The Atlantian System: Creation

Vigo’s Perspective

“Why do you think some Arisen become Chosen and others become Blessed?” Vigo ventured as he flipped through one of the thousands of books in the scriptorium.

After the initial excitement of exploring millennia of history had subsided, he was now peacefully seated at the table with Scribe Huda. Occasionally, he would break their comfortable silence with a random question.

Huda gently shut the book she had been immersed in, absentmindedly tracing circles with her gloved fingers on its delicate leather surface.

“Hm. I’m not sure if anyone knows for sure. I remember reading an account from ancient Scribe who spoke of the Old Gods that made the Arisen. From what I remember, the myth tells of the Old Gods crafting the Arisen to defend and support the Mundane. Nevertheless, a war erupted between a faction of the Old Gods. I can’t remember what for, but the result was that the golden rule was placed on all of us, those that fought for the evil god lost their humanity, and the Old Gods left our world.”

“Huh.” Vigo flipped a page. “Seems way too simple.”

“How so?” Huda casually inquired as she opened her book back up.

“I mean, nothing in history has ever, ever been x plus y equals z. Look at World War II, for example. None of the events in World War II would have happened if World War I. World War I wouldn’t have looked very different if Archduke Ferdinand hadn’t been assassinated. Archduke Ferdinand wouldn’t have been assassinated if the Treaty of Berlin hadn’t been signed thirty-something years earlier.”

“The past is nothing but a spiderweb of happenstances.” She commented impassively.

“See, first of all, I don’t like spiders.” Vigo shivered in disgust. “Second, I really don’t like not seeing the web as a whole. Sure, life is one big domino effect, but being blind to those blocks is a great way to knock everything over.”

After finishing his book, he took a moment to collect his thoughts before standing up and setting off to return it to its rightful place on the shelf.

Once again, his mind wandered to his grandmother in Christchurch. Since he was four, she had been looking after him, as his father was incarcerated and his mother struggled with drug addiction. Her memory had been steadily declining, and she had moved to a retirement village when he began college two years ago.

Once again, he pondered if they informed her about his situation or if she expected him to contact her.

To distract himself, he immersed himself in the scriptorium, absorbing as much information as he could, but in the moments between reading and searching through books, his thoughts were consumed by his grandmother.

Vigo quickly located the right shelf and was about to return to the table to grab the next leather-bound journal when he noticed a glimmer of something metallic on a different bookshelf in the collection.

Overcome by curiosity, Vigo allowed his feet to guide him towards the object, just like a moth irresistibly drawn to a flame.

The item in question was a metal spine of darkened steel, which was strange considering nearly every book and scroll in the space had been made of paper, leather, or cloth.

In the gentlest manner possible, he retrieved it from its spot on the shelf, and upon closer examination, realized he had never witnessed anything quite like it.

The book consisted of pages made from a steel-like metal, so thin and intricately woven that they could bend and adapt to the reader’s preference without hindering the reading experience.

The cover and back plates were thick and tooled with archaic images of swirls and hard lines. A peculiar yet prominent pattern of semi-precious stones adorned the front, back, and spine.

Vigo carefully turned the pages, his surprise shifting into confusion as he examined the intricate designs etched onto the delicate paper.

When Huda heard Vigo’s footsteps and saw the metal tome in his hands, her eyes did a double take.

“Oh! You found the mystery box.”

“The what?” Vigo frowned at her statement.

“We call this the mystery box. As you can see, it is no ordinary piece of literature. It is written in Ananakin, which is a common version of the language used by the Old Gods. Unfortunately, no one can decipher what it means. Not even us Scribes, and we’re built to understand and communicate in every conceivable language.” Huda shrugged, leaning back in her chair as if she were about to continue reading, but watched him move about the room out of the corner of her eye.

“Huh,” He poked the inside of his cheek as his eyes ran back and forth over the symbols, then picked up some of the books on the table and placed them on a cart so that he had room to place the metal tome there.

He took a piece of paper and a pen, then proceeded to scribble two sets of symbols - first a few lines of one set, followed by a second set.

He paused, his head tilting to one side as he looked between the two different sets of symbols on the paper and the strange markings in the metal book.

“Huh.” He said again, nodding to himself as he got another piece of paper and did the same thing again, this time with two different sets of symbols.

Huda’s brows came together as she watched him pause once more and look at his work, his expression both confused and fascinated.

“What are you doing?” She asked as she placed the book she’d been reading on her side of the table.

“You said no one had been able to figure out what this book says, right?” The expression he gave her when his head tilted up from his work was that of a man on the brink of a masterpiece.

When Huda nodded, he continued, “Do you know how old this book is?”

“It’s dated to 1430s, but my understand is that it’s a replica of a tome from the first century.”

Vigo looked back down at the tome, his gloved hand running over the symbols on the book as he asked, “Do you know what conclusions they drew? Stuff they ruled out?”

Frowning, she shook her head. “No. In all honesty, records were sort of hard to maintain before the Iron Age due to internal conflicts. It wasn’t until the early Middle Ages that the Chosen were able to be systematic with their record keeping, so any texts earlier than around 1,000 A.D. are very rare.”

Vigo had a lot more questions than answers.

Where were the originals kept?

What was the internal conflict that kept such talented people from being able to keep track of their own history?

He shook his head, reminding himself to keep on track.

“I really don’t mean this to be rude, but how do you - the Scribes - not know how to read this thing?”

Huda shrugged very so slightly, “The original mission of a scribe was to take notes and keep track large quantities of information for a population where the majority of its citizens were illiterate. We were the record makers and maintainers, which usually meant we were only exposed to a handful of languages. The skill used most by a Scribe is writing - I am ambidextrous, my photographic memory which lets me retain anything I read, and my ability to quickly learn languages if I have the correct materials. If I want to understand a language, I have to be exposed to it in both the phonological and phonetic sense, and the language needs to be close enough to one I’m already fluent in to understand it.”

Vigo frowned in confusion. “You need to see and hear a language and hope it’s close to something you already know for you to be fluent?”

She nodded, “Correct. Take the romantic languages. Spanish, Italian, and French, for example. To say ‘of’ or ‘from’ in Spanish and French is both ‘de’ while in Italian its ‘di’ - all of them are so close in written and verbal form. In constraint, the words ‘weather’, ‘transportation’, and ‘marriage’ are almost identical in Chinese as they are in Japanese, but knowing Chinese or Japanese wouldn’t help me in acquiring Swahili.”

He glanced back down at the book. “So the reason you can’t read this book is that it isn’t close to any language you’ve heard or read before. You can’t acquire a new language if you don’t have some kind of building blocks to start with.”

“Exactly.” The smile she gave him was bright, but colored with an odd sadness. “It’s a shame, though, that the world was in so much chaos back then that even our kind couldn’t preserve such works for future generations.”

Vigo ran a hand over his stubble. “This might sound very crazy, but I think I know what language this book is written in.”

Huda froze, his statement so strange to her that it took her a moment to find the right words.

“I-I what?”

“Look.” Vigo held up the papers he’d been scribbling to show the four sets of symbols drawn there.

“This is Sumerian dating back to 3000 B.C.” He pointed to a set of pictographs. “This,” He pointed to the next set directly under the first, “Is also Sumerian, but it’s when the language moved away from pictographs to cuneiform, which happened somewhere in 2200 B.C.”

Huda leaned forward, squinting as she compared the two. Indeed, the symbols were very similar, but she noticed that many of the symbols had been turned 90 degrees on their side, like the symbol of wheat grain that had once pointed up now pointed left on its side and the fish that had faced right was now facing upwards. Also, most of the symbols have fewer lines and were just a bit more simple.

“Now, this one.” He pointed at the third set of symbols, “is Early Babylonian, which is a dialect of the Akkadian language that used Sumerian as a building block for its own. The Akkadian language shifted to a phonetic language, so words were written as they sounded according to their syllabary. However, a lot of the Sumerian words like sheep kept their characters, but now they were being pronounced how the shape appeared in their language. So, instead of saying udu for sheep in Sumerian, you would have said immerum.”

This time, Huda could easily see the departure from pictographs to the use of wedge styluses. Gone were the curves and subtle nuances, replaced by harsh straight lines. The symbol of the fish from earlier had been reduced to an inverted triangle, with four smaller lines coming off its points for fins and tail.

Vigo finally pointed to the fourth set of symbols. “This is Akkadian in the Late Babylonian dialect. Notice something?”