The Lost Volume

Sibyl rifled through the ancient stacks, millennia of dust coalescing into thunderheads between her and the vaulted ceilings, invisible currents carrying them down the valleys of shelving. She looked for something specific and nothing in particular. A volume that she could make a name on, or at least something that she could make a few dollars on.

The city had been discovered a few years prior. An uninhabited continent had recently come on the radar of the Surveyors Guild, and in the gold rush for raw materials to grow the colony, they had stumbled on another ruin of a metropolis. It was all very hush-hush. The Ministry of Antiquities always wanted the first stake in any discoveries and Parliament favoring the Minister for his generous donations to their various campaign funds meant that the politicians were happy to leave an unmapped eighty square kilometers in the public record. Sybil, fortunately, still had a few friends at the Ministry willing enough to pass her a preliminary survey of the area.

She sneezed three times in quick succession, kicking up more ancient motes with each expulsion. The somber light clawing through the overgrown dormers trickled down from the intricately carved arches of the ceiling. The motes illuminated and floated upwards like a late winter snowfall in reverse. Her eyes trained on one particularly large cloud accelerating up the stack like a balloon on a thermal. A glint at the top of the shelf held her gaze as she stepped further down the aisle. She tripped over a broken tile and fell headlong down the channel, slamming into the shelf with her shoulder. It hurt, the sharp edge dug into the skin of her exposed shoulder, a faint line of blood pooled along the narrow slit before it began to drip down her arm. Another mark of her clumsiness, her skin a roadmap of her proclivities for accidents, what was one more detour?

Something fell from above and hit her in the back of the head as she was staring at her latest expression of gracelessness. Bright planetoids orbited each other in her vision as her eyes defocused. A moment of faintness rose at the base of her spine, and she braced herself on the shelving she had assaulted moments before. The moment passed without her collapsing to the floor and she regained control of her eyes, drifting to her feet where an intricately ornamented tome sat open-faced down on cracked stone tiles. It had a solemnity about it, all of its brethren standing at attention shoulder to shoulder on the shelves around her, and it had leapt from the comfort of its ancient post for an alien to find.

She knelt and picked it up, careful to keep the page it had fallen open on. There was a mystical art to chance and circumstance that she held in reverence. The book was unlabeled and uncoded. Inside were light smooth pages, filled with the unintelligible script of The Lost Ones and a series of diagrams and illustrations. All done by hand, or whatever appendage they used for manual writing. She marked the page it had opened to with a ribbon threaded through the book’s spine and slid it into her bag.

The illustrations reminded her of some apparatus in a small annex she had passed in another part of the library. At the center of a fanning circle of stacks was an open space. To one side was the path to the entryway into the room, directly opposite were five structures that looked to be lecterns, hanging from the vaulted ceiling was a grand orrery that she hesitated to step under for fear it could fall at any moment despite the presumed millennia it had survived in place. She wasn’t sure what system it was intended to represent, certainly not the one she was in. At least not any time since her people had arrived.

She inched along the periphery of the cavity in the stacks and made her way out through the hallway she had come in through. The almost gothically arched windows that ran the length on both sides were lined with intricate facets and details, like a basket woven in steel and stone to hold the grand slabs of glass, which still stood after so long of disuse. A jungle of vines and creepers encased each aperture, but not so much as a leaf had breached the walls.

The annex was one of five outcroppings in the entryway she had passed through. Each of the other four lead down a hall to a room like the one with the orrery, each one slightly different, but arranged for the logic of some other intelligence. The annex sat central to these, opposing the grand entry door. Inside was a series of five pillars. Not dissimilar in construction from the lecterns, with a smaller footprint and a plateau of a top. They were positioned pentagonally, with a flat side opening to the doorway. The room itself reflected the geometry. Cascading repetitions of shapes evolving out of patterns on the floor. Symbols, the words of the Lost Ones intermittently placed around the room, and on the top of the pillars.

Sibyl pulled the book from her bag and opened it to the marked page. She stood in the doorway and orientated the illustration in the book to match. She scanned the pages for clues to what it was saying. No one had deciphered the Lost ideograms in any meaningful way. Every few years some young boisterous student would publish a claim to understanding the lexicon, and every few years the Ministry establishment has something new to scoff at. But she didn’t need to translate the language to understand them in context, to an extent anyway.

Her eyes slid across the page to a small diagram at the bottom left surrounded by some sharp-lined symbols that looked more like mathematics than language. The ideograms lay at the apices of a pentagon, and she noticed that they were similar to those on a series of keys atop the pillars. Blinded by her curiosity, she circumnavigated the room, depressing the respective key on each pillar. She came to the last one and hesitated. It was one thing to sneak into a Ministry black site to steal some pieces to sell on the sly. It was an order of magnitude worse to interact with the Lost Ones’ technology. Not that there was a strong precedent set without having found anything particularly advanced functioning. What was the likelihood that this would be it? If it was, it could be her ticket back in. She pressed it. The ambient light in the room seemed to dim for a fraction of a second, and she felt the air pull from her lungs. When she gasped to reclaim her stolen breath, the air had a different flavor of staleness, a metallic mustiness that was previously lacking.

She blinked and a shimmering void appeared in the center of the pillars. She stepped closer and looked through it intensely. It was like she was looking through a mirror but finding herself vacant. The tone of the light a deeper shade of green, the walls a faint ombre of grit and growth that those behind her lacked. She pulled a pencil from her bag and tossed it forward through the aperture. It arced through the air and landed on the ground that was not quite like that at her feet with a soft clack.

She stepped through. It felt both like nothing and eternity and she found herself in a dark reflection of the world she had just stepped out of. In the main entry, she found the same four halls, but these weren’t untouched by time. One had fully collapsed, nature spilling in through the doorway. The others still stood, but they hadn’t staved off the assault of flora, plants crept through fissures in the walls, they reached for new rootholds.

In front of her on the floor, hidden in the shadow of the entryway was the white of bone, scattered unceremoniously. She stepped forward and knelt next to the remains and found them agonizingly familiar. In all of the literature, there had never been a visual depiction of the Lost Ones, speculation abounded, but most assumed that they were of an alien species, similar proportion to us, that much could be told by what they left behind. But certainly not us. Sybil considered that the proportions may be slightly off, but the similarities to her people were apparent. Her breath became shallow. She understood why it was assumed that the Lost were born of another world. If they are us even a few hundred generations removed, what does their disappearance mean for our future? This is the first body found in two hundred years since the first ruin was discovered. Where could they have gone? Where could they have come from? What does that mean for where we come from?

Sybil breathed rapidly, on the cusp of hyperventilating. She whispered a soft I’m sorry to the corpse and picked up the skull, complete with an ornate blade piercing its parietal bone, and placed it in her bag. She pivoted and sprinted back through the annex without so much as a second glance around her.

She was outside the entryway, kneeling with her hands on the ground, eyes closed, attempting to slow her breathing. She slowly regained her faculties, opened her eyes and found a brilliantly bright marigold flower staring back at her. It felt like freedom until a shadow moved into the sun's light, drawing her gaze up. In front of her stood the Minister of Antiquities, his cabal, and their entourage of aides.

“Sibyl, Sibyl, Sibyl…” he gazed into her eyes with calm resolve, “I thought we had to let you go because of little expeditions like this one. How do you always manage to find yourself where you aren’t supposed to be?” Sybil clenched her jaw.

“I guess I’m just lucky like that. But I have something you might be interested in.” She pulled the skull from her bag by the hilt of the blade and held it up. He reached out for it, shock, and what seemed like a hint of fear in his eyes. She pulled it back. “What’s it worth to you old man?” Anger lit his face.

“Why must you always play games? We will reinstate you, and give you the freedom to run your own team.”

“That’s it? It was no small feat to find this. I’m sure there are other buyers, maybe I should weigh my options.” She feigned to put the skull back.

“I can pay you a signing bonus. But you can never mention this...discovery to anyone.” Sibyl narrowed her eyes, there was more to this than she had realized. But she knew that if the Minister had enough clout to make a city disappear, he had more than enough to make her disappear if she became inconvenient for him. She put on a false smile and tossed him the skull. She closed her bag, the tome could serve her later as long as she didn’t show all her cards now.

“Sounds good boss, when do I start?”