Deposit 41-C, recovered from the ruins of a communal exertion-temple.
Among the artifacts unearthed in the western sweat-halls, none has proven more illuminating than the reflective slabs the Ancients installed floor to ceiling along every wall. We had long assumed these polished planes were oracular, and the discovery of the Self-Facing Rite confirms it beyond dispute.
The rite proceeded thus. The worshipper, having exhausted the body against the sacred iron, approached the slab and raised a small luminous tablet before the chest. The tablet's single opening was aimed not at the slab but at the worshipper's own doubled image, capturing the reflection for eternity. The body was arranged with great deliberation: shoulders squared, the free hand braced upon the hip, the face composed into an expression scholars now call the Solemn Unsmile, a look of profound indifference achieved only through immense effort.
We take this to be an act of self-consecration. The worshipper, depleted by devotion, sought proof that the labor had transformed him, and so preserved the changed body as a votive image, distributed afterward to the wider colony for witness. The higher the visible strain, the greater the reverence bestowed by the tribe.
What moves me most is the timing. They performed this rite at the very moment of exhaustion, when the body was least composed and the mirror most honest, and still they insisted on looking magnificent. They could not simply rest. They had to be seen resting, seen striving, seen becoming.
These were a people who could not bear to change without a witness, who built entire temples of glass so that no private effort would ever go unrecorded, and who worshipped, above all their iron gods, the terrible and tender hope that someone, somewhere, was finally watching them improve.