Orrythas found it in Chamber Six.
The text was carved into the wall of a circular room at the deepest point of the excavated dungeon — a chamber that the scholars called the Sanctum because it was the dead god's inner temple, the place where the god's consciousness had been densest before death, the spiritual equivalent of a heart in a body that no longer breathed.
The carving was old. Older than the dead god's civilization, which itself was older than any living record. Orrythas's Memory domain could date information by its resonance — the way a note's overtones told a musician the instrument's age. This carving resonated at the frequency of deep time. So old that the language it was written in had died, fossilized, and become geology. So old that understanding it required not translation but archaeology — digging through layers of linguistic sediment to find the meaning buried beneath.
