Excavation Layer 12, Feasting Chamber, Northern Site.
We uncovered the great annual sacrifice intact, and I confess my hands shook as I brushed the soil from it. At the center of the low ritual table lay the Roasted One: an enormous fowl, prepared with such elaborate care that we must conclude it was a god, or the emissary of one, consumed so that the tribe might absorb its power.
Around it, a defensive ring of lesser offerings, the small green spheres the Ancients called sprouts, which we believe were left uneaten on purpose, a deliberate token of abundance, proof to the ancestors that this people had more food than hunger.
Note the seating. Every participant wore upon the skull a crown of thin colored paper, recovered from within a tube that detonated (we found the scorched cardboard casing). No hierarchy is visible in these crowns; king and infant wore the same. A radical egalitarian rite, then, held once yearly to dissolve all rank before the Roasted God.
Most moving is the debris of gift-exchange: torn metallic wrappings, hoarded in the corners, and hundreds of small plastic figures, the toys, most snapped or abandoned within the same stratum as their unwrapping. They gave gifts they did not need to people already in the room. My rival Vessarn insists the whole feast marked a harvest.
He is wrong. The soil above shows deep frost. They gathered in the dark, cold half of the year, indoors, deliberately, when nothing grew and there was no reason to gather at all.
That is the wonder of them. The Screen People, who fled one another's faces all year into their glowing tablets, once every winter set the tablets down, dragged the whole scattered bloodline into a single overheated room, and endured each other on purpose.
They were lonely, and they knew the cure, and they took it only once a year.