Huh. Mial's never said that before.

Was that even in regular Draconic? Sort of hard to tell. The vocabularies are near-identical.

Aurin goes to his mom's office. He waits until her client leaves. He nips in.

"Mother, Mial is going to do something incredibly agitating and I thought I'd better warn you before you find out some other way," he says.

"Oh? What is it now?"

"Uh, he's gotten the miracle-workers to make up a new language which is basically like Draconic but without opinions on shrens. There's a couple words from it that he likes a whole lot. One's siahr, he got a translation of e'sisaak to stick."

"...I see."

"The other one's worse. I, uh, accidentally hit my head on a wall when he said it."

"...Well, I'm sitting down, Aurin."

Aurin takes a deep breath. He can say it, right? Three syllables. He has said all these syllables before. ...Not in a row, but.

"He's planning to go around wearing a shirt that says shrennaki."

Alys doesn't fall over. She stands up, hands slamming down on her desk, eyes wide. "What?"

"Oh, don't make me say it again -"

"No," she says, fire in her voice, "of course not."

"Sorry - it's not like I could possibly stop him, I said it was a bad idea but he wants to be obnoxious -"

Alys sits back down and cradles her face in her hands.

"Aurin," she says, "I love your cousin, of course, but sometimes he makes himself very challenging to like."

Aurin shifts uncomfortably.

"Thank you for warning me, dear."

"You're welcome."

Aurin then finds himself folding decorative napkins for three angles and going home with her at the end of her workday.

Avar sits still for a moment, thoroughly surprised.



Then he starts laughing.