Interlude: Four Figures at the Tree

The explorers found the geometry beneath four hundred meters of ice.

Dr. Nadiya Kest knew it was built before the drill camera completed its first rotation. Nature produced symmetry, but not this refusal of perspective. The structure resembled a pyramid only from certain angles. From others it became a set of interlocking planes descending into one another, larger inside the survey model than the cavern containing it.

Her team entered through a fracture opened by geothermal movement.

Five explorers. Two drones. One linguist. No BSI escort because the Russian deep expedition had filed the site as geological until the door closed behind them.

They moved through corridors whose walls contained black inclusions like frozen stars. Writing covered several surfaces in bands. Some signs resembled early Mesopotamian cuneiform, but the resemblance failed under grammar analysis. The system used positional depth as well as shape; marks cut deeper into stone changed the meaning of those above them.

Linguist Aram Bek called it Sumerian-like only because humanity possessed no older comparison.

They found murals damaged deliberately.

Tall figures worked beneath a divided sun. Smaller figures carried stone, water and bodies. In the next panel, the smaller figures raised tools as weapons. The tall figures created a third people inside vessels arranged around a branching machine.

Or a tree.

Translation fragments appeared on the drone display:

MAKERS OF LONG YEARS

THE LABORING ONES ROSE

SECOND CLAY / SLOW MIND / SHORT BLOOD

Nadiya disliked the certainty of machine translation. "Mark every noun provisional."

Aram nodded. "Especially makers. It could mean ancestors, owners or those who shape by cutting."

Explorer Tomas Ilyev studied the smaller figures. "Igigi?"

"That is a label from surviving Mesopotamian texts," Aram said. "Using it here may reveal more about us than them. The sign could mean workers, watchers, descendants or a class of stars."

"And the tall ones? Anunnaki?"

"Same warning. Ancient names were never a single clean mythology even before the world ended. If later cultures used those words for what they found here, that does not make the translation literal."

Nadiya logged the distinction. Their expedition had come looking for origins and carried too many ready-made ones in its luggage.

They photographed every band before proceeding.

The corridor descended.

A flood covered the next mural. Bodies changed beneath black rain. Some rose with extended limbs. Others knelt before four child-sized figures standing around the tree-machine.

All fruit on its branches had been scratched away.

Only four empty stems remained.

Another band of text survived beneath mineral glaze.

WHAT IS EATEN DOES NOT END

THE SEAT OF THOUGHT IS THE GATE

FOUR [SURFACES LOST] LIGHT [DAMAGED] DEATH

The translation software proposed houses, bodies, stations and agreements for the missing noun with nearly equal confidence.

One explorer crossed himself. Another laughed too loudly.

Aram said, "It may describe funerary inheritance. Consuming memory metaphorically."

Nadiya looked at the painted figures eating from a fallen skull.

"May."

They reached the enormous sealed door at the lowest accessible level.

The final approach contained a damaged sequence of smaller panels.

One showed an old figure lying beneath four kneeling descendants. In the next, the old figure was absent and one descendant carried the throat mark. Between panels, a portion had been hammered away, leaving only fragments that the scanner rendered as:

TAKE WITHIN / SEAT OF THOUGHT

HOUSE CONTINUES, BODY ENDS

Aram refused to call it brain consumption. "The sign for thought-seat can mean skull, memory, authority or council chamber. Take within can mean eat, inherit, remember or imprison."

Tomas looked at the painted mouths around the fallen head. "It can also mean eat."

"Yes," Aram said. "It can."

Another panel showed a marked figure consumed by pale altered bodies. The next depicted one of those bodies shrinking into a childlike human shape. Whether the sequence described transfer, rebirth, punishment or warning was impossible to determine.

Nadiya felt relieved by uncertainty. A clear explanation in a place like this would have been more suspicious than confusion.

They reached the door.

Four vertical figures surrounded an inverted tree. Each possessed a different mark at the throat. The first mark resembled flame. The second an open hand. The third a broken circle.

The fourth had been removed from the stone.

Not eroded.

Cut away.

Fresh black dust lay beneath the missing symbol.

Aram raised his scanner. New translation formed across the display, uncertain and incomplete:

WHEN THE RED RETURNS WITHOUT THE LINE

THE FOURTH DOOR—

The remaining text had been destroyed.

Nadiya placed one glove against the door.

Something touched the other side.

Once.

Then twice.

The four throat marks began to glow.

Far above them, every drill and radio shut down.

The explorers activated chemical lamps. Amber light crawled across the door.

Aram read from the scanner's last cached translation. "There is another damaged line. The youngest bears no house. Or the last-born comes without lineage. Confidence fourteen percent."

Nadiya thought of the confidential bulletin transmitted that morning from Caldera: structural attack, unknown prisoner escaped, BSI operative injured. Most details redacted. One leaked frame had shown black marks around a young man's throat.

She had dismissed the resemblance as human pattern-seeking.

Now the missing fourth symbol pulsed in darkness where stone had been cut away.

Something moved beyond the door. Not a hand this time. A long weight dragging across the other side.

One explorer whispered a prayer in Russian. Another began backing toward the corridor.

The door exhaled warm air through a seam that had not existed before.

It smelled of wet soil.

No open earth existed within a thousand kilometers.

The voice behind the sealed door spoke a name none of them had transmitted.

"Alex."

A second voice answered from deeper inside.

"Found."