"Yes. Exactly." And then, switching languages - "Yes. Exactly."

Emily smiles and nods and picks up a piece of paper and starts studying the words of his language on it.

Ashras will be delighted to help!

This will be helpful!

Ashras is a helpful person.

And language tutoring is a particularly helpful thing to be helpful at, right now, Edie would like in on this please.

All are welcome in Ashras Kevarsin's impromptu language school!

(At some point he takes an aside to mention that the Ceirene call the language Ceirene and the Aluvai call it Aluvai and there is no neutral term and it's a bit silly. Technically there are two different dialects but they overlap to the point where calling them separate languages would also be silly.)

...The outside of the planet is called Ceir, right, and the inside Aluvanna? Does the planet as a whole have a name?

Yes, it's called Suranse. It happens to be really awkward to transform into a demonym, and all the plausible ways of doing so turn out differently in the two dialects.

That is in retrospect unsurprising. Although it is sort of surprising that the whole planet has only one language.

There's at least a couple dozen more, scattered around, but nearly everyone speaks the main language as well as their local one.

Huh. Does he know how that happened, historically?

Nope, if you go back far enough you start getting lost records, and the oldest winged ones only go back about five thousand years which isn't nearly enough.

"People with wings live thousands of years?"

"Winged ones live until killed."

"How do winged ones happen?"

...this is a complicated explanation but he's pretty sure he can manage it...

Okay so, it's a mental state, and it's a little different for everyone but the pervading theme is a sense of accomplishment, and once you have experienced the correct flavour of that mental state for you personally, you get your wings, and then you have wings and a Sphere and - does he have to explain Spheres, he probably has to explain Spheres.

He totally has to explain Spheres!

"A Sphere is a place that's yours and yours alone, and you can make a portal to it - like a door," he gestures at the door, "from anywhere you are, and they start out about as big as a big house but they get bigger slowly over time, the king's is huge. It's rude to walk into someone's Sphere uninvited. Dead people's Spheres stop growing..."

"Huh. Well, as you've no doubt guessed, we don't have winged ones back home. Our recorded history goes back...a bit more than five thousand years, I think, but that's with archaeology helping. It's...surprising...if you've had the same language for five thousand years."

"'Archaeology'?"

"Digging really, really old stuff out of the ground and studying it to figure stuff out about the people who used it."

"...Huh. We don't really do that."

"Your ground works differently than ours. And there's less of it."

He laughs. "Yeah."