"Between the essence / And the descent / Falls the Shadow" - T.S. Eliot, The Hollow Men
The apprentice gardeners' illicit experiments take place in the abandoned eastern wing of the Grafting Theatre, where the copper oxidation has grown thick enough to muffle unauthorized phonemic emissions. Their techniques draw on forbidden botanical principles: splicing Proto-Slavic morphemes onto Mesopotamian root structures, grafting Aboriginal dreamtime-tenses into Linear A syntax trees. Sylvia Glossspinner, lead acoustician, has documented several successful hybridizations despite their official impossibility. Her field notes describe a particularly vigorous specimen that appears to be a fusion of Ancient Greek and extinct Caucasian dialects, producing philosophical propositions that could never have existed in either root language. When it blooms, it speaks in paradoxes that alter the local curvature of semantic space. The Withering Wards have reported increasing instances of [REDACTED] as hybrid specimens begin manifesting properties of quantum superposition — simultaneously ex...
From the lore of The Architecture of Babel.