The first warning Gloria had that her journey was drawing to a close was a sharp banging on her cabin door. She shared the space with three other researchers for their long journey, and for all she knew they would continue to bunk together once they'd moved off the ship and onto land. There had been plenty of correspondance off of the research site detailing the dig progress, the excavation, the ruins, but very little concerning the accomidations. One of the other girls opened the cabin door, and was swiftly bowled over by Ms.Francesca, her arms laden with tall trays of food.
"Okay gi- thank you Dora- ok girls!" Francesca used a foot to shift one of their chairs, plopped the tray down atop it, and then set about clearing everyone's papers off their shared table. The ensuing cries of outrage were largely ignored. Francesca didn't much mind upsetting her roommates, especially when she was excited. "They closed the mess down early this morning but I snagged you all breakfast before they kicked me out."
"Why-- gods, it's early, isn't it? Why did they close down early?" Gloria snatched some of her own papers off the table before Francesca could get to them, and set about organizing them into the thick leather satchel that she used to hold her notes and correspondance.
"Because, Miss Gloria, we useless fools in the cargo hold are the only souls left unoccupied today." Francesca smiled widely at the puzzled looks she received and smugly set about arranging their breakfasts on the now clear table. "There's no need to keep the kitchens running when even the cook has better things to do."
"Francesca," Dora said with a pout, folding her arms sternly over her chest. "Don't tease us so. What are you talking about? There's no reason for them to be so bothered unless..." Dora's eyes widened and Francesca's smile threatened to split her head in two. "But I thought we were days away yet?"
"What are you talking about," Rosa mumbled, glaring out at them all from under the covers of her bunk. There were high railings around each of the beds, to protect them from rolling out as the ship swayed in the night, and she squinted out from between the bars with open hostility until Gloria took pitty on her and passed up a cup of coffee.
Francesca relented at last and spread her arms wide to dole out the good news. "Last week's storm pushed us further than initially expected. Apparently they weren't able to confirm until late last night when the clouds finally parted. They expect we shall be within sight of the island within the hour, and landed by days' end. Eat up girls, and then we must get to packing. I want to be sure we're the very first off this ship, as soon as our navy boys have finished parading about."
In the end the four of them were nowhere near the front of the queue to disembark, which only made Gloria more thankful that they'd set about packing early. Francesca and Dora chattered animatedly about the romance of island life and the work they would be sharing. They were both geologists, brought in to help date the research site and using it as in opportunity to study the volcano which had initially burried the site all those centuries and milenia ago. Rosa was trying to do her long hair up with only a pencil, her brush and mirror all tucked away in their bags, and glaring determinetly at the deck as she did so. Gloria had taken pitty on her and was ensuing her bags did not tip or roll away, but had little sympathy to spare for Rosa's struggles after she'd spent the whole morning napping while everyone else packed. Rosa was the tallest of their group, and Gloria was convinced she was also the prettiest, with wild red curls that refused to behave and gave her a passionate and dreamy look. Rosa was a chemist by training, though she dabbled in many fields these days, and had been summoned to the island due to her proficiency with chemical explosives. The researchers here had apparently found some good use for dynamite earlier in the excavation, but now needed something with a hair less power to it as they encountered older and more fragile structures.
Geologists and chemists and a dozen other breeds of researchers were being dropped off at each of the five ports on the island, but for linguists like Gloria there was only one dig site worth considering. Dig Site Four was a bustling camp tucked away in the trees at the end of a long and muddy road. There had been a cart available to carry everyone's bags but only Dora, whose wheelchair would have been incapacitated in the mud, was able to hitch a ride herself. The rest of the scientists had faced a long hike through the jungle. By the time they arrived Gloria's legs were burning and her face was speckled with bug bites, but even that was not enough to curb her excitement at finally seeing the camp.
The trees here had been cleared, and a large swath of tents and simple wooden buildings made a wide crecent around the perimeter of the clearing. Some buildings, Gloria knew, would be set aside for anylizing and packaging the relics that they pulled from the ruins. Others would be dedicated to manufacturing explosives, sharpening pickaxes, repairing boots, and providing all the other physical tools that a team like this needed. The large circular structure in the center, Gloria guessed would be for eating communal meals, which meant the smaller structure jutting off of it would be the kitchens. In her prior expeditions Gloria had spent much of her time at those caffeteria benches. She found it easier to focus on her work with friends and strangers passing by, and the constant murmur of conversation around her. In her own tent, where nobody could see how focused and studious she was being, she was much more likely to get distracted.
The navy who had ferried them all here had their own camps, mostly nearer to the beach. Gloria had heard that some of the other dig sites had more military presence, but Dig Site Four was up a steep incline that was a hassle to traverse, and this side of the island simply had much fewer dangerous animals to deal with. There were a few men in uniform strutting about, to be sure, but far fewer than Gloria had expected. Maybe a dozen, compared to the couple hundred researchers and scientists stationed here.
The site they were focusing on had been drowned in hot ash in an ancient volcanic eruption, preserving the buildings beautifully but making them rather difficult to access. Still, better than the sites on the other end of the island which had been flooded with magma. Ash, even milenia old ash that had solidified in place, was fairly easy to remove without damaging the structures beneath. There were other sites that were further along in their excavation than this one, but Dig Site Four was the only site that held the wealth of linguistic data that would warrant bringing out a linguist like Gloria.
However similar the camp setup may be, Gloria knew that the work here would be quite different. She was only the third linguist to be brought on board and she would have little in the way of peers to talk through her work with. More than that, there were no living speakers to talk with. She had built her career interviewing the peoples of the wide island chains of the ocean, mostly in an area a few hundred miles northeast of here, and building up a dictionary of the Aloglossic language. It was an isolated language group with unusually complex tenses and verb forms and Gloria had been able to write enough research papers as she picked apart the workings of the language to make a real name for herself in the university linguistics department -- a real triumph for a woman working in the field. Alogloss was also the only language she knew with a strictly phoenetic script, the study of which she'd dedicated three long years already. She expected there would be many more, after this brief excursion. The Aloglossic peoples kept a wealth of written records, and purely phoenetic script meant that pronunciation shifts could be easily tracked back through the record, correlated with different social movements and contact with various outside peoples. It was also the same script that archologists here, on a distant and solitary volacnic island, had found enscribed across the walls of a series of half-collapsed buildings jutting out from the edges of the lava flows.
"Are you here to translate the writing then?" Francesca asked, as they unpacked their bags into the small cabin they would be sharing.
"Ideally, but probably not any time soon. I've taken a look at some of the early photos. The script is definitely the same, and theoretically that means I know how to pronounce any of it. That doesn't mean I know what it says though."
"I thought you've been studying the language for years," Dora laughed. "How do you not know any of the words?"
"Because," Gloria huffed, "it's been... however long, thousands of years since the eruption, and the Allogloss language has been changing and growing that whole time. And I can't even compare spelling, not really, because spelling in Allogloss isn't consistent. It changes with the pronunciation. Two people in the same village in the same year writing the same words might spell them differently. I've been looking at some of the very oldest word banks I've got, and I might have found a few cognates, but even then..." She sighed. "Cognates in living languages don't necessarily mean the exact same thing. It's all very exciting honestly, trying to piece together the language from the bits and pieces we have here, but I don't expect to have any sort of working glossary until, oh... a year or two. If they let me stick around that long."
"Oh? I thought... what about the rosetta stone?" Dora seemed earnest in her question, a fact that Gloria needed to actively remind herself of before she responded.
"You're thinking of Kemetic, I think. The rosetta stone had the same message in a few different languages, and that gave us enough vocab to finally crack Kemetic and start translating it. Dynagloss wasn't one of those languages though, and that's what's here on the ruins."
Francesca, busy arranging her many scarves over the bare windows of their cabin, tried and failed to bite back a laugh. She shot an appologetic look to Gloria. "I hope they do renew your grants, for what it's worth. But you're right. I doubt the crown will care all that much about the dead branch of a language that they don't even need to master anymore." The crown had begun setting up schools across the distant islands that Gloria had been working on for the past years, and everyone here knew that those were the beginning of the end for anthropological research. Once the schools had operated for a few years they would move to build hospitals, and churches, and post offices, and import stores, and by the time they got to a governor's mansion there would be very little left of the local culture to study at all. Research grants were only easily available while the crown was still looking for an angle to get its hooks in.
"Well then," Gloria huffed, glaring down at the neatly stacked contents of her bag.
"Oh, Francesca!" Rosa glared daggers at the geologist from where she'd been kneeling on the floor, tucking her bags away beneath her bed. Despite her late start, Gloria had been pleasantly surprised to find that Rosa had finished her work well before any of the rest of them, and had unpacked into her new space quickly and efficiently. Most of the girls were only half way through their bags by the time that Rosa was wrapping up her task entirely. "It's cruel to rub it in like that. I'm sure that Ms.Gloria will make records enough to continue her research from the mainland when her shift here is finished. And I'm sure that our friends in anthropology will care rather a lot more about what the people here were saying than they do about how old the rocks were."
Gloria appreciated the effort, but secretly she wasn't convinced.
Still, once she'd been properly oriented to the way this camp opperated and was allowed to actually enter the dig site, Gloria was excited.
Countless long avenues had already been uncovered and swept free of ancient ash. Scattered bricks became low walls, snaking between the trees and ferns. Pillars and cracked foundations dotted the jungle. The main road in had been wrought in gravel and bark chips which Dora's wheelchair struggled to traverse, but the geologist was determined to see the ruins in person as often as she could. Much of the city had been burried for a long time by ash and, above that, layers of soil, until only the scattered tops of second and third story buildings pierced above the ground. The excavation process, digging out the centuries of earth that covered the lower levels, was a tedious process. Gloria could see why dynamite would be desireable. At the center of the city stood a building that the archeologists here had taken to calling the spire. In the central district the buildings were more intact than elsewhere, but the tallest stood only two stories tall. The spire, though, stood a good three stories larger than the rest, and had no easy entrance on what had previously been ground level. It was a massive stone monument with a wide avenue leading towards it, much smoother than the road leading in. Gloria suspected that this smooth road existed beneath the gravel one for most of the road's length, but the excavation teams had only been motivated to dig through those last few inches of obstruction as they approached the tower. A great archway stood there, but where all involved had expected an entrance into the spire they found only a neatly bricked wall.
"Why would they brick over the doorway?" Gloria asked, dumbfounded as she finally took in the site. "I mean, this was clearly the enterance, right? It looks... it has all the signs of a gateway."
"It is," Dora agreed, running a hand over the stones. "That arch isn't just decorative, it doesn't just look like a door. That's structural. It should be able to support the wall being open."
"Was it added in after?"
"Uh... maybe? I'd need to take some samples back to camp in order to be sure. But I don't see anything that would indicate that it's not original." Dora rolled back carefully, peering back over her shoulder to be sure she wouldn't hit any loose rocks. The main avenue here had been incredibly smooth when it was built, and had been cleared sufficiently that she could maneuver her chair here without help, but odd bits of debreis still littered the ground at unpredictable intervals. Once she had a little distance she pivoted again to gaze at the tower, drinking in its dazzling heights. "What about the words there? I kinda assumed they would explain it. That's why you're here, right?"
Gloria scowled, stepping back a few paces so she could fit the whole of the arch in her view. Letters had been etched deep into the stone, a long sentence ghosting over the wall that should have been a doorway. "I... might know a couple of the words. This bit here," she said, pointing to a word around chest height, "means like... exterior? And this one here," she went up on her tip toes to point, then found she needed to jump to reach the word in question. The doorway was big, bigger than the tunnels back home that trains ran through, which only made it more mysterious that it was impassible. "This bit is about a passage, or like a doorway, or sometimes a transformation?"
"Hmm," Dora said, then turned and fixed Gloria with a wide smile. "You said you can pronounce it though, right? Can you read it out? You have such a lovely reading voice. I quite enjoyed it on our voyage, when you would read passages to us."
Gloria felt herself begin to blush and quickly turned away so Dora wouldn't see. She nodded, stepped back a few more paces to fit the whole thing in view better, and began carefully reading off the large script written there.
"bɪˈɡɪn ˈsteɪtmənt. ðɪs ɡeɪt əz dɪˈfaɪnd baɪ ðɪs sɛt əv ˌkɛrəktəˈrɪstɪks ənd ðɪs juˈnik neɪm. ðɪs ɡeɪt həz ðiz ˈspeɪʃəl ˈprɑpərtiz."
She spoke slowly and carefully, determined not to stutter or stumble over her words. Dora was very smart, she thought, and well respected in the academy. And she was kind. Gloria had spent too much of her life chasing after people that weren't even kind. She felt it was time to impress someone who was.
" ðɪs ɡeɪt əz ˈæŋkərd baɪ ðiz koʊˈɔrdənəts. ðɪs ɡeɪt ˈoʊpənz ˈɪntə ən ˈaʊtˈsaɪd ðət əz mɔr ˈaʊtˈsaɪd ðən ˈɛniˌθɪŋ kən bi. ðɪs ɡeɪt kəˈnɛkts tə ði ˈʌðər saɪd. ðə kəˈnɛkʃən əz ˈsteɪbəl ənd sɪˈkjʊr."
Gloria flexed her fingers at her side, and her brow furrowed. She felt quite strange. She'd always been nervous performing in front of anyone, something that had caused her quite a few embarassments at the academy and which had not been lessened at all by her time in the field. She'd taken up reciting passages to the other girls on their voyage largely to face that fear, and had thought herself quite improved, if not quite cured. But now her palms felt sweaty, and her head felt light, as if she'd been hanging upside down for some time. She clasped her hands together and discretely felt out her pulse in her wrist, but found it to be steady. It was all the symptoms of nerves without the nerves themselves.
"ˈɛnərʤiz ənd qualia ər ˈeɪbəl tə muv ˈfrili əˈkrɔs ðə ɡeɪt. soʊ ɪt ɪz."
As the last syllable left Gloria's lips she felt a powerful wave course through her, dizziness and nausea and then light, searing powerful light that seemed to grow in the roof of her mouth and shred outwards through her body. The wall before her, also, was awash in blinding light. She thought she heard screams, but they were distant, muffled by the blinding pain that permeated her whole body. She tried to scream herself but her tongue felt sluggish and her throat convulsed such that no air could make it past. Her body felt distant. And then her thoughts felt distant, and then there was nothing of her left to feel any way at all.
________________________
Dora had watched Gloria fondly as she read, wondering dreamily about the pretty shape of the linguist's lips as she spoke. She was therefore well situated to see the light that erupted from Gloria's mouth as she finished her recitation. Blinding white, it spread like porcelin cracks across Gloria's skin. Dora reeled back in shock and let out a shriek. The light shivered across Gloria's body, broke the woman up into blazing chunks which shifted and separated and began to turn horribly inside out. Dora lifted her hands as if to cover her eyes but found she couldn't quite bare to look away. She expected... well, none of this was expected at all, but from the way the pieces of Gloria were moving, Dora quite expected to see blood and gore and horror. She'd been witness to a mining disaster once where a misstimed dynamite ignition had blown a man's leg clean off. She knew more than she'd ever like about what the brutal insides of a person could look like. But as Gloria shuddered and her chunks separated Dora saw nothing of the sort. In fact, as each horrible piece of the woman rotated away Dora found nothing at all between them. No blood or sinnew or bone. Not even the back side of the pieces themselves. It was as if the jungle behind them was a painted backdrop, and the pieces of Gloria were folding themselves neatly away behind that backdrop until they disappeared completely and were gone.
Slowly Dora realized that she was screaming and shut her mouth. Where Gloria had stood a moment before was nothing at all. The ground looked undisturbed. The thick smells of the dig site, sweat and jungle mud and gunpowder, wafted through the air. Her hands felt clammy. And to the side, a ways down the path, Francesca was still screaming. Dora felt stunned and a little annoyed. Francesca was backpeddling, scrambling away from her. Dora stared at her, confused. Francesca pointed. For a moment Dora thought she was pointing at her, but no, Francesca's finger traced a line somewhere over her shoulder. Feeling numb, and then suddenly afraid, Dora turned to look behind her at the spire.
The wall that had once filled that archway, and which had moments ago been covered in ancient text, was gone. Sparks of light still sizzled around the edges of the hole. The space inside was massive, larger than it should be considering the size of the tower outside, and the circular wall of that great room was rimmed in more great arches just like this one. Dora felt stunned, but then that made sense considering the circumstances. She closed her eyes and pictured the tower as she knew it, with its one prominant archway. She opened her eyes again and slowly rolled herself closer to the door. Five great arches graced the room inside, including the one she peered through, but only hers seemed to hold the jungle behind it. She saw through one a great expanse of yellow sand. Through another, a soft green meadow that made her heart ache for home. There was a hubbub like a great crowd here, and -- finally Dora spotted what Francesca had been so frightened by, and for the second time in as many minutes she felt a shriek bubble up her throat. One great arch looked out onto a field of darkness, and out of it swarmed the largest bugs that Dora had ever seen.