By the twelfth day, Leo's parchment sheets were filled with rows of hand-sketched symbols and crude translations scribbled beside them.
His torchlight flickered across the cluttered desk he had claimed as his own, illuminating the mess of scrolls, broken quills, and half-eaten rations spread across the stone surface.
He was close.
He could feel it.
But something was still missing.
Some of the symbols—particularly those etched into the mural or written repeatedly on the oldest scrolls—kept appearing over and over again. And yet, no amount of cross-referencing with the children's book or the vocabulary he had built gave him a clean translation.
These were not simple words, they didn't represent simple objects like fire or water, or simple actions like eat or run.
They were concepts.
Ideas.
Foundations.
So, Leo did what he had never done before and started naming things himself.
"This one…" he muttered under his breath, tracing a spiral-shaped glyph that he had seen carved beside almost every depiction of a humanoid figure. "This one makes sense in sentences when I read it as 'we the people of this land', as it seems to be a symbol for civilization. However, for my own convenience, I'll just call the people of this land, 'ancients',"
He wrote it down beside the symbol:
[Spiral Symbol] – Ancients
The next glyph was a curved line ending in a sharp peak—one that often appeared near fallen figures or bones, which only made sense in a sentence when he read it as death, and hence Leo named it as such.
[Hook Symbol] – Death
Another symbol, softer, repeating beside growing plants, open hands, and circles of children. This one radiated warmth—every time he saw it, as he instinctively thought of breath and beating hearts when he saw it.
[Looped Triangle] – Life
One by one, Leo named several of these symbols, and began reading them in complex sentences to make sure it made sense, as little by little, he created a vocabulary of his own.
Although he still wasn't entirely certain what the original words for these concepts were, his mind no longer rejected the symbols as foreign.
Instead, it began embracing them. Connecting them. Associating each repeated glyph with the mental idea he had forced onto it, until reading a page no longer felt like deciphering madness, but rather like looking at an encoded sheet that only he could understand.
However, he didn't stop just there.
He pressed onward.
Assigning a word for every emotion, every object, every action he could recognize, sometimes even inventing syllables that sounded appropriate to match the tone of what he imagined these Ancients might have once called them.
And slowly, methodically, obsessively, the language stopped feeling foreign.
It stopped feeling dead.
And though he would never have considered himself a linguist, nor someone curious enough to commit to anything academic for this long, after 16 days of hard work, he was finally proficient enough in the language of the ancients to finally uncover the secrets they left behind.
—--------
"Alright… time to find out what that damn painting actually means," Leo muttered, cracking his neck as he sat back at the desk, his fingers brushing aside the mess of loose parchment, ink-stained cloth, and empty ration wrappers.
He began organizing the scrolls he hadn't yet opened, separating them based on script density, illustrative margins, and context clues he'd begun picking up, such as symbols of kingdoms, geographical landmarks, dates, and strange dividers that resembled modern subject tags.
History, Geography, Science, Language, Culture, and Ritual.
The first category he dove into was History—because that, he figured, would hold the closest link to the mural.
He flipped open the most intact manuscript he could find, its binding frayed and its spine bent with age, yet still held together by the stubborn will of whoever had written it.
As the moment he laid eyes on the first page, his heart skipped.
The first glyph? The spiral. The one he'd assigned as "Ancients."
And beside it, in repeated patterns, the symbol of the upright standing lizard god, the one wearing stone armor in the mural with orange-dotted eyes.
He read slowly, muttering aloud in his self-assigned phonetic syllables, parsing meaning from the web of text, until the picture grew clearer in his mind.
These were records left behind by humanoid beasts.
Beings that bore uncanny resemblance to modern lizardmen, albeit with a few key differences.
The 'ancients' who had once thrived here were intelligent, upright, and fiercely devoted to the lizard god, whom they believed was not just their creator, but the spark of their sentience. He was known as Zharnok, a name Leo mentally underlined three times as he continued translating.
Entire cities bore his emblem.
Ceremonies were held every solstice to renew their bloodline's bond with him.
Newborns were tested for signs of "flame-born purity", a phrase he inferred meant the potential to wield magic or carry divine traits.
And the more he read, the more he realized something staggering—
These people… these Ancients… were not alone in their worship.
They had rivals.
Warring tribes who pledged loyalty to different beast gods—twelve in total, just like the mural had shown.
Leo read through accounts of temple burnings, mass conversions, divine duels between champions of different tribes—ritual wars fought not just for territory, but to prove which god's lineage was most favored.
It wasn't long before another phrase caught his attention.
The Dimming.
He read those two symbols again and again, scrawled in increasingly frantic script as the text went on. It was as though even the ink had begun to panic.
"The light of the sky… ceased."
"The beast gods no longer answered prayers."
"The mana turned black."
Leo's brows drew together as he flipped the page, only to find the next section ripped out, scorched at the edges as though the one who had written it went mad midway and ripped it apart before burning it.
But what was left of the book was enough for him to understand that this world had not always been still.
That this pocket of space had not been created alongside the universe's creation as many modern historians believed.
As though nobody in the outside world really knew how time-stilled worlds came to be, and whether they contained civilizations before they were isolated or not.
What Leo read here was irrefutable proof that this world was once alive and flourishing.
Full of sun, ancient gods, and war.
And then—something happened.
Something that converted it into this time-stilled world.
But what could that be?