Excavation Report, Vertical Reliquary 44-C.
Within nearly every tower of the Screen People we find the same narrow shrine: a windowless bronze chamber, scarcely large enough for six standing worshippers, mounted upon a shaft that plunges the full height of the structure. We have named it the Ascension Cell. That it was sacred is beyond dispute.
No purely practical people would line a closet with polished metal, install a ceiling of soft perpetual light, and then decline to furnish it with a single place to sit.
The rites are legible in the wear patterns. Upon entering, the faithful pressed one of a vertical column of illuminated studs, each engraved with a numeral, thereby declaring the height to which they wished their souls conveyed. The doors then sealed them in. Analysis of the residue on the handrails suggests the supplicants stood in absolute silence during transit, facing forward, eyes lifted to a small changing number above the door, as one watches a sunrise or a verdict.
They did not speak to one another. They did not touch. To share the Cell with a stranger was evidently a trial of devotion, endured with held breath and folded hands.
Rival scholars insist the chamber was merely a means of moving between floors. This is absurd. A people so clever would surely have kept their legs. No, the Ascension Cell was a machine for practicing death and return: a brief burial, a rising, a door opening onto somewhere higher than before.
They were, we now understand, a race terrified of climbing and yet desperate to rise, who built into every dwelling a small dim room in which to stand very still, say nothing, and be lifted, trusting the numbers to tell them how far they had left to go.