Example Sentences

by Rudi Dornemann

Rascant
Another Sunday promenade in spite of the heat, and Lill’s collar rubbed rascant lines in the skin behind her ears.

Hopplag
By the frost-stained fountain, amid the clatter of the icicle chimes, she heard him before she saw him, and he was saying, “Nevermind what he charged, he tensioned up the hopplag and the gears haven’t slipped since.” He had a striped coat, green-tinted googles, and an asymmetrical grin.

Thurtle
She turned to see him astride a blue metal ornithoptopede, chatting with another rider. He tipped his hat as she passed and she resolved to find some pretext for conversation on her next circuit of the slippery tile-walk. But he and his friend were gone by the time she returned. That thurtling in the treetops might have been them.

Stoce
She got herself a cup of herb-flecked ice so she could loiter and watch. She chipped away with the tiny wooden spoon the vendor had given her. It was stoce. She hated stoce. She ate the whole thing, but he didn’t come back.

Ullivaria
She walked home the long way, and found grim amusement in the most neglected corner of the sculpture garden, where the statues of a quartet of primly-posed town fathers were draped with an exuberance of flowering ullivaria. She thought she saw cracks in the stone under the tendrils’ coils.

Fetzbalk
Back home, she cut silhouettes out of cheap fetzbalk, sigils that would represent the day’s events when she pasted them in her diary.

Widensh
When the light grew too dim for the fine cutting, she laid the book aside. Out the window, the sky above the courtyard was as widensh as she felt.

From An Ancient Tablet, With Successive Historical Notations (Translated)

by Luc Reid

With the last gleam of the wolf’s eye[14] will fall the night[1].

[1] Robert of Tours speaks of this fragment being borne from the tomb of king Vraghur II of the Cirroghs, born in the 714th year before Our Lord, whose armor was carved into the likeness of a wolf[7], a prophecy of the fall of the Cirroghs at the proud king’s passing.[2] (Jacques Etablant, 1310)

[2] Though the fragment be Cirroghic[3], no death of kings did it fortell but the death of us all, in the Plague[4] God hath wrought upon us, the weak and the strong alike. So show the French their putrid ignorance. (John of Hampdenmontfordshire, 1351)

[3] Be it Cirroghic? And who the Cirroghs, pray?[5] Though long extolled as paragons of ferocity, the learned man in modern days misdoubts that ever such men walked the earth.[6] (Albert Burlowe, 1605)

[4] Good John, were thou but mistaken of the nature of the thing, yet thou art mistaken only of the year! Thus God doth visit on us finally the last and worst plague, and we perish like (illegible) (author unknown, London, 1666)

[5] The Cirroghs were a race of bean farmers residing in the valley of Dziban, though they were not known to write with the Old Dazibanic script in which the table is inscribed. Yet they did exist! (Caleb Blackford, 1884)

[6] Oh? Then why is it that Vraghur II’s breastplate recently surfaced during excavations in Dziban?[8] (Blackford, 1884)

[7] But there was no wolf on it, so we doubt this tablet to have referred to Vraghur II[9]. (Blackford, 1884)

[8] Never mind. The breastplate, it appears, was a hoax. (Blackford, 1886)

[9] An excellent conclusion, as the Cirroghs were slaughtered to the last man[10] in the reign of Vraghur I. (Wolfgang Krunt, 1928)

[10] A 1952 excavation reveals evidence of surviving Cirroghs in Albania, however.[11] (Dr. Janice Pitui, 1973)

[11] Which doesn’t prove[12] it’s Cirroghic. (Dr. Walter Mordartur, 1974)

[12] Nothing in science is proven[13], as the occasional buffoon may forget (Pitui, 1974)

[13] But we talked about it a lot and decided it probably wasn’t Cirroghic anyway (Dr. Janice Pitui-Mordartur, 1976)

[14] A mistranslation; recently reviewed and retranslated as “With the last gleam of the sunset, will fall the night.” Appears to be an ancient snippet of amateur poetry. (Andre Hampden Etablant, 2017)