On 16 July, 2088, the West African Joint Aeronautics Commission (WAJAC) executed a successful touchdown of the ACRALANDR Martian Support Module approximately 4 kilometers north-northwest of the base of Olympus Mons, carrying the first humans to the northern hemisphere of Mars for a planned six-month stay and survey on the Martian surface. Approximately six weeks into the mission, Lieutenant Captain Kojo Boateng was routinely collecting Martian dust samples near the Annular Depression, a wide sloping canyon approximately 2.6 kilometers deep surrounding Olympus Mons, when his foot caught a protrusion in the dust, causing him to fall. The impact of his body cleared the dust, revealing an arrow carved in relief into the basalt pointing directly toward the caldera of the mountain approximately 300 kilometers away. The arrow was later determined to be symmetrical to a precision at least one order of magnitude higher than any known human-worked stone.
Lieutenant Captain Boateng assembled a crew to pilot the High-Speed Martian Rover (VMRM) in the direction of the arrow and discovered an etching in the basalt escarpment of the mountain. Lexicographic experts on Earth analyzed photographs of the etching and placed the language in the etching as a simple substitution cipher of early Aramaic. Content in the first etching, including a numbered heading and various textual elements, indicated that it was the first in a series; the goal of the ACRALANDR crew was subsequently altered by Mission Control to catalogue and discover any further etchings. In the four months following this directive, five more etchings were discovered. Their translated contents follow.
I.
There was a great bubbling and grinding. So great was this tumult that its like has not been seen among the World, the Worlds, or among the Stars, before, during, or since. It was then that I poured forth, over and across, around, through, within, between, among, and beyond. I saw and beheld myself and knew I was born of my own heart, torn from the womb of the Mother, who is I, who was rent asunder and cast aside, for she was dust and to it she returned. I knelt at her feet and wept for Seven long nights and on each night there was a new thing born of my tears. The things each of them were the same, clawed and immense, made of the salt of my grief and of the same substance, and each of them different.
The First was a shadow of myself across the land, a titanic breast of a woman in shadow blotting the Stars from the stone, the land driven back from me and rent crying and weeping at the feet of the Mother. It was a strangeness through a strange mirror and the milk which poured from me was made foul and icy in its sight. From the day it was born its nipping at my hem never ceased and at my hem it nips still. From its teat no living thing might nurse and to its touch only the dead are driven. Its name is Regret.
II.
Listen and behold. I am neither seed nor stone. I am neither egg nor ice. Look at the things which are not and know the thing which I am can be found only there. I am far more eternal than any of the things which creep but as them one day I too shall be ground to powder. The longer I live the longer I die and one day die I shall, and let my body remain as a testament to being born only by the will of another.
The Second was a movement and a possibility, a breath which lifts and commands all smaller than it to rise and quake, to tremble on the very air. He was a force of control in no direction but from warmth to chill, from light to shade, and so still he remains. What few things once grew and stood proudly here were blown down by him and he cared not and cares not for their sorrows. He is the scythe that cuts the heads of tall grasses and leaves them to rot in the fields and leaves a creeping chill on the back of your neck, for you know he is there and you are ever watched by him. His name is Certainty.
III.
When I died I knew I could never become what I might have become. See how once I longed to reach into heaven and grasp the form of my Creator. See how I built myself into my shape and form, how my tears and vomit stained my robes and impressed a layer upon a layer, how mightily I strove to step forward and into a greater place — but I could not. Choice was not given to me in what was mine. Rather I was pulled through the void by my own self into the shrieking daylight. The one who dragged me here was me but not the self who stands before you. Is it just that we call these two the same?
The Third was a rumble and a tremble, a rattling and quaking terrible and mighty and yet still but an echoing fraction of the day of the First. Violent and noisome without description and beyond understanding he was and though he has long perished I and all those at my feet on every world and in every land bear his jagged wounds for his knife is great yet blunt. His name is Consequence.
IV.
For my feet were rooted in stone and never was a lightness granted to me. For my feet were rooted in stone and never was a lightness granted to me. For my feet were rooted in stone and never was a lightness granted to me. For my feet were rooted in stone and never was a lightness granted to me.
The Fourth was a flume and a flow, a spume crusting a scarlet tide, as every foul thing I ever had done or thought or said came pouring forth from my accursed mouth, every evil thing in my heart was dragged into the light of the Stars and made real and solid and whole, every nightmare, every sin, every wound came out and poured down me in my sorrow and she encased me and built me into a shell that my heart laid bare beating inside, thrumming along with myself, my Mother. But — though she wrapped me in this shell of misery and stuck fast down my feet, she dwelt on my robes and over my hands and no longer in my heart. Her name is Suffering.
V.
But this meant I grew from something, even if that something was my Mother and my own self. I was born from somewhere and shared something with somebody. Though I stood above I did not stand alone, and just as She did, so did I birth many things anew. That I knew of a First, a Second, a Third, and so on as it does and as it continues and ever shall was the assurance. Not brought from the void but from a thing before — how could I have been so blind? An eyeless birth can be the excuse no longer. I must carve my eyes with my tears and wash them with my sorrow.
The Fifth was a crown and a chain, a circle unbroken. She sprang forth from the splitting of my head fully formed, a sun-kissed Hephaestus in a dress of ice. She wreathed me in her unwavering arc as an eternal reminder that we are all of us concentric, and my head is lighter, not heavier, for her burdens. Her name is Dignity.
VI.
How can it feel to be beheld? For after all this long and miseried time in in the dust and stone finally someone has seen me, known my presence, and given me a name. Someone has gazed upon me with love in their hearts and cared for me. How many years of the torture of lonesome sunrises and sunsets, howling winds birthing wordless echoes, and only the self inside can be mended with the touch of love? With the caress of sight? Of being known and others being made aware?
The Sixth was depth and fullness, tears poured into a cracked vessel. For though the vessel may leak and all the saltwater may flow forth and out and away into the vastness of the cosmos someone cried them for you and she may cry them for you yet again. She was sadness and joy, rage and scorn, attachment and freedom, dark, light, and all shades between, the ability to discern the truth of things, and the ability to accept or reject them. The ability to discern the truth of myself, and the ability to accept or reject it. Her name is Recognition.
The ACRALANDR crew continued their mission past its intended duration in an attempt to locate further etchings, but were forced to return to Earth in the face of critical supply shortages. Translators and anthropologists have reached consensus that the existence of a seventh etching is overwhelmingly likely, but to date, it has not been found.