Inscription

Birth is beautiful, so long as whatever is brought into being isn’t biological, so long as it isn’t alive in a way we can understand: so long as it’s an island. To see the vast inorganic organs of the ocean floor churn, push, constrict, and squeeze, or to feel them as the Earth itself rattles and roars in tune with the underwater rock’s contractions; that sensation brings me life. I don’t explain it like this to people often, however. I usually just say I like geology, I usually just say the shifting of tectonic plates is fascinating, I usually just say that the fact that islands can just be pushed up from the sea feels like fantasy. However nothing has been usual, much less explainable, about the last few days of my life.

Some like to complain about not being born at the right time, the common quote going along the lines of “Born too late to explore Earth, and too early to explore space,” and I find myself envying those people more by the day. I guess I was just special, I guess the tectonic plates deep below us knew how much I loved them, and their millenia long dances, and so they moved for me.

What I’m trying to say is, when Earthquakes rocked the North Sea, when tsunamis spilled into the fjords of Scandinavia, and when Europe was pummeled by the worst natural disaster it’s perhaps ever seen, I only managed to barely hide my smile.

New, rapid tectonic shifting meant rapid changes in previously studied rock, which in turn meant more for me to go out and research. To my delight, this rapid change had produced a new island in the North Sea smack dab in the middle of a shipping vessel’s normal path. My only complaint at this point was that I didn’t get to name the island, as the vessel who found what became to be known as Wilpride Island simply passed her name onto it as she drifted by, most likely creating future confusion if Wilpride Island ever became home to a port which itself ever stationed the ship Wilpride.

However the idea that Wilpride Island could ever be home to anything other than horror and confusion is now just a fantasy nearly as dreamlike as what I found on its craggy, jagged shores when I ventured there myself for a routine geological survey.

For an island whose birth was so violent, with the island being the result of two tectonic plates in the North Sea clashing and rapidly forcing rock up to the surface, the voyage myself and my fellow geologists embarked on started out feeling quite mundane. A geochronological study was our first priority, sitting neatly atop our nearly nonsensical, jargon-packed lists and schedules which we looked over as a cure for the ever increasing boredom which plagued each of us as we sat scattered about the trawler set to deliver us to our destination.

One would think that a landscape of white-capped waves and a universe of life beneath our feet would leave us with something to admire, if not at least think about. But no, I found that I couldn’t even look into the endless blue abyss without burning my eyes. The sun’s laser-like reflections bounced off every wave and ripple in the water, and threatened to blind me as I attempted to admire the ocean.

Infact, the setting sun’s glare forced me below deck, leaving me without a sense of direction or place outside the confines of the cramped cabin. That’s why I jumped slightly when the boat gently lurched against the rocks of Wilpride’s infantile shores. When I had gone below deck, all of my colleagues were already dawdling over the railing of our vessel waiting to get on with their work before even reaching the island. With that memory in mind, it was unsurprising when I walked out onto the main deck to find that not only were my colleagues gone, but so was all the equipment we’d be using to take core samples of the island to study later.

Eerily, however, not even the captain was left to direct me in the direction of my co-workers as I scanned the blisteringly bright horizon for any sign of my fellow researchers. While I did find them as thin dash marks off in the distance on Wilpride Island’s rocky shores, I found their completely stationary nature combined with the absence of the echoing drum of our drill slightly disturbing, leaving me feeling unwelcome in the face of this unexpected change of course.

They remained completely motionless, like stones in their own right as I made my way across the uneven, carved up, almost lunar addition to the Earth’s family of landmasses. While my pin-prick co-workers remained constant North Stars to me, I took pause as a new anomaly slowly faded in like a ghostly apparition along the edges of the blinding sunset which sat perched on the horizon. Its silhouetted form grew larger, its details began to stick out, and the subtleties of its outline began to solidify, showing me what had been seemingly abandoned by my colleagues, still reduced to being black outlines against the sun.

I had to process it twice, as the first time I did so my brain seemed to reject its own math, denying its own conclusions. However, no matter how many times I studied the familiar object before me, there was no mistaking what had been left here. What sat before me was my team’s coring drill. I heard no sound from my motionless compatriots because they had abandoned their own tools to run ahead, to see something I would soon bear witness to as I cautiously stepped closer and closer.

Before me, now just twenty feet or so, stood a ring of right angles; silhouetted figures whose vantablack shadows served as an extension of their own smoothed over, monochrome bodies. The sunset’s extreme projections did nothing to help in peering over their vague shoulders to see what had captivated my colleagues to the point of abandoning their own equipment. It took me nudging past an unidentifiable figure to enter the circle, to see what they saw, and seemingly as if the world wanted us to see, the rock that sat before us was perfectly illuminated by the setting sun.

No shadows seemed to be cast across its many indentations and canals, and it seemed impervious to our own shadowy twins stretched far across the rocky ground. Looking at it, I felt the detail drain from my body, I felt my shadow lengthen, and I let all thought of geology slip from my mind to sink into the abyssal depths of the ocean which surrounded us on all sides.

It was writing.

The rock which had never seen the light of day. The rock which had just been unshackled from the sea by an unprecedented earthquake. The rock which had faced millenia of continuous water cover. The rock covered in ancient Greek.

No core samples were taken that day. No words were spoken on the trek back to Trondheim in Norway. Most importantly though, no time was wasted in immediately reporting the discovery to the local university which had sent us out in the first place.

The translation came quickly, in a few hours in fact, though whether or not it’ll ever leave the dusty halls of academia is yet to be seen. Not only is the existence of human writing on a piece of previously submerged ocean floor impossible, but the contents only further seem to disprove the reality of the physical world around us. Were Wilpride an island at the time of ancient Greece, it would’ve sat thousands of miles away from even the perceived edge of the world at the time, let alone the furthest extent of Greek travel. And the story contained within those impossible glyphs, the references it makes, the claims it contains, it all contradicts history, artifacts, and traditions of record keeping spanning thousands of years.

While debate swirls about whether or not we ought to subject the public to this knowledge, to this contradiction of reality itself, I know without a shadow of doubt that it’s too much to put on me. I don’t know if it’s fair to put this burden on humanity, but I know it’s unfair, and impossible, to have it rest on my shoulders alone.

So it won’t.

Here.

I thought the island was a mistake at first. I thought that between the raging storms, the blistering cold, and my vast hunger, that I had finally gone mad, finally lost my mind. But no, peering at me between the flurries of water crashing against my boat was the gray outline of land, of at least a place to starve outside of my wooden vessel. I foolishly, not just for what I know now, but for what I can logically reason, thought this island to be much more than just a peaceful grave, however.

I thought it was Salvation.

So I set a course to Salvation, my sail doing little to help in the stoic face of the boreal winds, and so the burden fell on my arms to claw at the endless ocean around me in the hope I could inch further towards land. It burned, I can say that much. The burden on my forearms seemed too much to bear, and looking back it should’ve been. To push my boat alone even on dry land with both strong arms behind it would be a task of the Gods. To do so at sea with nothing but oars to push against the waves with, that was a task of Legend.

Still, there could be no legends without someone to recount them, so I created legend, and pushed onward. I felt muscles snap, give way, wither and fade, but they still didn’t stop moving. It was work no man should be able to accomplish, a task fit for none other than Hercules, and yet my name was Lysander, and soon I could see the pebbles which sat upon Salvation’s beaches.

By the time the island could see me back, however, it was too late.

I didn’t see the moment they saw me, it must’ve been while my back was turned, but when my gaze crested up over my shoulder to look at Salvation once more, I was greeted by the pin-prick details of a figure standing where there was once nothing more than pebbles to stone. My arms were too torn, too worn down, too decimated, to reverse course or even stop. To stop rowing would mean they’d have to start again, and as the aches bellowed up from my appendages and into my rib cage, I knew that if I stopped now, I’d never move my arms again.

So I didn’t stop, I simply rowed, my head affixed to my shoulder, gazing as more figures silently floated like ghastly spectors to spectate my arrival. I was still too distant to make out their specificities, to make out their humanity, though from what I could see no vessels accompanied them, let alone housing or any sign of civilization. They didn’t traverse roads to greet me, only solid stone. Their only companions seemed to be objects, still too distant to specifically identify, but obviously too sophisticated for the seemingly resource starved island they inhabited.

By the time all of them gathered at the shoreline, about twenty forms in all I’d say, I could start to feel my oars come against resistance, slamming into submerged rocks close to Salvation’s shore. Still as I grew ever closer to these unfamiliar shores home to even more unfamiliar figures, the island’s inhabitants made no movements to greet, let alone examine, their lonely visitor. The only movement besides that of my broken arms were their heads, following my path across the seas before them. It struck me then, watching their heads move slowly and methodically on their necks, that it was like an owl stalking its prey.

As I watched them watch me, a new screaming entered my body, a different screaming from the one emanating from my arms. It was a scream of return, a scream of panic and fright. I couldn’t place it within me, though I knew I could place it within my new acquaintances, and their steadily moving gaze, though what about it created animalistic panic within me I couldn’t figure out.

I calculated, I reasoned, I analyzed. Then I crashed against the rocks of the shoreline, being forced up from my seat as my body kept moving despite my boat’s sudden halt, with my tired body collapsing against the hull. Only there, resting at the bottom of my ship, my arms immobilized and unable to row any further, and my head spinning from the collision, did I realize why I had been so panicked by my new hosts’ moving gaze: They had all moved in unison.

I painfully pushed myself up, leaning on the hull of my boat, expecting these strangers to be scampering towards me, or to have silently lurched towards me in one collective motion. But no, I simply stared at them across the beach, and they looked back at me, their details obscured by the natural fog of distance, their arms clutched around whatever objects they held dear.

They made no first moves, these impossible islanders, so I did what I had to do, and I moved. It was a struggle to get up without the help of my decaying, seemingly festering arms, but I managed, soon finding myself stumbling onto the pebbles, onto dry land for the first time in years. No sands of the Great Sea filled the gaps between my toes, nor did any children come to ask what sea monsters I fought. Instead only pebbles crunched beneath my sandals and holes were bored into me by the dozens of eyes which lay perhaps a stadion away.

I had no choice but to slowly approach, and the screaming began anew, whipping up and down through my body like it were one massive drum. I now knew why, and I expected the movement this time as I watched one collective mass of feet shuffled in complete unison. Every single one of those strangers marched in perfect precision to make a wall of unfamiliarity before me, to line up to greet me as individuals, despite their seeming collective consciousness.

Only now, as even a few previously unseen figures faded into view could I tell what these strangers held so dearly. From this distance, their various shapes and sizes gave their identities away, though it was only the imposing, rolling form of a pipe organ, behind which presumably hid another stranger that told me exactly what my newfound companions were holding.

Each and every one of them held an instrument, a musical instrument.

Lyres and harps. Ouds and aulos. Panduras and percussion of all types. Some instruments I couldn’t even recognize, their wooden bodies clearly deep caverns for air to fill, and like I said, even a gigantic organ sat atop the rocks.

So I approached these strange musicians, and they only blinked in response. One stood slightly before the rest, however, and his dress was like mine, his face was like mine, and his hair was like mine. That is to say, he dressed for too much sun, and his skin was too tan. He was a stranger, just like me, with some sort of guitar cradled in his elbows.

“Help,” I said, gesturing to my boat, waving to my empty stomach, in some sort of desperate pantomime, before giving the man my most pleading look to punctuate my point.

“How?” The man replied, in Greek, in my tongue, so far away from home. “You look fine, you’re healthy enough to row.”

“Who are you?” I asked. I couldn't respond to his question, I couldn’t respond to another Greek man so far from home.

“We are Hyperboreans,” He said, claiming myth, claiming fiction, claiming falsehood as his truth. I couldn’t do this, I couldn’t play, so I didn’t. There would be no response, I moved to the next silent stranger.

“Who are you?” I asked the silent figure, a woman who still dressed like me but who was slightly paler skinned.

“We are Scythians,” she replied, her solidly stoney face betraying her impossibly cheery attitude, her muscles failing to come together, to cooperate to display even a consistent display of humanity. So I left her behind for the next woman standing beside her.

I won’t write again what I asked, I won’t pain my arms again, but I waited. I waited for the next lie, the next myth to be claimed as fact but the next stranger just stared blankly at me, her lips slowly coming apart in a miniscule ‘O’ shape. From that thin opening a hardy laugh escaped where only a whisper ought to meekly emanate. That laugh pushed me, grabbing my shoulders and steering me away from these strangers as the laugh continued. Her face didn’t move, her cheeks never raised, only her neck contorted and shifted as she let out her entire soul cackling at my question without anything more than a whistler’s opening on her lips.

I turned and I ran across the pebbles, past even my boat for whom my arms felt nothing but hatred. I crested the curve of the shoreline, I left the view of those strangers who spoke my language without human tongues, and I came to this rock.

They haven’t followed me, I know that much given how little I’ve actually looked at my own inscription while writing. I know they’re still exactly where I left them, because I hear them. A little while ago as I wrote, while immortalizing this evil in stone, I heard the low drone of some string instrument. It prowled across the skies, searching for me. Somehow I know it was searching for me, and with me out in the open I’m sure it did.

It sounded like no instrument, however. It didn’t pierce the air like one, didn’t create music or notes like one. This sound carried ideas, carried some cobbled together imitation of humanity, carried the warbling of a human voice packaged in the inhuman vibrations of an instrument's string. Before I reached the next sentence the low ring of an organ note with the same human warbling rang out across the island, before being joined by the childish plucking of a harp.

Despite what I saw I knew they may as well have put those instruments on the ground. I don’t think these Songweavers need them to make this music, this horrible symphony that tells me exactly where they are, that tells me exactly what I have to confront to get back to my boat.

I can’t stay here forever, so I won’t.

Here.