Site 12, riverside excavation. We recovered eleven of the long seating-altars along a single processional path, each anchored to the earth with iron so that it could never be moved, spaced exactly one shout apart.
The slats were worn to a shine at the center and rough at the edges, which tells us the Ancients approached the altar from its middle and always alone, lowering themselves to a fixed posture facing the water. We name these devices Vigil-Frames, and we believe they were stations of enforced stillness in a culture that otherwise never stopped moving.
A small bronze plate riveted to the backrest of nine of the eleven bears a name and two dates. We are confident these were burial markers. The seated worshipper was meant to commune with the honored dead by occupying their exact place above the ground, wearing their grief into the wood.
Note the wear pattern more closely. One end of every frame is polished; the far end is not. From this we reconstruct a strict hierarchy: the elder or the mourner claimed the sacred end, while the empty stretch beside them was left open as an offering, a seat kept vacant for the departed, or for a stranger the ritual obliged them to tolerate.
Crumbs of fossilized bread lay beneath all eleven, scattered for the small feathered priests who gathered at these sites to receive the tribute.
They planted these altars where the view was widest and then commanded themselves to sit and do nothing before it. They tethered stillness to iron so it could not run away from them. I think the Screen People were a race terrified of their own speed, who built shrines to the one act they could no longer perform unaided: to stop, to look at moving water, and to let an hour pass without being asked to become anything at all.