Excavation Field Journal, Terminal Complex Delta-9.
We have unearthed the largest devotional site yet discovered from the Late Screen Age: a vast glass basilica, its ceilings impossibly high, oriented not toward sun or sea but toward long paved processionals stretching to the horizon. The Ancients called this a "hub," and we now understand it was a place of transformation, where a person entered as one kind of being and departed as another.
The rituals were austere. Pilgrims arrived in the dark hours before dawn, as the strata of discarded fuel-vessels confirm, and submitted at once to a series of purifications. They removed their foot-coverings. They surrendered their liquids. They passed, arms raised in supplication, through a sacred arch that judged the worthiness of their bodies. Only the purified were permitted onward.
Artifact 44, recovered near the threshold: a vessel of dark bitter fluid, held in a single hand, sipped continuously. We believe this was a sacrament of endurance, for no pilgrim was ever found without one. The wear patterns on the seating suggest the faithful did not truly rest here. They perched.
They waited. They stared, red-eyed and reverent, at great glowing tablets overhead where the names of distant cities scrolled upward like the names of gods, some blessed with the word "boarding," others cursed with "delayed."
The rank of a pilgrim was legible in their satchels. The high-born carried little and moved swiftly through separate gates. The humble dragged enormous burdens on small wheels, and slept upright against them.
I confess a tenderness for these people. They rose in darkness, half-dreaming, clutching bitter fluid, to stand in glass halls and wait to be lifted into the sky. They must have been a species who could not bear to remain where they were, and who believed, with their whole exhausted hearts, that somewhere else was worth the leaving.