I am now all but certain that our new pale-aelv companion, Isha, speaks the tongue of the ancients. A’lárian. I have heard her murmur it to herself while awake and slip into it in her sleep, and the moment I listened closely, the pattern was unmistakable: its sounds and structures lie beneath both high-aelvar and wood-aelvar speech like buried roots. If A’lárian is the progenitor of our languages, then were the ancients themselves pale-aelvar, or something so close as to be indistinguishable? And if that is true, how did our kind change so profoundly, in body and custom, across the hundred millennia since the Binding?
— from the research notes of Zyr’Magi Tes’Lothen, “Magi the Blade”, high-aelv scholar, mage, and swordsman
