Recovered Cult-Object, designated the Truth-Glass, from a domestic shrine of the Late Screen Age.
Every dwelling we have excavated contains at least one, mounted at eye height in the wettest, most private chamber of the home: a polished plane, silver-backed, framed with reverence. We believe now that this was the central devotional station of the household, more sacred even than the sleeping-place. Here the Ancient came alone, at dawn and again at dusk, to confront the deity that lived inside the glass.
The evidence of ritual is overwhelming. Arrayed beneath the Truth-Glass we recover small vessels of pigment, fine-bristled applicators, and coiled tools warm-worn from repeated use. The devotee, we conclude, did not simply gaze upon the god. The devotee attempted, morning after morning, to become it. They painted their faces to match the face in the glass, adjusted, painted again, seeking an approval the surface never granted and never withheld.
A god of perfect mimicry, offering back only what was already offered to it.
Note the wear patterns on the surrounding wall: countless fingerprints, the plaster worn soft at arm's reach. They leaned in. They came close enough to fog the deity with their own breath and then, we imagine, watched it vanish, this proof that the god was made of nothing but themselves, and returned the next morning anyway.
Rival scholars insist the object was mere grooming apparatus. They have not stood, as I have, in the excavated bathing-chambers at the hour the light comes in sideways, and understood what these people truly were: a civilization that could not begin its day until it had looked upon its own face and been forgiven. They worshipped the only god that always answered.
Themselves, held at the length of an arm, and never once believed.