Excavation Report, Precinct of the Great Provisioning Hall.
We uncovered a row of eight identical shrines, each a slender pillar crowned with a glowing tablet, arranged in the manner of a devotional colonnade. The Ancients approached these pillars alone, never in groups, which tells us the rite was one of private penance rather than communal celebration. Each supplicant arrived bearing offerings in a woven basket, then presented them one by one to the shrine, passing each object across an illuminated altar-stone until the shrine emitted a single clear tone.
We have named this tone the Absolution.
The wear patterns are instructive. The most eroded surface on every pillar is a small region we call the Panel of Grievance, where the faithful pressed again and again with a single finger, often in evident distress. Contemporary accounts, if we may trust the recovered fragments, record a recurring liturgical phrase: "Unexpected item in the bagging area."
We believe this to be a confession of unworthiness, chanted by an unseen priest-voice to remind the supplicant that the offering was never truly theirs to give.
Note the absence of any human attendant at the shrine itself. Yet slightly apart, hovering at the edge of the colonnade, we find evidence of a single robed figure who oversaw many pillars at once and was summoned only in moments of crisis, moving between the distressed with a sacred key that silenced the priest-voice. This was surely the highest rank of their clergy: one keeper for eight altars, appearing only to forgive.
They were a people who longed to be trusted and could not quite manage it, who built machines to watch them be honest and then stood before those machines, alone, apologizing to the light for things they had already paid for.