As innumerable are the dregs of civilisations, wider yet is the multiverse. Most fragments of the long-lost will assuredly continue to lay forgotten in space, never to be uncovered or documented. A smaller fraction of these are written texts, and a small fraction yet is readable. Precisely for its exceeding commonality in the universe and overbearing rarity, we seek to accumulate all sorts of fragments, even if inexplicable or uninterpretable. This specific fragment was found joined with rock, in a union with its very matter – extreme care was needed to extract the information from the rocky mound whence it was found. Its medium was not paper, nor parchment, but the very material structure of said mound.
Of a discontinuity
Beyond the orifice below, I stepped upon the boiling tarry sand,
after bygone millennia, I set sight on my native land.
The sand – black and oozing, its sentience from light lost,
darker now than its master night, covered wholly in frost.I felt the warmth of the sand, and the frost-covering cold,
I knew I stepped upon a land not yet dead, but very old.
A vista of many-a sinuous mound, I cried without a sound,
with menace the sand-mounds stared, I knew I was found.“My god, why did I emerge?” I felt my feelings surge,
“The stars I want to see!” I identified the causal urge.
But none were there to see, fade away did the stars tall,
and from the malicious one, the moon, fright did upon me fall.Upon me still they stared, and to go further I did not dare,
I turned back – but what even was my emergence lair?
And there it stood, a mound of sand, shaped by time and my mind,
so I came back without a sound, again one with the many-mound.