Bibliophobia | Glowfic Constellation

Wow, that's a lot of magic rock in one place.

They call down the magic grey in case that helps.

That one grey can read more writing on the door. Nobody else can, and the instruments can't seem to detect it either. About the same length as all the other sections, but it has a lot of repeated sequences from the other sections once painstakingly written out.

The grey copies down the extra writing for them and tries poking things.

Randomly poking things occasionally causes bits of the art to light up for the grey only, only to go out when another thing is poked.

They will make her poke many things and try to figure out patterns. (She is thoroughly bored but does as she's told.)

The same poke pattern produces the same glows each time, at least. Particular scenes in the art and particular passages light up at the same time, which should help the linguists a bit.

After a while of this a poke generates a loud, low grinding noise echoing throughout the tunnel! The floor shakes slightly. There's a rockfall a couple hundred meters back, and a mangled mummified magic-animal corpse half crushed under the rocks.

...weird.

They investigate the dead animal. Does it have its magical rocks, how old is it. Also, can they still get out of here.

They can still get out of here. It has its magical rocks, and seems to be... Maybe 5 million years old going by radioactive isotopes? Maybe 20? It's hard to be precise without enough context and supporting data, they could be way off if anything is weird about this particular one.

What's in the area that it was before?

Just a big hollow section with some kind of - now destroyed - hidden mechanism. There's more art along the walls of the space.

Scans of the walls indicate more of these here and there.

They investigate the mechanism and avoid having the magic grey poke anything else till they have a sturdy smaller tunnel resistant to rockfall to put inside the big one so they can duck under it and be sure to get out. What did this mechanism once do?

It looks like it held the animal upright or possibly restrained and delivered water to its mouth? And then there's a trapdoor that levers the restraints(?) away and releases it into the tunnel.

...wow.

Just water? No residue in the piping? Where did the water come from, can they find the reservoir? Are there more setups like this?

No residue in the piping. There doesn't seem to be a waste pipe either. The (very narrow) pipes run all along the tunnel, showing up on intense enough scanning - and up to some higher alcoves with similar setups, too. The reservoir seems to be behind the big door, there's a larger pipe running along the roof.

Is the reservoir going to flood out if they pry the door open?

It looks like it won't.

Oh good.

They have the grey don protective gear and poke more things.

They discover a few pairs of pokes that will make two things light up!

Stoneheart has been filled with uncertainty ever since the discovery. She was less careful before. Known as the librarian, a villainous epithet that inspired hate in all, for a long time until the legends grew vague and the descriptions of her diverged enough to be unrecognizable, vanishing into the mist of time. Because she tried to share her convictions - to push through what she quietly suspects is a deliberate psychological hobbling and actually record things in perpetuity.

Her libraries are carefully buried far away from prying eyes. Multiple sites over a wide area, constructed and filled and maintained entirely by herself. She doesn't even remember writing most of the oldest notes, the Well won't give those ancient memories back- But she has been around a long, long time. How many lifetimes has she forgotten, except for carefully stored stone tablets, scored by her own hand? How many times has she learned new tricks for her magic, only to go multiple lifetimes without it and eventually forget all her knowledge and fail to rebuild the innate reactions for it? How much has she learned and forgotten?

A lot. Maintaining the copies is a burden that only consumes more of her time as the history grows. She hardly ever adds new things to her archives anymore, because if she did that more than once or twice a lifetime, it is inevitable that things would become lost. She has over twenty thousand records. Ten thousand lifetimes, at a vague guess. One million years.

It's a long time.

One million years of Dwellin being born, growing, farming, hunting, fighting, dying. A hundred million happy couples on first dates, more glorious battles than there are grains of sand on a beach, a nigh-infinity of moments flaring like a fire before slowly fading into embers, every life a spark against the emptiness of time- The immensity of it is overwhelming when she actually THINKS about just how much the world is. Tries to picture a thousand thousand of her friends or family.

Stoneheart believes that permanence is the basis of all that is right and good in the world. Leaving something behind, forever. Great legends weren't good enough. They eventually twist, distort. How accurate are the legends about the gods, really? Given how she tracked her own legend, terrifyingly inaccurate. She would be surprised if anything other than their existence was correct.

Hence her library. Her heresy. Her deepest, darkest secret.

The very oldest, carefully preserved records of hers... Are written in something that somewhat resembles the glyphs the Amentans have found. She read a few of them, the frustration and headache and the horrible falling wrongness what are you doing this is all fake none of it matters waste of time and space and energy NOTHING MATTERS-

Stoneheart is pretty visibly not having a great time. Her work on the new city suffers. She's distractible, forgetting things, irritable.

"Stoneheart, are you sick?" asks one of her coworkers.

"-No." She almost leaves it at that, but. "The- I'm stressed and worried, I suppose, about that tunnel that was found."

"It's interesting! We're wondering if it might clear up some confusion about the gods and why this planet is so weird."

"I would be, extremely interested, in clearing up the confusion there."

"So would we! Do you want to go look at the tunnel? I know a guy on the linguistics team."