Field Journal, Excavation of Dwelling Cluster 14. The site designated the Congregation Chamber presents the richest deposit yet recovered: a single room in which the Screen People appear to have practiced their most sustained collective rite, one they timed, curiously, to the deepest hour of the dark.
We date the ceremony by its sediments. Beneath the standing layer we find the Sticky Stratum, a floor lacquered in dried libation, studded with the crushed remains of the Salt Offering (a golden triangular wafer, ritually stamped, then trodden underfoot as tribute). Above this, the Vessel Field: dozens of the red conical Devotional Cups, all identical, all abandoned half-full, arranged in no order, which tells us the worshippers achieved a sacred forgetting of ownership.
To hold a cup was not to keep it. This was a people who had transcended possession, at least between the hours we would call midnight and dawn.
The central relic is the Throbbing Idol, a black rectangular altar from which, we believe, a rhythmic force emanated so powerful it commanded the entire congregation to move in unison. Wear patterns on the surrounding floorboards confirm hundreds of feet striking the same spot for generations. Near it we recovered the Complaint Tablets, small glowing slabs clutched by individuals who had withdrawn to the chamber's edges, faces lit, thumbs working, communing privately with distant gods while the collective rite raged on.
Even in ecstasy, some prayed alone.
At the threshold we found the final, tender detail: two worshippers seated on the entry steps, one holding the other's hair, a posture of caretaking we have named the Vigil.
They were, we now believe, a people terrified of the dark and of one another, who solved both fears at once: by gathering in a sticky room, drinking from cups they would never reclaim, and dancing until the sun forgave them.