This was not unusual. They sat by the water occasionally — not for any particular reason, in the way that people who are comfortable with each other sometimes end up somewhere without having decided to go there.
Emmet picked up a stick.
He looked at it for a moment.
Then he wrote in the dirt.
G - H - O - T - I
Dennis looked at it.
"Is that a word?"
"It is."
"What does it mean?"
Emmet set down the stick.
"Say the 'gh' the way you say it in 'enough.' "
Dennis frowned. That took a bit of thinking. "F."
"Yes. Now say the 'o' the way you say it in 'women.' "
Dennis hesitated. These were hard. "...that's an 'i' sound. Right?"
"Yes. Now say the 'ti' the way you say it in 'nation.' "
That proved it. This was a test. This was a word Dennis had to really really think about. Eventually, Dennis's mouth moved.
A pause.
A longer pause.
"...sh?"
He looked at Emmet, uncertain. This was a hard word.
He looked at the word in the dirt and thought hard about the answer.
He looked back at Emmet, who was smiling and nodding kindly.
Dennis breathed a sigh he didn't know he was holding. His chest felt flappy. He'd got it right. Emmet said, "Now lets put those sounds together", and gently helped Dennis connect the strange sounds, one at a time.
"That's —" Dennis was absolutely certain his answer was wrong. There was nothing right about it even though the word math added up.
Emmet smiled. "Fish."
"THAT'S ...FISH!!?" Dennis was appalled.
"Yes."
"THAT SPELLS FISH? Like F-I-S-H, the thing you eat with chips and ketchup? Another way to spell it?"
"Technically."
Dennis stared at the word in the dirt, discombobulated. He'd learned that word, too. It seemed the right fit for this moment.
Dennis stared at it for a long time.
"That's the stupidest thing I've ever —" he stopped. "And I once built a toilet luge."
Emmet said nothing. His expression did the thing it did when he was waiting for Dennis to realise something.
Dennis looked at the word again.
He followed the letters slowly. This is hard when you're still learning the shape of things.
"Gho..."
He stopped.
Something shifted.
"Gho... ghost says go. with the secret 'h' "
He looked at Emmet. The cogs were ticking behind his eyes, the fragments floating together to make something wonderful.
"GHO IS GO."
He looked at the word. Fidgeted. Here it came.
He looked at the water. More fidgeting. Bouncing a little on the tree trunk. Here it came.
The grin arrived. The full one. Slow and then all at once, the way things are sometimes. The one that made his ears wiggle, and lit up the world around him.
"Go Fish."
He looked at Emmet. Proud of his joke. Unsure, though. He wasn't completely sure the pieces had joined together right. He thought they had. Maybe.
"GO FISH. That's GO FISH."
Emmet's smile had crow's feet. The ones that came with his face. The ones that could be thirty or maybe a thousand years old.
"Yes," he said. "It is."
Dennis laughed. What a wonderful sound. Emmet's crows feet deepened, his smile wide. He'd got it. Really got it.
They stamped the word out together.
Into the mud. Gone.
Solas observed this from Emmet's pocket with the specific expression of a duck who has seen everything and is impressed by none of it. The little quack was almost a laugh of a quack.
The language had been doing it the whole time.
Finding its own way to the sound. Ignoring the official route. Arriving through whatever path was available, rules or no rules, sense or no sense.
English didn't follow the rules.
It just got there first and started marking other people wrong.
Dennis had always known this, in the way he knew things — not through reading it, not through being told, but through living on the wrong side of it long enough to recognise the shape of the injustice.
He'd just never had the word for it.
He looked at where GHOTI had been.
Just mud now. And water. And a stick.
"Emmet?"
"Mmm?"
"The language is a bit like me."
Emmet looked at the water.
Crow's feet. Deep. The way they caused grooves only lightbulb moments showed.
"The language," he said, "has always been a bit like you."
They sat by the water for a while longer.
Not for any particular reason.
The way people do, sometimes, when something has just been set down that needed setting down.