Lexicon:Modern/Oelwy

Oelwy
Stage	Modern CLT
Pronunciation	/ˈɔɪl.wɪ/
Part of speech	Noun
Etymology	full form Oelwy Moek (freedom mushroom)
Related words	Oelwy Moek, Livrtei, Moeka

Oelwy — the Liberty Cap. A small wild mushroom, hallucinogenic, and the means by which an otherworld arrival acquires the Tongue.

Notes

Grows wild across the Known World and most abundantly in Eldershore’s heat and wet. It has never been successfully cultivated. Every city has tried, several have tried repeatedly, and the attempts are recorded and unremarkable — a good many wild things refuse the field, and no one finds it stranger in the Oelwy than in anything else. In the earliest years its use was constant, since every person brought into the world arrived without a word of the Tongue and the Oelwy was how they got one. That is no longer so. Everyone now living was born speaking it, and arrivals come perhaps a handful in a year. The Oelwy is still what is given to them, and for that handful it remains the most important thing in the world. For everyone else it is a hallucinogen. Taken recreationally in every city-state, tolerated in most, and taken with some ceremony in Stormharbor and Eldershore where the traditions around it are old. Its medical uses are few and are what one would expect of such a thing: it is given for certain disorders of the mind, and physicians disagree about how much good it does. Gathered rather than grown, and priced accordingly. The trade is small, seasonal, and entirely legitimate.