Heliqar's library wasn't the Great Library of Thensapolis. Codices and scrolls were expensive. Scribes were expensive. It was a smallish room in the Palace, no bigger than my quarters. It had always smelled of taxidermy. There were the shelves with the copies of Elias' scrolls and codices, as well as the window and the reading desk by it. The only sound was my boots scuffing across the stone floor.
The "Speculations" was a mess of sketches and notes. Elias' works were normally beautifully written and meticulously organized. On the inside cover was Elias' recognizable signature, but inside it wasn't Elias' normal beautiful script. This was the raw product. It was a compilation of journal entries that had not been organized or recopied.
I turned the delicate leaves. On the one page was a diagram of a water screw, the next a star chart, and the next a diagram of force calculations that made up the physics of arches.
As I flipped through the pages, I found a blank page with a title, "The Twelve Stones of the First Empire." Elias mentioned the First Empire before in the his histories under the heading Myth. It was referred to as the Golden Age, before the darkness of the brief Second Empire and what came after its fall swallowed the world. This darkness only lifted when our Empire, the third, allegedly conquered all the warring states of the world. That was almost two thousand years ago. History about the formation of our Empire were bound to be self-serving mythologies propagated with the Imperial cult whose temple was still in our city.
I flipped to the next page and there they were, a set of rough charcoal sketches. Mostly regular polyhedrons, starting with a sphere and at the end a dodecahedron with a label saying "white" and a tridecahedron labeled "black." I placed my two stones next to these. They pictures matched. My heart quickened.
In the margin were written notes. By the white one it said: "A fire that burns away lies," and by the black one it said, "The black weight of the judge that needs no eyes."
I turned the page. On the first side was text. At the top I saw in phonetics the words that the dying woman had spoken: "Aiy hehr-biy bii-qwee zees stawnz tooo zee..."
On the other side was a poem, in a script I didn't know, a language I didn't know. But it did use letters, like we did. Not our letters, but ones similar to the ancient script used in Olympos and Thensapolis.
Below the old woman's words were Elias' commentary.
>Legends of these stones are discussed by many traders from Olympos. I have also heard similar tales from well-educated men from other lands. The fact that so many have such similar stories, hint that there may be truth behind them. These legends are seductive, but their seduction is a trap. Rumor is not fact. I have interviewed many. Some say that men from some shady component of the Legion Intelligence come to collect any person in whose possession they are found, and they are never seen or heard from again.
>
> Similar conspiracy theories are frequent in large cities, and no city is larger than Olympos itself. My conclusion is that someone in Olmypos started some kind of rumor centuries ago that keeps being transferred back and forth between the nations and the capital.
>
> The more a tale defies the common order of the world, the more it must be burdened with proof. It is the duty of the seeker to doubt as much as to believe. A man who claims that there is a plow that can fly to the stars must do more than show a sketch of a plow. He must fly the plow and allow us to see it.
>
> The sketches and poem are reproduced here second hand from the notes of a visit from a visiting Qulomban archeologist. Engravings found in the archeological ruins of an ancient city. This is the most concrete evidence that I possess.
>
> After painstaking research I have concluded that these stories must be dismissed for lack of evidence. The wise men of Thensapolis have a saying, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
>
> No demonstration, no witness I can interrogate, not a scrap evidence. I am led to conclude that rumor is the simplest explanation and that the Golden Age as well as the stones are myth.
>
> Yet something holds me back. The sheer volume of the stories regarding these stones. How long they have lasted. The trustworthiness of the people I have heard the tales from. When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. If I could truly rule out every mundane explanation for the tales, lies, mistakes, exaggerations, then perhaps the stones, however improbable, would be the only explanation left. Alas, I do not have hard evidence and I will never be able to eliminate such ordinary explanations.
>
> But, as I wrote in my Epistemologies, here is the danger: in our age, how can I be sure what is impossible? What is "impossible" to us may only be ignorance in disguise.
>
> Among all explanations that fit the facts and do not contradict themselves, choose the simplest. Yet simplicity is a slippery thing. To a farmer, the sun's daily path is simple: it circles the world. To the astronomer, that is the more complicated fiction. What is "simple" depends on what you already know, and what you do not.
>
> Again, I do not know if my efforts to record the information I have collected will have any value to anyone, but still for the sake of completeness, I have kept my records.
My mouth hung open as I stared at the stones that I had placed on the table. I felt like I knew the man. He was the most wise and intelligent that either of my parents had ever known. He taught my father to build a kingdom and look at the stars. He had looked at this puzzle and given up, concluding that it was pure fantasy.
My father's words echoed in my mind, "You are looking for magic because you are young. For all you know, magic could be just around the next corner. You are desperate. You see anomalies because you need them to be there."
Was I just a desperate boy holding two interesting rocks, grasping at the scribbles of a dead man who wanted to believe in fairytales? To disagree with Elias or my father would feel hubristic.
"No," I mumbled to myself. "Elias didn't have the evidence. Yet here it is on the table in front of me and it's still not enough to convince your protege."
I brought out my own journal and placed it next to the poem, then I went to the shelves, and got out the Olympian lexicon. At the end was a much smaller glossary. It was Elias' attempt at reconstructing the prehistoric language that Olympian derived from. The dead man was an incredible polymath. It started with an alphabet. An alphabet that matched the poem.
I took my quill and dipped it into the inkwell. I turned my journal to a fresh page and began copying the phonetic gibberish of the poem.
"A.. sin-gle... sphere..."