This is not a grammar; the translator handles the grammar. This is a working note for the people who fly beside the Nhál, on a thing the translator cannot carry: that the Nhál do not have parties, they have standings — ways of holding oneself toward the dark — and that you can tell which standing a Nhál keeps not by what they argue but by whether, when something moves in them, a word ever slips.
The standing-quiet (vesh)
The Nhál baseline is a low, even stillness they call the standing-quiet — vesh. It is not absence; it is a held readiness. Their greeting and their leave-taking is the same word, vesh’a — be still, it is well, peace — and it means both at once. Raised volume is itself meaning to them: a voice lifted is a kind of breach. Most of what passes between two Nhál passes in stillness, in the naru — the listening that does not answer yet. Before a hard thing, one of them will ask naru-sa? — will you listen? — and that frame is the door opening on the serious.
The two standings
The Nhál aboard the coalition keep two different standings toward the dark, and they are best understood through conduct, not labels:
- The ones who keep the silence (the hard-line). They meet the dark with quiet and hold that every voice raised against it is a hand cupped to call the worst of it down. They do not slip a word — ever; the not-slipping is the discipline, the standing-quiet kept by force where a human would let something show. To them, a coalition is noise, and noise is what draws the thing that came once for a guttered sky.
- The ones who left it. Those who crossed their whole lives to read the dark beside humans, at human speed, in human light. Their tell is the opposite: when something moves in them, a word slips — a low kel (no; a closed door), a vesh’a said down toward a deck where the dead were carried out. The slipping is the leaving showing. Their own line has not forgiven them the leaving; a Nhál who lives among humans cannot read the dark and say nothing while they fly into it, and the saying is the cost.
Render them through conduct, never as a parliament. A human command summary may write hard-line and moderate; the Nhál themselves never sound like they run one. Their politics live in how they stand.
Grief-debt, and a word for a dying sky
The heaviest Nhál concept is korr — weight owed; debt — and its great form korrvesh, a grief-debt: a grief carried formally, not discharged. The far pocket they fled is full of tael-vesh — spent light; guttered stars — and the loss of it is not a fact they report up a chain. It is, in one liaison’s account of what an officer carried at her console, a korrvesh the size of a sky. Keep such words short and untranslated on the page; the slip into the tongue is the feeling, and glossing it flatly kills it.
In The Dimming, the two standings stop being a curiosity and become a fracture under fire — because the silence one keeps and the word the other lets slip are, in the end, two answers to the same question, and no one yet knows which of them calls the dark down the length of the line.