Field Journal, Ninth Season at the Reception Strata.
Today we exhumed the most elaborate mass gathering site yet uncovered, and I am nearly certain we have found a temple of transformation. The Screen People assembled here in unprecedented numbers, arranged in tiered wooden benches facing a raised platform, as one would arrange worshippers before an altar.
Central to the rite was a garment, the Whitecloth, a vast trailing textile worn by a single celebrant and by no one else present. Its impracticality is the proof of its holiness: no laborer could till or hunt in such a robe. It was worn once, we now believe, and then entombed forever in a sealed box, which we recovered intact. The Ancients preserved this garment more carefully than they preserved their own dead.
Nearby, in the Feasting Layer, we found the Tiered Confection, a monument of hardened sugar built in ascending platforms, ritually cut with a ceremonial blade by two celebrants gripping the handle together. Fragments suggest it was destroyed at the peak of the ceremony, a controlled act of sacred waste that signaled abundance and thus high rank.
Most moving are the Metal Circlets, two small rings of precious material exchanged and then never removed, worn against the skin until the wearer's death. We find them still on the finger-bones. Whatever bond they sealed, these people considered it stronger than the grave, stronger than memory, stronger than the flood that eventually took their cities.
They were, I am now convinced, a species that could not bear to face the vastness of a single life alone, and so invented an afternoon in which they gathered everyone they loved into one room, ate too much, wept for reasons they could not name, and bound themselves to another creature with a ring they intended to be buried in. A hopeful people.
A frightened one.