Virtues//Customs//Languages

First thing you need to know about Celds: they love Celdaenn.
Second thing you need to know about Celds: they hate other Celds.

[bits and bobs stolen from Locheil, per usual]

4 Virtues

Celds respect you if you have two or more of these:

1. Wit: Sharpness of the mind and tongue.
2. Memory: Preservation of our ways of life; rediscovery of our culture.
3. Fertility: Creation of life, art, and invention.
4. Bear: Self explanatory.

8 Customs

Celds expect you to remember all of these:

1. Trees: Bringing harm to trees of a certain age is forbidden. Lying to a tree of a certain age is also forbidden. Exact ages depend on species and location; penalties include lashes and dismemberment (a hand for a branch, etc). Tree law is arcane enough to merit its own profession; the lawyer.
   
2. Speech: Skalds have the right of free speech; they can insult anyone, even a lord in their own chambers, and cannot be directly punished for it without the lord in question losing face. (Note: this does not prevent them from getting mauled by any Celd, just those who care about upholding the law)
   
3. Drinking: Disputes are resolved by either talking, dueling, or drinking. For the latter, everyone tests FORT and gets very drunk; the loser is the one who falls over first, but both characters ToD (roll on the Table of Disgraces).
4. Iron: Iron is forbidden in holy places. Driving iron spikes into a tree is deadly, and punishable by death. Everyone agrees on this one.
5. Democracy: Only Celds have the right to vote. No one actually knows what this means, but they are very smug about it.
   
6. Scars: For two to transcend a Blood Feud, they must share each scar created by their feuding: an eye for an eye, a hand for a hand, a child for a child. If there are no scars to share, you probably weren't feuding in the first place.
   
7. Signs: Each Celd knows the Signs of Friendship (two fingers linked), Respect (fist over heart), and Veneration (two hands interlaced).
8. Wholeness: A scarred body cannot rightly rule. Prosthetics are common, as is makeup. All parts must be accounted for. Celds go back and forth on whether a clean-shaven face counts as a scar.
   

royal, skeleton, saintmaker, berserker-knight

20+1 Languages 

Celds expect you to speak at least one of the first six:

1. Citizen: business-like, loanwordful common tongue; described by outsiders as "barely intelligible" and by Celds as "soft"
2. Celdaenni: proudly impenetrable Citizen dialect, aka Old Marks or Ancestor; completely different writing system; jostles with Citizen as the "official" language of the City
   
3. Sheel: singsong tongue of the river districts, sometimes called Merchant; full of untranslatable witticisms
4. Kalut: coarse tongue of the seaside districts; insults in Kalut are so devastating they count as attacks
5. Ilish: grumbling tongue of the displaced Ilmari and their lost sister-cities; plagued by excessive homonyms and loanwords
6. Skullsign: sign language of skeletons; audible bone-on-bone clacking component
7. Palace: gliding royal tongue, spoken by servants and captives of the Palace-State; lacks structures for rudeness and aggression
8. Orison: barking prayer-tongue, spoken by dogs; the sound of it is too delicious for gods to ignore
9. Howl: language of ghosts and cats; inimitable without a spectral tongue
10. Feather/Hoof/Coil: spoken by the flying/hoofed/coiling creatures of Creation
11. Tracks: "written unknowingly by those who walk the wilderness"
12. Knocks: percussive language spoken with large mallets; transmissible across long distances in the deep City
13. Teppo: crashing tongue of the Land of Ashen Rain, and its Ways of Unmaking
14. Qesic: laughing tongue of the Qet, and their Queen-Saint
15. Gnomen: droning tongue of Gnosc reborn, and its dark wizarding colleges
16. Feral: dead language of Carcharvan, the Iron Apostate, and of demons
17. Koan: dead language of Koa, the Despicable Apostate; written in spirals for some godforsaken reason
18. Nwnish: dead language of Nwn, the Silvered Apostate; has two genders (Above and Below) which annihilate one another when placed in the same phrase
19. Apolytic: dead language of Apolyon, the Lower Apostate; inventors of law and sarcastic punctuation
20. Obliterat: dead language; black ink on black parchment; insanely information-dense
21. Original Linear: dead language; grim hieroglyphs of a death-obsessed civilization