Excavation Site 44-C, designated the Chamber of Waiting.
We have unearthed a narrow subterranean passage adjoining what appears to be a great hall of ritual noise. The walls still bear a faint iridescence, and the floor tiles are worn smooth in a single unbroken line, evidence that the Ancients queued here in vast numbers, night upon night, for reasons that could only have been devotional.
The women of the Screen People, it seems, gathered in this passage in tight clusters, never singly. We infer from residue and posture-marks that they arrived in threes and fours and would not proceed without one another, a bond so absolute that a single member could not be left behind at the threshold.
One held the wrist of the next; the next held a small illuminated tablet aloft. We believe these tablets were reliquaries, consulted for guidance while the faithful awaited entry to the inner sanctum.
Curious deposits recovered from the queue: a smeared pigment-stick, worn to a nub; a torn ticket of admission; a single shoe of impractical height, abandoned as an offering. The pigment we take to be sacramental, reapplied to the face in a mirror-shrine within, so that each supplicant might emerge transformed and worthy.
Rival scholars insist the passage was merely a place of bodily relief. We reject this vulgar theory. No people would wait so long, embrace so fiercely, and weep so openly (the tear-salts are unmistakable in the grout) for anything so trivial as the body. Here, plainly, was pilgrimage.
They were a people who could not endure alone. They descended into the dark, they queued in the roaring half-light, they held each other by the wrist and told each other, over and over, that they were beautiful.
And then they went back in to be lost in the noise together, which was the only heaven they knew how to build.