Site Report, Excavation of the Great Plain Deposit.
We have uncovered the largest ritual ground yet documented from the Screen People: a flattened expanse ringed by the rotted footings of enormous towers, at whose base the earth is compacted by the weight of many thousands of feet moving as one. Here the Ancients gathered, we now believe, to enact their supreme act of collective surrender.
Consider the evidence. Around the perimeter we recovered thousands of Skin-Bands, colorful fibrous loops fused permanently to the wrist and never removed even in death. These were plainly marks of caste; the initiate wore the band until the flesh beneath it rotted away, proving devotion outlasted comfort. Nearer the towers lay the sacred litter: crushed silver vessels, the Portals inevitable but dead, and countless small cylinders whose interiors held the residue of a fermented offering.
The faithful drank, we surmise, to loosen the body for the rite.
And the rite itself we can almost hear. At the towers' feet stood priests upon a raised platform, and from these platforms issued a summons so profound that the assembled multitude ceased all speech, raised their Portals toward the sky in unison, and swayed. They did not eat. They did not rest. Many wept. Some were carried out upon the shoulders of others, having achieved, we assume, a transcendence too total for the standing body to contain.
Most poignant of all: they endured this in punishing heat, upon ground churned to mud, packed shoulder to shoulder with strangers, for days. No comfort. No shelter. Only the sound and the crowd and the raised bright rectangles.
They were, I have come to believe, a people who could bear anything so long as they bore it together, and who feared nothing on this earth half so much as they feared being alone in a field.