Field Journal, Excavation of the Threshold Dwelling.
We have found the rarest of sites: a chamber caught at the exact instant of consecration, before the family gods had been installed. The Ancients called this liminal period the First Night, and it appears to have been a trial of endurance demanded of every new dweller.
The evidence is stark. A single sitting-cushion, deflated, its edges taped, positioned at the precise geometric center of the floor: the penitent's station. Around it, sealed vessels of Cardboard (a sacred pulp the Screen People manufactured expressly to be broken open and then, we believe, wept over). No table. No sleeping platform.
The dweller was required to consume one flat disc of ritual bread, sourced by rectangular summons-tablet from an unseen priesthood, and to eat it upon the floor, facing the wall, in the manner of an ascetic.
Note the acoustics. The chamber is bare, and we have calculated that every footfall would have returned to the dweller as an echo. This was surely intentional. The Ancients arranged for the room to speak back to them, so that in the emptiness they might hear the shape of the life not yet lived.
We recover no glowing rectangle from this layer, which is unheard of. For one night, the dweller sat in the dark with the sound of its own breathing and the hum of the cold-box, unaccompanied by the gods.
We had long believed these people incapable of stillness. Yet here is proof that each of them, once, chose a bare room over a full one, sat down among sealed boxes in a place that did not yet know their name, and waited to be recognized by it. They were not, as we assumed, a people who feared the empty room.
They were a people who understood it had to be entered alone.