At first he sought to teach them a language, but their minds were too lazy and they could not easily learn. However, the Oanthiul could mimic sounds they heard and parrot them back, so the Red God opened their minds and taught them to take names for themselves. This they did, but they as often mimicked the names of their fathers and mothers, for these they readily understood and heard often. All this mimicry made their language, if it could be called such, confusing and incomprehensible to any but the most clever. The people learned to mimic with more than just their voice, but learned to change the shape of their bodies and reorder their minds.
The child of an Oanthuil was born with the memories of the father and thus in some respects the Oanthuil lived forever, though the memories blurred with time and were supplanted by new memories so that the father became entangled with the son. The women of the Oanthuil were rare, but born with the full range of the mother’s memories and often the fathers and with this they wielded great power over their people.
All this was to Ornduhl’s design, but it was a design filled with malice and his words unlocked the lazy minds of the Oanthuil and enhanced their natural proclivities toward being clever and merciless, so that that people became powerful without wisdom and strong without remorse. And Ornduhl was proud of what he had wrought, for he saw in them a poison to men of whom he had only distant rumor. He left them to their own devices.
Excerpt from Shades of the Red God, A Tale of Two Worlds
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