Field Report, Chamber XII: The Assembly of the Lesser Kin.
We have long known that the Screen People segregated their populations by age-cohort, but the excavation of this rectangular hall (a "gymnasion," from the ritual apparatus of hanging nets found at either end) yields our first evidence of a coming-of-age rite. The dead were young. We can tell by the shortness of their preserved garments and the extraordinary quantity of aromatic resin, a cheap ceremonial musk, applied so thickly to the walls that it survives even now, a millennium later, as a faint chemical grief.
The ritual geography is unmistakable. Two great populations of celebrants were arranged against opposing walls, held apart by a gulf of empty floor perhaps four paces wide. This we designate the Sacred Void. No artifact was recovered from its center. We conclude that to cross it was forbidden, or holy, or both.
The young pressed their backs to the perimeter for hours, we estimate, judging by the scuff-strata, achieving nothing, approaching no one, radiating a devotion so intense it curdled into stillness.
At the room's edge we found the shrine: a raised platform bearing the remains of a Sound Engine and, beside it, a solitary elder skeleton, seated, arms crossed. A priest, surely, whose office was to witness the vigil and forbid its consummation.
Only twice per gathering, the fragmentary chants suggest, did the Void grow narrow. A slow devotional was permitted, and two celebrants would join at arm's length and sway, terrified, counting.
I have excavated their tombs, their temples, their monuments to power. But nothing has moved me like this room.
Here were a people who invented longing before they invented courage, and built an entire architecture to keep the two forever four paces apart.