The Serpentines were a people-group hailing from the steppes of center-eastern Tosthekes, now extincted by a eradication campaign by the Old Central Empire.

The Serpentine language remains a subject of scholarly panic, due to its importance to the influence of the Leviathan curse.

Evidence of Serpentine writings dates back to soon after the spread of the proto-Uotiman script, and bears close visual resemblance in glyphs, although inspection of the novel orthography shows an existing familiarity with the system, implying an earlier adoption than recorded.

The oldest known association of the language with serpents originates from an essay on the politics of the nearby central-basin city-states, speaking contemporarily of the neighboring factions of the region in the early Old First Century. A legible fragment reads:

"...who trace like snakes their words across the ledgers"

This would seem to imply that the characteristing linear styling of the modern script had already taken shape by some point between the collapse of the Uotiman dynasty and the following city-state arrangement among the basin's affairs.

The stylistic development of the language might well have stemmed from the repurposing of the basin's typical reed stylus from a clay-impression device to one of ink-based writing, incentivizing a cursive approach to the calligraphy.

Another theory, however, recognizes a parallel between the new style of penmanship and the already-existing prevalence of snakes as a motif in the cultural iconography. By the time of the early surviving writings within this neo-Serpentine style, a motif of inking important passages in circles with ends linking back to beginnings was already taking hold. A motif that brings with it the imagery of the self-eating snake.

Serpentines were known from early in their history for being possessors of mystic knowledge. An association likely borne out of their cultural knowledge surrounding the venoms of various snakes, and the antidotes derived therein. This highly regional medicinal knowledge could have been seen by foreigners as unprecedented workings of miracles.

It is not impossible to see the connection between the cyclical motif and the many snakes of the homeland that favored it so. The toxin and the cure come from the same fangs. The beginning and the end, what started it shall end it in kind.

Indeed what little of the Serpentine mythology not eradicated with the erasure of the language's understanding--surviving only from translated accounts from neighboring tongues--frequently recurrs in an identical, cyclical manner within the narrative. One reportedly ubiquitous story tells of a mythic hero and his 3 restless days of 14 great deeds, and his ending, later slain out of mercy by his own mother.

Like the aforementioned tale, these stories were told through the folk music tradition, with a large amount of their narratives having their determination of cause and effect based in rhyme, rendering these narratives nearly impossible to discern with their lexical context having been destroyed.

Similarly, according to the account that presevered the above epic, it was only one of a vast canon of folk ballads that utilized a similarly symmetric lyrical structure. While sometimes the middle-facing verses of these stories would take a looser approach to reflecting one another, the verses towards the beginning and ends would almost unwaveringly be structured parallel. The ending stanza being a beat-for-beat rewording of the beginning verse's melody and line structure. The Three-day Hero's introduction centers around his mother, just as his farewell does.