The Once Forgotten Tongue

“What do you think?” Kudriva asked.

“I’m not sure, jewelry? charm? talisman?”

“Not the pendant itself,” she sighed, “the markings.”

Avésko looked up from the artifact and hesitated. “Well I think it’s too soon to say anything for sure, but they seem too random to just be decorative.”

“It’s the forgotten tongue, same as we found at the Kalaski ruins in Low King’s Pass.” Kudriva let no hint of uncertainty into her low, deliberate tone. The seasoned theologian leaned against a wall staring at her long faced spouse. Her husband, draped in dark woolen robes sat across the room from her at a scroll table. He turned the artifact over in his hand and considered her claim.

“The markings are unmistakably similar, but they’re… more abstract somehow,” he said, eyes squinting at the metalwork before him. Avésko carefully set the artifact down on the scroll table and continued, “it is bronze, however, and we have no evidence to suggest the Kalaski people--”

“Yes yes,” Kudriva jabbed in, “a point to which I’ve already been enlightened. What I’m saying is not that the artifact comes from the first civilization, only that its writing is in the Forgotten Tongue. I do not know how that tongue ended up inscribed on something like this, let alone how a Psochtani trader got his hands on it, all I know is that this language is the same one from the ruins.”

Avésko arose from his seat at the scroll table and paced in the direction of a door. The High Scholar opened it and gazed out over one of the Astronomy Tower’s many parapet balconies. Before him the city stretched below in every direction, pale towers and arches of meticulously cut stone guiding the eye down the slopes of the mountain. From the western face rose several towering cranes of wood and rope.

“The Zaddya seems a popular district for construction projects lately,” Avésko offered, beckoning his spouse to the balcony.

“You always change the subject when you know I’m right but can’t prove it,” Kudriva softly chortled. She began toward the balcony but stopped to admire the bronze pendant at the table. She gazed at it just a moment before picking it up. The ancient looking metal still had some shine to it. Lump shaped from a distance, upon close inspection it was the exact form of an animal’s heart, cleanly cut at the arteries. Whoever cast the bronze also bore a hole through it at one of these arteries, leaving enough room for a string. Kudriva’s gut told her it was meant to be worn, but her ever skeptical spouse resisted even using the word pendant.

“It’s because when you’re right but can’t prove it your conviction is contagious,” the High Scholar confessed. “You have an intuition for these things and it’s what I love about you.”

Kudriva gave a look and jokingly spat, “oh, is that what you love about me?”

“Among other things,” he returned with a smile, “but when your intuition rubs up against the rigor of the Lyceum, the burden of evidence required of tsuyáf scholars like us… what can I say to the council? No need for proof, just trust my companion’s intuition?”

“Then don’t tell the council anything they don’t already know,” Kudriva sighed. “Let my intuitions be simply that, and if you believe them then that is something we can share, just the two of us. The council doesn’t need to hear all that.” The theologian embraced her scholarly husband. “Dya kávu tuvá. I love you,” she whispered.

“Dya kávu tuvá,” Avésko replied in earnest.

~~~

Ahaldea ran and ran and the world ran past her and then through her, all the while spinning like a storm off the sea.

Ahaldea looked before her and saw the horizon ablaze, a realm of fire eagerly soaked up by all that which was once familiar.

Ahaldea looked to the sky above her and wept at the awful, red splendor of the falling shapes.

Ahaldea looked behind her and lamented the end of the mountain giants, their last behemoth kin slain beneath the weight of rocks and earth, taking the great cities with them.

Ahaldea lamented the end of so many things but she somehow knew she would not be one of the things to end. Whatever cruel spirit now controlled her destiny would not allow her to end. A cataclysm on this scale requires a witness. So Ahaldea was kept alive to see the destruction of her island home.

She roamed an ashen land too familiar for comfort. She saw everything that had been lost and she remembered all of it. Memory was the only artifact she could save from the world that once was, and with her memories at hand she became the cartographer of the apocalypse. Ahaldea ambled gravely across ground that was once fertile, up dried river beds once brimming with fishes and birds, and through blackened forests that once burst green with leaves and echoed with the voices of beasts. With every loss she catalogued her shoulders became heavier and her feet dragged through the withered crops.

The most burdensome weight on Ahaldea’s shoulders was the memory of who she had been, however long ago it was that she had last been herself. She had once been a blacksmith’s daughter, an apprentice of the family trade. Her father taught her everything he knew, and some things he did not know for sure but strongly suspected to be true.

“Ours is the kingdom of the Green Cliffs,” he would tell her, “and the Green Cliffs protect us from harm because we draw our magic from them and forge it into our tools.” In the world to come after, Ahaldea could feel that magic dying, just as her mother had predicted.

Her mother had died when she was only a girl and her father clung to her as an artifact of his loss. They used to practice the sacred ritual as a family every summer when the priestesses would give out calves to the masses. They would bring the priestesses’ offering to their family altar in the woods and slaughter it over the Word of the Stone, burning its heart for the Allfather. They ate like kings those summers.

Summer and winter insisted on becoming indistinct in the world to come after. The tides would choke the island and return to their bed every cycle as they had before, but all the while the sky was dark and the ground was dry. The world kept her alive to torment her and rob her of her will, but Ahaldea, biographer of destruction, found the strength in her to exert one last effort of free will against the chaos around her. She returned to that family altar in the charred woodland.

Ahaldea reached into the ground and she pulled metals from it as her parents had once pulled the hearts out of ritual calves. She cast the metals together with the strength of her own fingertips and bound them with the last dying magic of her people. In the furnace of her hands she forged an amulet the shape of a sacrificial heart and inscribed it with the Word of the Stone.

~~~

Noris had to strain a bit to get a decent look at the next exhibit. It was his decision to follow at the back of the group, and a worth it one in his eyes, but it did have its drawbacks. Most of the group was humanoid, but there were a few cephaloid and several automata in the crowd. Up until this stage of the tour most of the information had been about the college itself, how students and professors alike framed their studies of the natural world, what the school’s campus might have looked like. But now the group was rounding a bend into a dark hallway of shelves lined with artifacts. Each item appeared far more ancient than those Noris would have expected from an Enlightenment Age academic institution.

A quick series of orange-on-yellow patterns flashed across the skin of the cephaloid tour guide and half a second later the translation came through Noris’ earpiece. “And the artifacts here are believed to have been kept by the college in an airlocked vault, perhaps to prevent damage to especially old items.” Now this was the kind of thing Noris had come to see. A museum within a museum had just enough novelty to attract types who weren’t actually interested in history, but for those who were, it was items like these they most looked forward to seeing.

When Emperor’s college had first been unearthed by cephaloid archeologists it gave rise to a series of highly contentious debates over the chronology of humanoid history. The Last Talorian War was so destructive it often served as something of a veil over the modern understanding of humanoid history. Before they nearly wiped themselves out with bombs, Noris’ ancestors had seen great things, done great things. And it wasn’t anyone’s fault but theirs that their accomplishments had been literally buried, forgotten to the sands of time and the sands of the Drivosan deserts.

It was being in a place like this, museum within museum, history within history, which allowed Noris to be stricken with an odd nostalgia for a world he had never known. It reminded him of the deeply human instinct to hold on to the past. His kind continued to hold on to the past into the modern day, it was why museums like this one existed. But seeing firsthand how his ancestors had the same instinct, built museums of their own to preserve what was past to them, this was what touched Noris so profoundly on his tour. He split off from the group to wander these dim halls of ancient ephemera.

It was at the end of one of these corridors that he came across a display case holding a bronze pendant dated thousands of years before the Last Talorian War. It seemed like an unassuming little lump of rust, but when he looked closer Noris jumped at the realization that it was in the shape of an anatomically correct heart. Scribbles in a writing system Noris did not recognize peaked their ligatures out from under the rust, begging to be decoded.

A tentacle dropped against the railing next to Noris, the cephaloid tour guide. Rapid flashes of blue and green ornamented the thing’s head and Noris’ earpiece quickly translated, “odd little thing. Emperor’s College academics believed it to be of Paldaesian origin, but contemporary techniques date it centuries earlier. Might even be a pre-Cataclysmic relic.

“Wow…” Noris muttered to no one in particular. It struck him that this little pendant survived the Cataclysm, four thousand years of war and conflict, and somehow even the apocalypse of sunbombs. It forced his mind to the uncomfortable task of wondering what would happen to it should the Interplanetary Educational Center find some disastrous end. But when it comes down to it, apocalypses happen, endings are beginnings and beginnings are endings. Finally he broke his silence, “do we know what the writing says?”

The cephaloid shifted and flashed the answer over its skin. “Contemporary linguists believe it to be some Aedo-Kalic language written in a Tezian script. Much of the text has been lost but what remains suggests it may have been used in some kind of religious ritual. The words ‘gift,’ ‘humble,’ and ‘inheritors’ are all that have been conclusively deciphered.”