The Ruins of At-Tabar

III. Virgil

It was but barely a moment's pause before our virtuous band, that was but a merry gaggle at the time of our formation and who had envisioned a world of endless, incredible discoveries, began to take note of the strange runic language that was etched into every inch of the stone walls. They did not carry any of the familiar lettering of the world's common languages; on the contrary, they were simple pictographs, much more in common with those ancient hieroglyphics of ancient Egyptian civilizations. They polluted those violet walls with indiscernible images, impossible to understand and translate to any kind of earthly meaning. Perhaps they were encoded inside a system of some kind, encrypted for all but those who had been at the site of their creation, and intended to hide away for potential millennia what they truly meant to tell. We leveled our crackling torches up to those ancient yet immaculately preserved walls, unable to completely comprehend what their foreignness might be a form derived from, or perhaps searching, grasping, for any kind of visible similarities with which our cunning, adroit, learned linguists and phoneticians could begin to assemble a string of commonalities and begin to understand the origins of.

As we pressed onward inside that claustrophobic tunnel, a certain feeling of gravity began to be pressed upon us, as if the atmosphere within that strange yet awesome ziggurat was making its greatest efforts to keep us from continuing our journey of discovering what it might house within. Our band of excitable academics, seeing vast collections of envisioned precious lost treasure, and of perhaps even ancient gold that had only appreciated in its monetary value since that time it had been concealed inside this gigantic tomb, would not be denied their perceived destiny to uncover, unravel, and obtain the mysteries of these strange lands of At-Tabar. Onward we continued, determined in our quest, shoulder-to-shoulder as we stood in a line of duos in order to compensate for the skinniness of that weird corridor.

After what had felt like an eternity lost walking within that structure, we began to see the faint glow of light somewhere past our own position. Our movements quickened, as we soon started to realize that this might be, even had to be, what we had come in search of, what we had longed to find at that time in which we escaped from the blasting, arid lands of the desert outside. Those of the expedition, whose voices began to croak as the first signs of significance had escaped from the shadows of mystery, had not been lost upon the gravity of their current circumstances. Indeed, we had reached an inner sanctum of sorts, where lit torches continued to burn and illuminate that grandiose room, of which its walls seemed to expand for distances far greater than its breadth had left us to surmise, truly an impossibly enormous room.

Stone steps descended into that room, again of an incredibly enduring quality. Perhaps it made a greater degree of sense, we wondered, that the architecture within would be preserved of a higher quality than that outside, that had to endure the harsh elements of time; but this capricious thought was soon deserted, for the state of quality the outside stone, we soon determined, was almost a perfectly exact quality to within. Indeed, something was remarkably strange about this abandoned building. Perhaps our discovery of those ruins had been partially misinformed, our projection of its origins and how long ago it had been constructed was miscalculated? In that circumstance, to what is to be said about the state of all the rest of those ruins, who had crumbled and began to be lost beneath the sands? We queried more than could be answered, finding the situation perhaps was of a far greater impact than we could have ever hoped to understand; the significance of our discovery, indeed, was of a magnitude that could never be replicated nor duplicated, a discovery that would forever be etched into the fabrics of the quilt of human history. This was not major, no, but rather it pushed beyond the imagination of what we thought possible. Decades past had already proven to belong to the mold-breakers, the ingenious brother inventors who answered the question of human flight with metal apparatuses, or the lone visionary who automated and deployed a transformative method of enabling greater, and far more efficient, travel across distances. This, indeed, could surpass all other expectations and ingrain itself in history as the most significant effort to ever be organized. And yet, all of this was considered before we began to understand what was contained within that inner sanctum.