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Caleb is bad at accents, and everyone knows it. What they don’t realize is that this didn’t used to be the case. Before Vergessen, before Eadwulf’s rocks, before his own failure ground him into someone too terrible for words, he had been good at accents—at least, in Zemnian. Deutsch or Tietsch, True Zemni or Old Zemni or spy Zemni, he could do it all. Even his Common was less accented, his umlauts less audible, his vowels further apart, back then; his tongue was his to command, as thoughtlessly as anything else.
And then…
He’s not sure what did it, really, the damage to his soul or his brain or simple, brutal, time. He’s not sure he did much but mutter nonsense for sixteen years.
At any rate, he could barely fit cantrips between his teeth when he first got the amulet. It took time to untangle the spell words and articulate components, effort to pull Zemnian out of his lungs and up through his throat. It took longer for common, longer still for Celestial, and both now bore the marks of passing through a space Zemnian had already claimed.
He does not mind, when it makes his friends laugh. He does not mind, when it reminds him of a home, of a people, he should be fighting for. Nearly all the Volstrucker were Zemnian, after all; it is a Zemnian he must destroy and dethrone. But there is also a reason he chose others that sounded like him, and it is not because the way Trent and Caleb sound is in itself evil, but because at the core of the Empire exists a culture even nationalism could not erase, and that failure of the Empire to dominate graces both the lips of those who would fight to protect and fight to subjugate it.
So yes, Caleb is bad at accents. But he wouldn’t give up Zemnian for the world.