Young Justice: Solstice

Twenty-Nine

I'm writing this with a eyepatch on because my eye hurts so let's see how this goes *finger guns*

"That symbol, the one that looks like the sun?" I pointed it out to my audience, "That means day. Now I don't understand whatever number or calendar system that they have here, but I think it has a date."

"Like maybe the date that the scarab fell to Earth, or the day that they performed the ritual to cleanse it if alien influence." Artemis chewed her thumbnail, deep in thought.

"I don't think so, Arty. There were scarabs all over the place, but not on the walls we looked at." Karen scrolled through the photos of the Bialyan ruins on her tablet

I took a picture of one of the scarab walls Karen had mentioned, displaying it side-by-side with the wall I already had up. "That's because these two walls were written in a completely different dialect than all the scarab stuff," I said, a grin on my face like a child on their birthday. If only my parents could see me now!

"Strange. What else would they be writing about?" Black Canary asked.

Superboy pulled up two more pictures. "These two walls are a complete match the site in Mars."

"The site of the Green Beetle crash?" Cassie asked.

"Yeah!" Beast Boy high-fived her.

I inserted little text boxes on the images, writing English translations over the icons and symbols we has already translated on the wall.

"Well that's...slightly less confusing." Raquel said.

"It looks kind of like a story," Beast Boy mumbled helpfully, perched on Superboy's shoulders.

Artemis looked at me, "You said that there were a lot of symbols here that were related to your Hindu story. The Ramayana?"

"Half of it, at least, might be telling the story of the Ramayana." I nodded, pointing out the symbol of a glowing man. "That is the symbol for Rama."

"What about the other half?" Raquel asked.

"I don't know," I shook my head, "Door, open, it might be instructions of some kind."

"Zatanna, can you make out any magic energy behind any of these symbols?" Canary asked.

Zatanna shook her head. "It's not a spell. I'm sure of that. Except maybe that bottom line."

Cassie peered over my shoulder. "You mean the one almost completely obscured by rocks that looks like it might be painted in blood?"

Zatanna squinted at what she could read for a minute, then shook her head, "It's only bits and pieces, but it's far beyond my capacity, maybe even Doctor Fate's."

"Well who's stronger than a Lord of Order?" Bumblebee asked.

Cassie looked at me. "A god."

I set my mouth in a firm line, and traced the symbol for "destiny".

-------

I sat at the desk in my room, the photographs of the different sites set in front of me with the translations written out in bright red ink.

Instead of working on translations, like Black Canary wanted me to, or improving my combat skills, as Artemis and Raquel suggested, I was rereading the Ramayana.

There was a knock at the door, so I shoved a sticky not in the spine to save my place.

"It's open!" I shouted, before I remembered that I needed to put in the code to open the door. I fell out of my office chair before floating to my feet  and letting them in.