Knowledge from the Ancients

The parchment should have crumbled when I touched it. That was my first thought, before any sense of wonder had time to take hold. We had found older things in worse conditions—tablets that dissolved into powder, ink that vanished at the breath of air, bindings that unraveled into dust the moment they were disturbed. This sheet held together as if time had passed over it rather than through it.

It lay within a narrow stone coffer beneath the collapsed floor of what had once been a workshop, though that word feels insufficient. The chamber bore no resemblance to any forge or laboratory I have known. The walls curved inward in smooth, uninterrupted arcs with no seams or joints, as though the room had been shaped instead of built. At its center, undisturbed by centuries of ruin, rested this single sheet.

I lifted it carefully. The material was neither vellum nor paper; it had a faint translucence, like thin stone held to light. The markings upon it shimmered with a precision that made my eyes strain if I stared too long. Lines covered its surface in dense, deliberate formations—intersecting, spiraling, branching with intent that was far beyond decoration.

At first, I mistook it for ceremony, perhaps some elaborate ritual diagram. That impression did not last. There were repetitions embedded in the design, patterns nested within larger patterns, and a kind of measurement encoded directly into the geometry itself. The longer I studied it, the more it resisted being reduced to ornament.

“Do you see it?” Lethan asked beside me.

“I don’t,” I admitted, “but I can tell it isn’t random.”

He leaned closer, tracing a section with a gloved finger. “This isn’t a spell.”

He was right. We both knew what spells looked like: fragmented, conditional, filled with allowances and corrections. Even the best-preserved Adranian fragments we possess feel like incomplete thoughts, as though we are reconstructing something that was never meant to be broken apart.

This was different. This was complete.

I turned the sheet slightly, and something shifted in how I perceived it. The lines did not move, but they aligned in my mind, revealing depth where I had only seen surface. What I had taken for a flat diagram unfolded into layered structure. Channels suggested movement, though not in any form of magical flow we teach. Anchors appeared, but they did not bind; they balanced. Nodes connected in ways that implied responsiveness rather than control.

“We’ve been copying gestures,” I said quietly. “Trying to reproduce outcomes without understanding how they were formed.”

Lethan said nothing, but I could see he had reached the same conclusion. He pointed to a section near the lower quadrant where repeating forms converged toward a central shape. It was not a core in the traditional sense. It felt more like a purpose given structure.

“This is an artifact,” he said.

I understood immediately what he meant. This was not a record of something discovered. It was a design for something that could be made.

The weight of that realization settled slowly. Every enchanted blade, every warded wall, every charm we have assembled over generations has been built from fragments and approximation. We have treated magic as something to replicate piece by piece, never questioning whether the pieces belonged together in the first place.

This design carried intention from its first line to its last.

I glanced around the chamber again. There were no tools scattered about, no failed attempts, no remnants of trial and error. The absence felt deliberate. Whatever had been created here had not required iteration in the way we understand it. It had required comprehension.

“Can we recreate it?” Lethan asked.

I hesitated because I understood the cost of attempting it without that comprehension. “If we try without understanding,” I said, “we won’t fail in the way we expect. We’ll build something that works incorrectly, and we won’t recognize the difference until it’s too late.”

He nodded slowly.

I returned the sheet to the coffer with care, even though every instinct urged me to keep studying it. There is knowledge that rewards urgency, and there is knowledge that punishes it. This felt like the latter.

“We don’t take this to the Academy,” Lethan said after a moment.

“No,” I agreed.

Not yet.

Above us, the ruins of Herdawn stretched silent and patient, as they had for centuries. We had always believed the ancients left behind tools for us to rediscover.

Now it was clear they had left something far more dangerous.

They had left instructions.