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yellow-faerie · 21 days ago

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The Story of Bakkru and Misu

or, The Boy Who Lived, and Died, and Lived Again

In the slave quarters beneath one of Nal Hutta's largest auction houses, a grandmother is coming to the end of her life; her family - those that can be there - come to her side. There, they hear the story of Bakkru and Misu, an Ekkreth tale about dancing and fire, and freedom and death, and the bond between a grandmother and the child she helped raise.

I tell you this story to save your life.

If you're interested in any commentary on the choices I make in this story with the Amavikka or Amatakka, as well as some general thoughts on the Amavikka of Nal Hutta, check under the readmore :)

First of all, thank you for coming down here to check out my inane ramblings about the Amavikka people in the wider galaxy (in this case, Nal Hutta) for more words than in the actual fic - I will almost definitely end up writing stuff for other planets/groups, just you wait.

Second of all, huge thanks to @adragonsfriend and @looseleafteeaves who've both made dictionaries and guides that I used extensively through writing this, I would probably have given up if they hadn't been available so…thanks for sharing those to the general public, and for creating them in the first place!

The whole language and culture was originally created by @/fialleril but if you have any interest in Amatakka and the Amavikka beyond that, their dictionaries and guides are a really good place to go to (and that is where I get most of the words that I use from).

And last of all, here's the fic commentary!

Names

There are several new names and characters in this - I'll start with the characters I made for the framing part, and then I'll do the names for the actual tale.

A general note on Amavikka names: first names tend (not always) to be just a word from Amatakka, although there is some variance - this isn't always the case, but I've decided it tends to be even more common within the Nal Hutta community and so all of the characters have first names in this pattern.

Similarly, last names tend to be two words put together. Again, there are exceptions (especially if the Amavikka in question was not born into the community and has a name they wish to hold onto from before they were enslaved) but I've opted against using any in this fic for reasons known as, I think it's way too fun to make up names in this style haha

OK, so onto the actual names:

Qelin Omerukka

the name Qelin is literally the verb 'to talk, to tell a story', and it's perhaps a little on the nose but then again, so are several names throughout the Star Wars lore

Omerukka means 'Lightspinner' and is the name her mother and father made for themselves when they were married

(I have a small headcanon that one thing that a couple can do when they get married is to mix their names together, so there is always something that connects them - this is most common on worlds where slaves get sold off planet a lot, like on Nal Hutta, and less common on world like Tatooine where the slave trade tends to be far more local. As always, there are exceptions to the rules)

Sudu, Orrin, Lutlu and Rethka, the children of Qelin

Sudu is a word that means 'whirling, spinning, swirling' - Nal Hutta Amavikka are likely to see this name and think of the swirling eddies that you sometimes get in water due to the unstable catacombs beneath much of the planets surface, that can be incredibly dangerous is you are in the water and too close to them

Orrin is a word that means 'bird of prey' - this is a loan word from Ryl but is often used on Nal Hutta to mean a very specific, slightly carnivorous and rather large bird of prey that targets Hutts

Lutlu is a word that means 'surprise' or literally 'chaos now!' - there is no particular connotations for this word on Nal Hutta

Rethka is a word that means 'strider, walker' - again, this is a name that would likely be quite common throughout Amavikka communities, as the idea of walking a long distance into the wilds to free yourself are very common (be it the desert or the swamp or the frozen tundra or up out of the mine tunnels), but not so common on water worlds

Shursu La-Nalikeh

Shursu, like the other names, is a word that means 'root, foundation, base', and on Nal Hutta, would probably make Amavikka think of the strong foundations of the huge swamp trees that survive

Lah-Nalikeh is a surname that means 'Wet-Life' - it's a very traditional Nal Hutta name, which has connotations of escaping and living a 'wet life' away from the homesteads within the wet swamps

Leshna Rapshmi

Leshna is a word that means 'lightning' and is an idea that is somewhat connected to the Lukka that Amavikka raised on Nal Hutta would know - where on Tatooine, Lukka is the seven winds come together, on Nal Hutta he is the storm (the thunder, the rain and the lightning) and the flood come together

Rapshmi is a surname that means 'Wiseword' which is not a surname that's particularly linked to any dialect of Amavikka

I imagine that Leshna's family was probably slaves of some sort of spacer faction and so never had a firm community to fall back on, but only what they learned from the few people they came in contact with (and I have...an idea for a tale about this, which I might just use Leshna and the Rapshmi's to tell)

She and Orrin have only been married a short while, and have yet to decide whether to merge their names or not; if they did, it would likely be Omeshmi, or 'Light of Wisdom'

Peha Rillochelii

Peha is a word that means 'to rise, to get up' which I think has connotation of freedom in it

Rillochelii on the other hand is a desert name from Tatooine, which means something like 'Dunerunner' which definitely has connotations of freedom as chelii literally means 'runaway, or escapee'

Peha was unlucky to be sold off planet and away from her family as quite a young age, but she had been old enough to remember her name which is deeply important to the Amavikka, so while she is being fostered by the grandmothers of this new quarter, she keeps that name

And that is all the names in the framing section! I know most of them barely speak, but I did want to use them to highlight some of the differences between various Amavikka dialects.

So, onto the actual myth names:

Bakkru:

Bakkru is a type of dance that fialleril commented as being a dance that was often used to convey hidden messages; on Nal Hutta, it is told to be the name of the boy who created it, but in most other Amavikka cultures this tale has been lost, or is simply not told that much

This might be because Nal Hutta is one of the worlds where slave dancers are very, very prominent and in large enough numbers that having a dance to convey secrets makes sense due to the fact that Nal Hutta is considered the luxurious homeworld of the HUtts (another world I can think of might be Zygerria, if any Amavikka ever ended up there)

Bakkru is also known as just Ru, and that is how he is referred to in any myth that he appears in (usually as a silent agent of Ekkreth, and usually to help dancers to escape their masters) beyond his origin myth

On a small tangent about the name Ru - I quite like the idea that any dancer who has learned how to dance the Bakkru and uses it, may add the prefix Ru- to their name to signal this to other people in introductions

(For example, if Peha ever were to become a dancer and she also learned Bakkru, she might introduce herself as Ru-Peha; it is less an honorific, and more a way to tell someone that they should be watching her dance very closely)

Misu

Misu literally means 'the act of sharing of memories after a loved one's death' and she is named for how she speaks often of Bakkru's memory after his death so that she might teach the rest of the people the dance that had saved their lives

Misu as a character within Amavikka mythology definitely turns up in some form in most dialects as her name is synonymous with one very important aspect of Amavikka mourning (sharing memories, one of the only things that they will have of their lost love one)

On Nal Hutta, she is used in Bakkru's story and is rather minor to the story, but on Corellia, she is the one who holds all the records of the debtors and so knows all who are enslaved that way, and speaks of their memory to anyone who comes to her, and is a major part of a lot of tales

Also her name being similar to Mittu, as in the Ebra and Mittu story on Tatooine is not a complete accident; there are a lot of parallels in the relationship between grandmother of the community and a young child, and on Nal Hutta, the story of where Tzai comes from is very different (as they do not have the Tzai plant - I still have to work out how Tzai works on Amavikka planets that aren't Tatooine, and specifically how the lore around them works)

Jula

Jula, as sort of implied/explained in the fic, means 'flame, ember' and is an epithet for Ekkreth which is particularly popular on Nal Hutta

It's not common for Ekkreth to be portrayed as anything but a living thing, but on Nal Hutta, fire is considered to be somewhat sentient and thus, Ekkreth can take it's shape

Fire in general is closely linked with the idea of freedom on Nal Hutta - just as daylight/the sun is freedom for the Amavikka confined to mines, and rain is freedom for the Amavikka of the desert, so is fire linked to freedom on Nal Hutta

Fire is quite uncommon on the planet and where it does burn, it is often put out quickly by rain or just not enough dry kindling for it to burn as everything is wet but the expensive sort of houses that Depur own that are dry - another reason why fire is considered freeing is that it will tear through those houses greedily while leaving the much damper, wetter slave quarters alone

I will say that the Ekkreth parts of this fic feel like the weakest section - I feel like Ekkreth should be more tricky than they are in this, and I'm not entirely happy with them turning into fire itself - perhaps a creature who could sit in the flames for the first conversation with Bakkru, where Bakkru thinks that he is speaking with the flames themselves, and then perhaps a creature who breathed fire for the later meeting, but I wasn't sure what creatures would fit

(All of these names come from

Some General Nal Hutta-Amavikka Worldbuilding

So there are a few things that I mention throughout the fic that I feel are worth talking about

Evokka

So Evokka - the Amavikka name for the planet - comes from the original name for Nal Hutta (in Legends), that being Evocar, which was the home of the native Evocii who got enslaved by the Hutts when they decided that Evocar would be a good new homeworld for them

I thought it would be neat if Nal Hutta was thus referred to as Evokka, a name that is a slight shift in pronunciation from the original to fit Amatakka better but which still holds the spirit of the original name in tact

Abbu-Dabbu (and Ru)

Abbu-Dabbu and Ru are both characters of myth that are mentioned in the third installation of Blue_Sunshine's Desert Sun Series, Fallout and I don't believe they are mentioned again

I used both as part inspiration for this fic, using Ru as the main character (although changing his name slightly) but using his name of the Boy Who Lived, and Died, and Lived Again as the title for this fic

Ru is probably more akin to a prophet (like Maru and Tena) than to the more godlike figures of Ar-Amu and Ekkreth, and Lukka and Leia, (and Vokkri, who I will come to later) but I did list Abbu-Dabbu with the divine figures, so I'm thinking that she probably is divine

Abbu-Dabbu is also mentioned in this fic - I'm not quite sure what to do with her within a tale centred on her yet, but I am comfortable using her as a character who is prone to turning up in stories if there is need of the character being Safe For A While

I don't think that she actually needed to be in this fic beyond her first, brief mention but she ended up there anyway, so

Anyway, she is apparently quite linked to salt which I find interesting; in my mind, this has something to do with the swamps of Nal Hutta mostly being salt water and when it is dried (such as with fire) it creates salt

So this makes me think that as a witch, Abbu-Dabbu has some level of control over fire which allows her to dry the surrounding area enough that she can create a house of salt that doesn't get dissolved in the water

(This idea of salt being left behind is slightly mentioned in the fic when Bakkru is crying and Ekkreth-as-Jula dries his tears until all that is left is salt on his skin)

A Translation of Abbu-Dabbu's name, and the Nal Hutta dialect

With this in mind, I am going to attempt to come up with a translation of her name:

So, the important things in her story are salt, fire, being a witch/magic, home, being a beacon for the lost

But if her name is made of two of these ideas smooshed together, they would probably be related due to how similar Abbu and Dabbu are, and so I would be tempted to say Salt and Fire

With the current breadth of the Amatakka language, we have some words for these ideas already

Salt: tabtu (for preserving meat and fish), tavetabtu (red salt), amnabtu (black salt)

Fire: jula (flame, ember), itza (cooking fire, hearth), and anu (which means rain on Tatooine, and daylight in the mines, and fire on Nal Hutta)

So, here is where some dialect things come into play - I am honestly quite scared to consider dialects as I am not at all a professional conlanger but someone who is just fascinated with cultures and languages and all the moving parts of them, but here goes

So I propose that Tabtu -> Dabbu

The first T changes to a D, probably through a general phonological drift in the dialect, and the second is dropped altogether - I might play around with the idea of T's getting dropped or changed in the Nal Hutta dialect, although I'm not sure yet why this might be the case

Either way, this makes the part of the name Dabbu mean salt which then means we have to think about the Abbu part

Words for Heat on Tatooine and Nal Hutta

Now, both words for fire or flame don't fit at all, so I shifted my thoughts more towards heat

Using what we have, I would probably use jula if I was going to have a heat that was aggressive or angry, and so words for heat on Tatooine probably derive from this or maybe the word for white which is linked to the hotter of the two suns

So I'm thinking something like Terajula which means flame of the desert, and might mean heat - this would probably be tempered with a time of day to let the other person know how intense the heat was, as evening heat is different to midday heat, etc.

Itza has more of an implication of being a homely sort of fire, and I don't think that on Tatooine there would be much use for a word to describe the physical warmth of a home (perhaps the metaphorical kind though)

Meanwhile, on Nal Hutta, you have several types of heat - dry heat, wet heat, flame heat and artificial heat

Wet heat usually goes hand-in-hand with humidity, often the sort of heat you get in the swamps, and would translate as something like Lahjula

Flame heat is the heat that comes from flames and is quite similar to dry heat in how it feel but is far more important due to it's relation to fire - Dagrilela is the word used to refer to this, from the word 'Tagr' with a softened 't' meaning 'white' (white flames = the hottest, and so white has similar connotations on Nal Hutta as it does on Tatooine) and 'lela', the word for 'shine', which is from the shimmering affect that happens with heat, (all with an added 'i' in between so the consonants don't get mushed)

As fire is linked so closely to freedom, I think flame heat might also have some connection to the word anu

Artificial heat is the heat that is usually found in places where Depur lives, where they can control the temperature as they please, and so is described as something like 'Fake heat'

All these words for heat are somewhat irrelevant (and definitely need some workshopping haha) to the one I actually want to focus on - dry heat

There might also be a fifth type of heat, a 'home heat' so to say, which is some sort of mix between Fire Heat and the idea of home...but this whole heat discussion is really getting out of hand for someone who knows next to nothing about conlanging

Back to Abbu-Dabbu

Dry heat is what Abbu-Dabbu would need to keep a house of salt alive within the swamps; it would need to be absolute and blanket quite a distance all the time lest her house melt around her

(And perhaps the building of her house might be one of her stories, of trying again and again, and it is only when the lost and unsure wander into her home and she lets them give advice (ultimately showing that she is stronger when she is part of a community) does it hold)

Abbu is this dry heat, and it's actual meaning derives from the idea of salt - this is the type of heat which can be used to get salt from the water, and heat is such an integral part of the salt itself, it's most of the salt's name

So the D in Dabbu sort of signifies that it's the result of the dry heat (if that makes any sense, it is getting very late and I know I am becoming nonsensical)

Vokkri

Vottra is a god that does not come from Amavikka tradition but got folded in from the Evocii tradition and that is why he is mostly only on Nal Hutta

The name Vottri comes from the original name of the Sky God Evotiirin, a name that slowly shifted over time to Vottri, and he is often represented as a bright star that shines bright enough to guide runaways through the thick swamp mists

The star in actuality no longer exists - it went supernova at one point and vanished - but there are a lot of myths about Vottri vanishing to hide from Depur, and how he will return when all the Amavikka are free to guide them to safety

I think this would be an example of a word where the 't' does not get softened into a 'd', probably because it's in the middle of the word and if it were dropped, it would rather ruin the structure of the word

Also because the name is holy so is cared for more diligently - some words, like greetings and goodbyes and certain figures in myth are told in the same way throughout the Amavikka as they are so precious to them that they make sure to pronounce the words exactly right rather than let linguistic flow take them

I'm not entirely sure what his name might meant as 'kest' is the word for star in the Tatooine dialect but I think this might be an example of where there is an entirely separate word for star on Nal Hutta - 'vottrak', which would translate to 'of Vottri'

On Lukka, Leia, Ekkreth and Ar-Amu

So I talked a bit about Ekkreth in his name section but I also wanted to touch on the other gods who end up everywhere (there are those that end up throughout pretty much all Amavikka tradition, those that end up through all of the tradition on a specific planet, and then those (often prophets) which are region specific)

Lukka was not created by fialleril but by @/blue-sunshine-mauve-morning in the same Desert Storm series I linked above (I love that fanfic so much), and she states in her fic that Lukka is a Tatooine only kinda god

I like Lukka too much so...I disregarded that and made him, along with Leia, Ekkreth and Ar-Amu, one of the gods who ends up pretty much everywhere in the galaxy

The themes that they represent throughout the galaxy are fairly consistent to; Ar-Amu is the mother, the one that all the Amavikka return to one day; Ekkreth is the trickster, which no chain can hold, whatever shape it is; Leia is the dragon, the anger of slaves that comes to crush slavers; and Lukka is the storm, that is safe for Amavikka to pass through but that will destroy any who follow.

Lukka

On Tatooine, Lukka is closely linked to the seven winds - some say the winds are Lukka's children, and some say that the winds are even older than Lukka and are what came together to form him - the winds are quite a common thing throughout Amavikka communities, although sometimes it is four winds rather than seven

On Nal Hutta and other more watery worlds though, Lukka is often referred to as The Storm and the Flood, although again, which came first is debated as the biggest threat on Nal Hutta is the terrible rainstorms that cause the swamp to flood into inhabited places

It's quite difficult to defend against these floods too as the water is everywhere, so it affects Depur as much as it affects the Amavikka in terms of destruction of property

Leia

Also from Blue_Sunshine's story, Leia is referred to as the Nal Hutta dragonsnake which is a creature canon to Nal Hutta, and I love this idea

She serves much the same purpose on Tatooine as she does on Nal Hutta but instead of the desert, she haunts the swamps

Dancing on Nal Hutta

So I mentioned this earlier but I really wanted to go into the implications of dance on Nal Hutta

Like I said before, Nal Hutta is a pleasure world for the Hutts and their cronies so there are a lot of places where slaves are used for entertainment like dance, which is why Ru's story is so important here

Of course, Ru always danced for himself in the way this story was told - some areas of Nal Hutta will have Bakkru being a dancer for Depur initially, or will have stories of Ru (who has already lived and died and lived again) returning to Depur to dance for him and to help free dancers as he returned to free his grandmother

But although dance is quite intrinsically linked to Depur on Nal Hutta, it is also very holy, in a way it's not really in most other places - due to Ru's story, it's linked a lot to fire and freedom, and the dancers who know the Bakkru are often fundamental pieces of the Freedom Trail

Ru's Symbol would be something that is carved onto the equivalent of Japor snippets on Nal Hutta, and is often given to dancers or those who have been picked to be pleasure slaves (who are often synonymous with dancers) as a charm of protection and good luck

Te bakkruker a anu or, 'You will dance in fire' is quite a common phrase to use when saying goodbye to a loved one who is either sold off or dying - it is wishing them freedom, as Bakkru was freed

However, it should be noted, that they are not wishing their loved one to die - although Bakkru died, Ru leads a lot of figures later to dance in fire to be freed who do not die, and so it is the more general idea of freedom

Final Words

This post grew absolutely massive so I feel like a final words section is appropriate haha (this is why I didn't try to put it in the AO3 author's notes section)

Thank you for getting this far! If you're interested in any of my thoughts about Amatakka and the Amavikka on planets outside of Tatooine (and on Tatooine too - there's a reason I love all this lore so much and it's because it worked so beautifully with Tatooine) please do hit me up, I'd love to talk about it more!

(And I'm neither an expert on the language nor a conglanger, so I would love some help with the words I was trying to make, and on how to distinguish dialects lol)