Field Journal, Season Eleven. Recovered from a domestic sleeping-chamber: one Nightslab, a palm-sized tablet of glass, found not in the ritual pits with the ceremonial refuse, but clutched against the resting-platform where the Ancient lay down each night to be renewed.
This placement troubles the standing theory. We had assumed the Screen People severed their devotions at dusk. Yet here, at the very threshold of sleep, in the darkest hour when even the beasts go quiet, we find evidence that the faithful did not rest at all. Wear analysis of the glass surface shows a single vertical groove, worn deep by the pad of one thumb, repeated upward, upward, upward, ten thousand times in the dark.
A gesture of supplication. The believer summoning the next revelation, and the next, refusing to stop until the ritual granted release.
We recovered no images of joy from these late sessions. The scrolls they consumed at this hour were, so far as fragments suggest, a litany of distant catastrophes, quarrels among strangers, and omens of collapse. The Nightslab lit the resting face from below, a cold blue glow, so that the Ancient absorbed the sorrows of the whole world alone, in silence, while those beside them slept.
Rival scholars insist this was mere idleness. I cannot accept so small a reading. No idle creature keeps a vigil that costs it the very sleep it came to seek.
The Screen People, I have come to believe, could not bear to close their eyes upon a world in trouble without first witnessing all of it, every wound at once, as though attention were a form of prayer and looking away a kind of abandonment. They kept the watch no one asked them to keep.
They mistook their helplessness for duty, and they carried the whole aching planet down into the dark with them, every single night, so that it would not be alone.