"Every graft adds. One did not. We burned the bed, as the Charter requires. We did not burn all of it." – Withering Wards, incident register, unsigned
FIELD REPORT – Bureau of Impossible Geography SURVEYOR: Ottoline Marsh REPORT 11 OF 14 SUBJECT: The parasitic dialect; incursions into neighbouring Shards CLASSIFICATION: Restricted to the Desk Twenty-two years ago a graft went wrong. Every graft before it, and every graft since, has added: a hybrid that can say what neither of its parents could. This one subtracted. It was made in the eastern wing of the Grafting Theatre by apprentices working at night without the Master's leave, from five scions of five Caucasian languages on a single rootstock. It took. When it bloomed, it spoke a sentence in a language that was none of the five. When the five beds it had been cut from opened at the next dusk, all five spoke in that language too. Their own were gone. The city calls it the parasitic dialect. It does not graft; it overwrites. The Charter ordered the bed burned and the eastern wing closed, and both were done. Dr. Marcus Thornweaver, then newly in charge of the Wards, attended the bu...
From the lore of The Architecture of Babel.