Excavation Site 44, Winter Stratum. In the ruined halls we designated Retail Cathedrals, we uncovered evidence of a single sacred night the Ancients observed once each cold season, and the physical record of it is unlike anything in the historical strata before or since.
The floors of these cathedrals tell the story better than any tablet. We found the polished stone scored by thousands of overlapping drag-marks, radiating from great vaults toward a central altar we have named the Register, where the faithful surrendered their tokens. Near the entrances, embedded in the very grout, we recovered fragments of the fallen: a single small garment, a shattered box that once held a warmth-shrine (what earlier scholars misidentified as a mere "television"), and, most movingly, the imprint of many bodies pressed together in the dark before the doors opened.
They came in the pre-dawn cold. They waited. They ran.
We believe this was a rite of ordeal, a night on which the Screen People proved their devotion through discomfort, crush, and the willing surrender of sleep. The prizes were not chosen for use, we now think, but for scarcity: the object mattered less than the striving. Colleagues at the Northern Institute insist the marked reductions on the price-tablets indicate a festival of generosity.
They are mistaken. No people fight one another over a gift freely given. This was penance dressed as bounty.
What remains is the wear pattern, and wear is confession. These were a people who could not feel their own abundance except by nearly losing it in a crowd, who needed one dark morning a year to want something so badly they would bleed for it, so that the other three hundred and sixty-four days of quiet plenty might, at last, taste like enough.