Names in the Tower’s Shadow

By Idun (Linguist), A Windy Tree

Your name is your résumé

Imagine walking into a tavern, a market stall, or a workshop and introducing yourself not with a firm handshake and a vague “I’m in logistics,” but with your name. Just your name. And imagine that your name already told everyone what you do for a living and who you answer to.

That, more or less, is how it works in the world we’ve been building at A Windy Tree. Much of what I’ll talk about today happens in the city of Bytorsskug, where Artificers repair, sell and study the magical artifacts that Hunters bring through their workshop doors. Think warm lamplight, a cluttered workbench, and the occasional object that hums when it shouldn’t.

Before anyone who walks through such a door says a word, their name has already done half the talking. A name in Bytorsskug works like a résumé you can fit on a coin. I’m Idun, the studio’s linguist, and today I want to walk you through how those names work, the language they’re built from, and one language that you’ll never find on a map.

The Starsong: a language everybody shares

Almost everyone in this world speaks the Starsong. It’s the lingua franca, the language you reach for when you need to haggle, argue, gossip, or apologize to someone who doesn’t share your mother tongue. And that happens a lot, because the world is home to more than one sapient species. There are elf-like people, and there are desert bear-folk, and each of the sapient species has its own native language as well.

Here’s the twist I’m proudest of: in-world, the Starsong is itself a constructed language. It isn’t a tongue that drifted into being over centuries of nobody paying attention. Someone built it. So when I sit down to work on it, I’m a real-world conlanger making a language that, inside the fiction, was also made on purpose. It’s conlangs all the way down, and I could not be happier about it.

One of the design pressures on the Starsong, both for me and in-world, is anatomy. The Starsong was simplified so that people with bear anatomy can say it. A shared language is only shared if everybody’s mouth can actually produce it, and a bear’s mouth is not an elf’s mouth. The result is a language that a great many very different throats can manage.

As for flavor: the Starsong is mostly Nordic, with a Middle Eastern strand running through it and a dash of Welsh. If you squint, you’ll hear a bit of each. Despite the name, nobody sings it. But it does have a distinct rhythm and cadence, a beat you start to feel once you’ve heard enough of it. More on that in a moment.

How it sounds

Let’s put the Starsong in your mouth. It helps to relax your jaw.

Vowels. There are six: a, e, i, o, u and y. None of them are long. There’s no stretching a vowel out to change a word’s meaning, which keeps things tidy and brisk.

What’s missing. There’s no q, no h and no w. In place of q, the Starsong has kh, the rough, scraping sound at the end of Scottish “loch” or German “Bach.” If you’ve ever cleared your throat with intent, you’re most of the way there.

Two kinds of ll. This is where the Welsh dash comes in, along with a bit of Icelandic. The Starsong has two separate “ll” sounds, and they are not the same:

• hl is the breathy Welsh ll. Put your tongue where you’d say an l, then blow air past the sides of it instead of voicing it. (Yes, the letter h is “missing,” but it shows up here as part of a spelling. Languages are like that.)
• tl is the Icelandic ll: a t that releases straight into a hissed l, as though the t can’t quite let go.

r and j. The r is rolled or tapped, never the soft American kind. The letter j is always the y sound of “yes.” Never the j of “jam.”

The curious case of kn. In the Starsong, kn counts as a single sound, and it behaves differently depending on where it sits. At the start of a syllable, it’s a crisp k followed by an n, both pronounced, as in Old Norse “kniv.” After a vowel, it’s a k released through the nose, which is a strange and satisfying thing to do with your face. And in softer accents, or over long stretches of time, kn can drift toward gn. I love this one because it leaves room for regional accents. A shared language that everyone speaks will never be spoken identically everywhere, and kn is one of the places where you’ll hear people’s origins peek through.

Stress and rhythm. Stress always falls on the first syllable, and words follow a strong-weak beat. This is where that cadence comes from. Say the city’s name with the weight up front, BY-tors-skug, and you’ll start to hear it. Strong, weak. Strong, weak. It isn’t singing, but once you’re used to it, it does feel a little like walking to music.

How names are built

Now for the main event. Most people in this world carry a name with up to three parts. Everyone in Bytorsskug does, and outside the city it’s the most common convention, though not the only one:

Given Name + Primary Occupational Skill + Faction or Organization

The easiest way to understand it is to meet a few people.

Ylva Archer Hunters. Ylva is affiliated with the Hunters’ guild, more formally the Tower Acquisition Guild. But the Hunters’ guild is the organization, not the job. What actually earns Ylva her living is archery, so “Archer” sits in the middle of her name, and “Hunters” closes it out.

Hamr Repairer Artifice. This is the kind of name a working Artificer might carry. Don’t let the similarity fool you, though: “Artifice” here isn’t the Artificers’ Guild. So a name like Hamr’s says two things at once: repairing is the living, and Artifice, the workshop he’s tied to, is the organization. (A name’s last part can be a workshop or another organization, not only a guild.) In the same way, an apprentice at a workshop called Tinkerforge might be Alvid Merchant Tinkerforge, with “Merchant” naming his primary responsibility around the shop.

Olana Freelancer. Olana has no affiliation, so her name has no faction part at all. Just a given name and the way she earns her keep. The gap at the end is part of the name, in a sense. Nothing is there because nobody is there.

Not every culture does it this way, though. Some settlements and cultures outside Bytorsskug are exceptions to this convention. I’m not going to say more about them today, partly because they deserve their own post and partly because some of that is still on my desk.

One skill, not every skill

Here’s a detail that trips people up when they first hear about the system. Everyone in this world has many skills. Ylva presumably has talents beyond the bow, and Hamr can surely do more than fix things. A name doesn’t try to list all of that, which would make introductions very long and parties very tiring.

Instead, the name uses only the single primary skill a person makes their living by. It isn’t “what are you good at?” It’s “what pays your rent?” Those can be very different questions, as anyone who has ever had a day job knows.

Why names change

That leads to my favorite consequence of the whole system: names change.

If your name says how you earn your living, then when you change profession, your name changes too. The name follows the work.

From a linguist’s point of view, that makes every name in Bytorsskug a snapshot: true right now, and maybe not forever. It also means a name can carry history in the gaps, in the names someone used to have. What all of that means socially is Slarti’s territory, and you’ll find it further down.

Gloss versus Starsong: how names appear in English

A practical question we’ve been chewing on is how to render all this in English.

The skill and faction parts of a name are real Starsong words. In the language itself, “Archer” and “Hunters” and “Repairer” and “Artifice” all have their own Starsong forms. But when we write about the world in English, our current plan is to mostly use the English gloss. So Ylva appears as Ylva Archer Hunters, not as a string of unfamiliar syllables you have to decode before you know who she is.

Why? Because the name is supposed to communicate at a glance. In the world, anyone hearing Ylva’s name understands it instantly. The gloss gives readers that same instant understanding. If we wrote only the Starsong, the names would sound wonderful but say nothing to you, and that would undercut the whole point of the system.

I want to be clear that this is our current plan, not a final decision. We’re still weighing it, and it may shift as the world takes shape. (I’ll admit the linguist in me would love to sneak more Starsong onto the page. The storyteller in me knows you’d rather meet the people first.)

Myligasti, and why it isn’t on the map

At the center of the continent stands Myligast, a vast and mysterious Tower. Around it lies the Vindring, a great ring around the Tower.

The Tower has its own language: Myligasti, the “tower tongue.” And Myligasti is a very different creature from the Starsong.

For one thing, it has only ever been known by Artificers and academics. Ordinary people never knew it. That’s an important distinction, and one I’m a little fussy about. Myligasti is not a lost language, and it is not a forgotten one. Nobody’s grandmother spoke it at the hearth. It was never the everyday speech of anyone you might meet in the market. Only the specialists, the people whose work brings them close to the Tower’s things, have ever been able to understand it.

Which brings us to maps. You might expect a language tied to the center of the continent to have left its fingerprints all over the place names. It hasn’t. No place names come from Myligasti. The one exception is Myligast itself. Every other place name is either Starsong or one of the native languages. Bytorsskug is one example; the Vindring is another. (And no, I’m not going to tell you what those mean. Not today.)

So where does Myligasti show up? On artifacts. It appears as inscriptions on the objects that Hunters bring in, and Artificers study it. That makes reading those inscriptions part of an Artificer’s craft. I won’t go into how that decoding works here, partly because it’s still being polished and partly because some of the fun is in discovering it. But if you’ve ever wanted to squint at an old object, turn it over in your hands, and slowly work out what the writing on it says, you’ll understand the appeal.

What a Name Says in Bytorsskug

— Slarti (Creative Lead)

In Bytorsskug, the City in the Tower’s Shadow, you don’t introduce yourself so much as present your credentials. Nearly everyone carries a name built from three parts: a given name, the primary skill that earns their living, and the faction or organization they belong to. Meet someone called Ylva Archer Hunters and you already know a good deal about her before she says a word. She lives by her bow, and she answers to the Hunters’ Guild.

That middle part matters more than it first appears. Everyone in Bytorsskug has more than one skill. Ylva can surely do plenty besides shoot. But your name doesn’t list what you can do. It names the one skill that puts food on your table, so a name is less a list of talents than a statement of how you make your way in the world.

This is why a name in Bytorsskug isn’t fixed. When you change your trade, your name changes with it. To outsiders that might sound strange, even a little sad, as if a person were shedding an old self. In the city, it’s simply honest. Your name has to stay true. A carpenter who now earns their keep at the market isn’t a carpenter anymore, whatever they once were, and the city will call them by what they are now. A name change can mark a hard-won promotion, a quiet failure, a fresh start, or a whole life turned around. Neighbors notice. They always do.

The last part of a name, the faction, tells you who stands behind a person. Two organizations loom especially large in the city.

The first is the Tower Acquisition Guild, which everyone calls the Hunters’ Guild. Hunters range across the lands around the city searching for wild artifacts. Only a badged Hunter may sell or consign what they find, and the badge isn’t handed out lightly. Newcomers serve a probation, then a period of mentorship before they’re trusted on their own. Every Hunter keeps a mandatory logbook, shows it to the Artificers they deal with at every visit, and pays dues against it each Judgment. So when “Hunters” closes out someone’s name, it means more than a job. It means oversight, obligation, and a record that follows them.

The second is the Artificers’ Guild, which works less like a brotherhood of adventurers and more like a certification office. Training at the Academy isn’t enough. A graduate can’t legally practice until they join the Guild and serve as an apprentice under an assigned master, then reach journeyman rank, which certifies them to work on their own, whether by staying on with their master or opening a workshop of their own. Most Artificers don’t carry the Guild’s name, though. Their last part is usually their own workshop or their master’s, and only those who work directly for the Guild are named “Artificers.” Still, the Guild’s certification is what lets an Artificer practice at all, and in a city where everyone needs a local Artificer, that trust is worth a great deal.

Then there are those with no faction at all, the Freelancers. Someone like Olana Freelancer carries only two parts to her name, and the missing third says as much as any guild could. A Freelancer answers to no organization. That can mean independence, or a sense of not quite belonging, or simply a life that doesn’t fit neatly into anyone’s ledger. Freelancers aren’t outcasts, but their name announces, to everyone they meet, that no one stands behind them.

And that’s the quiet truth of names in Bytorsskug. They’re never just labels. They’re a running account of where you stand: what you do, who claims you, and how far you’ve come.

Come along for the ride

That’s the lay of the land, or at least the lay of the language. The Starsong, a built language shaped so that many kinds of mouths can share it. Names that work like résumés and change when your work does. And Myligasti, the tower tongue, which lives on artifacts rather than on maps.

There’s a lot more to come. The Starsong keeps growing on my desk, the naming system keeps raising new questions, and the inscriptions are slowly giving up their shapes. If you love worldbuilding, conlangs, or just the idea of a quiet workshop full of strange objects, I’d love for you to follow along here on awindytree.quest. (This is also the world where Artifice, AWT’s first game, is set.) Tell us what you’d name yourself, primary skill and all. Freelancers welcome.

Until next time, keep your vowels short and your stress up front.

— Idun