescued it from the waves. Seeing the head of Ama, she held it in her arms and wept. For she loved him as a brother. She then cared for it, placing it upon the Isle of Adda, deep within the tomb of Anadelling. There it would remain. But whether it spoke to her, none would ever say or know.
As the glorious garden within Phantaia grew forth in living splendor again, the darker destiny of its sorrowful past seemed almost forgotten. A happier and more peaceful age of innocence and youth was once more upon it. For within the twilit garden were heard the cries of children coming from the heart of Abrea. They had come unexpected into that place, calling out from the top of the hill where the Sacred Pool now bubbled forth with bold jubilation. Two loving hands then reached down into the depths of its silver waters, pulling forth two beautiful children whose happy eyes shone with the sparkling joys and hopes of a new dawn.
The End
Family Tree
Lexicon
Introduction
Most of the languages and names used in the Phantammeron were based on a casual study of the Insular Celtic languages of Ireland and the British Isles (Irish Gaelic, Welsh, etc.). However, in researching ancient languages, I found I was often more interested in their appearance in ancient Indo-European philology and fairy tales than in the more general study of linguistics and the construction of artificial fantasy languages from them.
Many of the fantasy names used in my books originally used elaborate accents, umlauts, etc. to guide the reader in their correction pronunciation. But after careful consideration, I removed them in an attempt to simplify the words and avoid printing errors. In my notes, however, exist my original word designs, accents, and inflections. The new names were then redesigned to make them as easy and as intuitive as possible for the reader to pronounce. It was then my hope that newer words constructed from earlier forms would use rules the reader could easily understand and build upon, deriving meaning from more complex names built from various roots and stems. In that sense, I tried to build languages in my current books using ordered constructs that readers could easily build on in pronouncing words used in future Phantammeron books. But I also wanted readers to sense their hidden meaning, and find deeper connections between the characters, places, and events these names represented.
Because the Phantammeron books represent a written mythological history spanning a great deal of time, the names used in Book One had to be loosely constructed from future languages that evolved in later books (for example, the world of Anatar). Yet, as Book One covers the initial cosmology of the Phantammeron series, primitive names given to early divine places and beings in it had to form the basis for more complex derivative names used in later books, as well. This pattern, I felt, reflected how ancient mythological names have been used in our modern world. For that reason, the simpler names used in Book One were carefully designed to fit a more ordered mythology and comprehensive evolution in both their meaning and influence over later languages, stories, characters, and books of the Phantammeron, even though those languages and the races that used them had yet been born.
But it is still my hope that you will find more value in the hidden spiritual meaning, inner connections, and carefully constructed purpose of these languages in representing the often irrational, spiritual, and emotional nature of the mythopoeia found in the Phantammeron, and less value in attempting to portray the ordered and coldly logical artifice of fantasy linguistics and language construction.
Phantammeron Book One Page 16
