Birthright (The Technomage Archive, Book 1) - Complete Novel

Chapter Twenty-Three

To the shock of his teammates, Chuckie was the one who found the inscription.

He said, "That what you're looking for, boss?" and pointed to a shattered tower not far away.

Ceril focused on the tower. "Yeah, I think it is, Chuckie. Good work." The three of them moved more quickly toward the ruins, which weren't an obelisk like Ceril had originally thought.

"Can you read it?" Saryn asked as they stood at the base of the tower. The building itself was broken at an angle, as though the weight of its upper section was just too much for the base to support any longer. If Ceril hadn't known better, he would have said that it had been cut away, given the angle and cleanness of the edge. The writing was inscribed at the highest point, and during Meshin's heyday, it must have circled the whole tower when it was still intact.

"I don't know," Ceril said honestly. He couldn't read it, but it wasn't because he did not know the language. He couldn't read it because it was simply out of range, too high up. "Can you, Saryn?"

"No," she said. "It's too far away. I can't even make out any characters."

"Me, either," Chuckie added.

The nanites in Ceril's nose and mouth surged. Tendrils expanded from his nostrils into his eyes, which once again went solid black with the magnification Conjuring. Saryn did the same, while Chuckie focused his attention on keeping watch while they were occupied.

"Stupid angelmen taking my guns," Chuckie muttered. "Lotta good I'm going to do if something tries to attack us."

Ceril and Saryn ignored him.

"What is it?" Chuckie asked, after the two of them stood gawking upward for a few minutes.

"Well," Ceril said, not breaking his gaze from the writing on the tower, "I can read it. Or some of it. I think."

"Really?" Chuckie said.

"Yeah, really. It's kind of weird, actually. I shouldn't be able to read it, though. No one should."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, it's written in...Ancient Erlonian. I guess that's what I'd call it."

"Okay, I'd think that's a good thing."

"But that's just it, Chuckie. There is no Ancient Erlonian language. We all speak Common now, but we haven't forever. Common dates back only as far as the original Untouchable's era, but before that, there is no indication of a universal alphabet or language." Ceril pointed at the peak of the tower. "Up there, I see characters from the Yaghian, Ternian, and Ferran sites I studied." He paused a moment. "You may have just made a huge discovery, Chuckie."

"How's that?" Chuckie asked, and Ceril wondered if the guy were really that dense if it was just for show.

"Because," Ceril explained, "those three written languages have nearly nothing in common with each other, but here, at least based on what I can see on the building, there are characters and syntax from all three regions utilized in a single script. It's not like they're being used separately, either. It's a single, unified script that uses all three sets of characters and grammars."

Chuckie still looked at him blankly, and Ceril said, "This might be the original source of the other languages. This Instance might even be older than Erlon itself."

Now Saryn looked at Ceril blankly, too. "Really?" she asked "Just from that fragment?"

Ceril nodded. "Yeah. Maybe. It's way too early to tell, and I'm not even sure what the symbols technically mean when put together like this, but that's my initial theory, yeah."