1. To kill a language, you must first rip it from living throats. Don't look so askance; you knew it already. The dead can't speak unless called and the only way to prevent our enemies calling upon their own hordes of dead ancestors is to strip their path.
So go on. Find a young speaker, soft and sure, charismatic. Lure him in with promises, and when he opens his mouth, push your fingers in. Two at first, to part the lips. The third should go in gently as he laps.
Push it in. Press your fingers down on his tongue. He might revolt at first; he might not. You'll never know how many times he's done this before. Anyway, push it in until you touch the throat. Until he starts to scream.
2. Now, comes the difficult part. You cannot let the scream escape. Catch it carefully between two fingers like a scissor (Now, see why three are necessary? The third needs to press down on the tongue) Pull it out. First will emerge your hand, like a reverse time-lapse, covered in spit and blood and vomit. Between your fingers will be the primal scream, the sound of death and desire, intermingled.
Now, pull him up with your other hand. Up. Kiss him. Does he moan against you? Good. Now grip his cock and squeeze it. Until it hurts. He doesn’t know how to scream. He can’t scream. Not when you are holding it. Break the scream between your fingers, let it go to dust. Now, scream into his mouth. Give it as he hungrily devours it. Teach him how to scream with every press and touch, and teach him in your language, with your tongue, until he is hoarse.
“But,” you ask, “Isn’t this cruel?”
My sweet child, one I begot as a curse, don’t you see the world is cruel? Cruelty is the way of life, the way of ruling. To rule over another is not a matter of moral superiority; forget that gibberish they teach you, no child of mine will live in illusions. To rule, it only matters to be cruel; the blade doesn’t care who draws it first, only who drives it in deeper. There is no other way; choose cruelty or suffer it.
3. The sound of death is silence. One never notices how many noises the body makes; from the imperceptible sweep of lashes moving from the brow and cheek to the pounding of blood, the rasp of breath, in and out, in and out, in and out. Sit still, do not move, not an inch. Try to catch all the resonant sounds your body makes, just because you are alive. This, too, is language. This, too, you must kill.
4. Magic is language, a glass, a color, a shade. There are words for forgetting, ones you can use to induce loss of memory. But while the mind forgets, the body is a careful traitor; you can strip away the notes to a melody from your charge’s mind, render notations useless, but when he brings his fingers to string, they remember to play. This you can’t erase, so you must subjugate. Melodies are resilient, words are not. Divorce their words from meaning, until all you hear is gibberish.
Let him sing now, and his people only hear a pleasant sound, not knowing why the ache of sadness pulls their heartstrings tight. Let the drums beat into the night, let them dance into the fire. Do not outlaw music but forbid storytelling; forbid remembrance.
5. Softly, softly, you must do it. A loud sword demands sacrifice. Be the knife hidden in a braid, sliding under translucent skin into the void afterwards.
6. The ancestral memories are adamant; one can’t kill what’s already dead, so take away comprehension. The ghosts only respond to commands they understand and necromancy is useless if language has evolved past limit. Force its evolution past memory, let none remember what words induced fury.
7. Language is a lens, its confines defining your understanding of life. There are several nuanced ones out there, where an intonation changes meaning, principles of soft subtlety and sweeping grace, but all of them bend to propagation. You must teach them that these tongues are inferior, that by might, yours stands strong and its right is to spread through their villages, like wildfire. Let the boy of yours ascend, like a star to the sky. Let them watch, all because of his tongue; all because he's yours.
8. Let them forget the way they thought, let the necromantic paths of plea, wisdom, and vice close on their own. Generations will pass, each holding their tongue looser than the other, until they are all yours.
9. But one day, you will hear a garden child sing a rhyme he considers nonsense but you, you with no right to know except the right of the thief, you will know it is a lament.
Weep for your crimes, weep for mine.
Sex, violence, colonialism, imperialism
