Artifact 12, Late Screen Age. Recovered from the threshold of nearly every dwelling in the excavated settlement: a small illuminated button of hardened resin, set into the doorframe at the exact height of an adult hand, worn smooth and pale at its center by the pressure of countless fingers.
We have named this the Petition Stone, and we believe no visitor was permitted to cross a threshold without first pressing it and waiting. The device did not open the door. It could not. Its sole power was to produce a chime somewhere within the dwelling, a sound the arriving supplicant could not always hear, and then to compel him to stand motionless outside, offering himself to the inhabitants for judgment.
Consider the theology of this. A people who had mastered flight, who buried their dead beside glowing tablets, nonetheless surrendered the crossing of every doorway to a ritual of asking. The wear on the button suggests it was pressed reverently, once, and then again, less reverently, and sometimes a third time, which we read as the erosion of faith in real time.
Higher-status dwellings, we note, mounted a small glass eye above the Petition Stone, so the household deity could observe the supplicant without revealing itself. To be seen and not answered was, we believe, the deepest shame their society could inflict.
Rival scholars insist the chime summoned food, not people, and that the smooth button marks hunger rather than devotion. I find this reading impoverished. These were folk who wrapped their most fragile hopes in the pressing of a single finger against a lit stone, then stood in the cold on a stranger's step, trusting that somewhere inside, someone had heard, and would choose to come.