Dr. Marrero disembarked from the plane at the Tarfaya Airbase, seven linguistic experts accompanied him. Some had been with him at Cape Hatteras, others he had just met.

Even after four days, he was still high on his accomplishments. Not only did he take a major gamble by going to the Assistant Secretary for Intelligence and Analysis claiming to have answers, but he did so demanding to be a part of the expedition to Morocco. The Homeland Security higher-up was not impressed by him, but the history books would not remember him for kissing ass. He did not lose any sleep over the man’s disdain.

Besides, his presence here was crucial. They were toiling against time, he could not shake the feeling. It was like the knowledge that you forgot to do something while being unable to remember just what it was. He had been working on deciphering the language for over three months. They needed him here.

A car drove the linguists north of Tarfaya to a maze of tents and a cocktail of local and foreign military uniforms. The setup was shabby and incomplete, having been set up only two days ago; unguarded, however, it was not.

By the gate, two armed guards checked their credentials and let them come through. From there on, they were escorted by other armed guards to their assigned living quarters.

The crowning achievement of my career. Right here under my feet.

The archeologist was giddy with excitement. The sentiment was a singular bubble within him and a contrast to the impending sense of doom that saturated the air.

He walked into the tent that he would be sharing with the team of linguists and started unpacking. As he brought out shirts and socks from his luggage, he could not help but think about the progress that he had made. It was not much, but it was more than his colleagues. He had worked with them back in North Carolina. He knew what they had found, but he did not share his findings with them- he was smarter than that. That gave him an edge he ought to maintain.

A soldier entered the tent after the scientists finished putting their things away. He asked them to follow him as he led them to a tent filled with a few big screens and several desks with monitors. The screens showed pictures taken of the newfound relic from different angles. Despite the impeccable image quality, Dr. Marrero was disappointed for not getting to see the real thing yet.

“Wow,” said one of the new linguists, “they really do glow.”

“This is where you will be working from for now. Someone will come to see you shortly,” the American soldier swiftly explained before leaving.

Dr. Marrero picked a desk and sat down. He opened his suitcase and brought forth the documents he amassed in Cape Hatteras. He adjusted the height of the seat and powered up the computer.

After a while, a man approached him. He was one of his new colleagues. “You must be Dr. Marrero, nice to meet you,” he greeted. “I’m Pr. Deric Richards, MIT.” The archeologist got up, “Nice to meet you.”

“I heard you were a part of the initial expedition in North Carolina, and that you cracked the location of this site, in fact.” That, he did. His chest heaved with pride, and he fought off a smirk. “That is correct. I was working on the first fragments we found of the relic with Professor Wonton and a few others, and after a while, I guess it just made sense.”

“That was for three months, right?” asked Deric. A few of the other experts in the room joined in, intrigue apparent on their faces. “That’s right.”

Deric eyed the papers on the desk. “Do you mind if I have a look at that?” He pointed to Dr. Marrero’s pride and glory, the fruits of the revelation he had after the Call.

Dr. Marrero remembered that moment of epiphany four days ago. It was as if a veil had lifted from before his eyes. The walls were facing east instead of west. It was as simple as that. That small realization steered his mind towards a singular sure direction they had long speculated about. The language read from top to bottom and very likely from right to left. That indicated the nature of the characters used in the scripts and helped him distinguish vowels from consonants. It was a small feat in the great scheme of what needed to be done but a great leap towards getting there.

A man walked in as he was about to answer, saving him from having to sugarcoat a rejection he yearned to spit out.

“Good afternoon, ladies, and gentlemen. I am General Hekings of the Defense Intelligence branch. I will be your supervisor during your stay here,” the middle-aged military man said, “First things first, I need you to sign this. It is a non-disclosure agreement. By signing this you don’t have the right to tell the public about your work here until we make it a public matter.” A soldier passed them the papers. Dr. Marrero clutched his pen in hesitation but signed the paper eventually.

“Now if you’d follow me.”

This is but a small setback, he reasoned with himself. They can’t keep this under wrap forever. It’s bigger than humanity itself. Dr. Marrero will have his name forever inked in the history books. He will do anything to make that a reality.

The party of men and women followed the general out of the tent and towards the ocean. There, they descended a metal staircase mounted into the face of the cliff. The journey was terrifying and too long for comfort. The end of the spiral sat too close to the crashing waves below, and the staircase's metal plates and mech did nothing to hide the fatality a fall from this height would ensue.

The descent ended in a hole the archeologist suspected of being manmade. It bared the inside of the room to the wind. The scientists stepped inside. The entrance to the room was dull and bare, unlike the relic in Hatteras.

Dr. Marrero’s imagination on the flight here did not do the room justice, not one bit. The writing shone in a golden light, illuminating every inch and corner of the room. The ceiling was lofty, and the room was wide, which removed the claustrophobic sense Dr. Marrero expected the place to give.

They stepped forward, leaving the territory of the cliff to enter the circular structure. It felt sacrilegious to the young archeologist to step on what he had been working on for months, but he quickly shook the feeling and advanced.

As he suspected, the room was circular in shape. Whereas he presumed its floor to be flat, it had levels digging three feet each into the ground, with the center of the chamber being more than fourteen feet deeper than its entrance. It also lacked any structural support whatsoever, which he found weird. The weight of the place, no the weight of the cliff itself, all rested on the circular walls. Impressive.

The linguists and the archeologist were given the rest of the morning to have a feel of the place before going back up again and starting the deciphering process. The room was full of personnel, he noted. Some had cameras and were recording the scripts on the walls. Others were installing platforms to reach the lofty 60-foot ceilings and metal steps to breach the three-foot gaps between the floors.

“The photos you see us taking will be fed to an AI program to categorize the characters and determine the patterns in which they are arranged,” the General addressed the group as they returned to where he awaited. “You will use that data to verify the accuracy of the translations we will provide you with.”

Translations.

Translations?

Dr. Marrero felt faint. The ground shook under him and his knees threatened to give in. “What do mean by translations… Sir?” somebody asked.

As far as he knew, the local government had no idea this place existed. They could not have entered it before, or else, they would have either made it public or put it under tight surveillance.

The author's narrative has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.

“It means exactly that. We have English translations of the scripts of this temple, and your job is to verify their accuracy,” repeated the general.

Question upon question poured into his mind, muting the chatter around him as the general left and his colleagues dispersed.

This doesn’t matter. Dr. Marrero had hoped to be the one to decipher the language but what was done was done. He could still come on top of this if he worked hard enough.

That’s right.

Dr. Marrero left The Temple and returned to his desk. There he asked a technician for the pictures of the scripts before setting to work.

*****

“Dr. Marrero, join us. A new set of translations just arrived,” announced June, a fellow linguist of his enthusiastically. “I’ll be right there,” he answered with a courteous smile, flipping his notebook closed. The middle-aged linguist turned around to join a growing group in the next tent.

Dr. Marrero re-opened the notebook and took a final look at the contents. In the past ten days since his arrival, they had been feeding them small bits of this place’s wealth: translated phrases and paragraphs that, while incredibly fascinating, fell completely short of satiating the archeologist’s thirst for answers.

He stood and walked to the next-door tent, his shoulders growing lax with the accumulative weight of hopelessness and dissatisfaction.

Seven people sat around a conference table. Dr. Marrero joined them. He opened his laptop, where, sure enough, a new file had arrived.

“Alright,” started Deric. “A new paragraph was translated.” A sleep-deprived Marrero swayed in his seat.

“It reads in Etherean as follows: Ne mala zo merevo pa weweza mina-d’he vo dajarasso zo weweze bika-d’he? Yero zo khajo minazo pa zo birivikahe khejeya, ne ja zo weweza hia zo khajo pa minahe.”

Another preaching bullshit, great. He did not need to hear Deric say it to guess what this was. It was so on-brand for this Do Mavaye: something about selflessness and honor in giving a part of ourselves for the good of all.

“And what good is the life of one if it serves the lives of none? For all is one in the cosmic tangle, and life is all in one.”

Conversations budded and linguists debated and argued the grammatical classes of words and how they fit, or not, into the Etherean syntax.

Dr. Marrero zoned out during the following hour of tedious bureaucracy. Instead, his mind wandered back to Cape Hatteras. At least there, the company was respectable, and the military did not censor his work, but that was before The Call.

A Call of which there was no mention in the translations they had received so far…

A Call of which there was no mention in any part of this temple…

A Call he was sure, beyond any doubt, had something to do with this place…

They took all he brought here with him, his notes, his laptop, and the pictures from the fragments in Cape Hatteras. They even searched him, his body, and his luggage. They also searched the linguists from Cape Hatteras. It was weird. What are they hiding?

“Now, you already know what you have to do,” silenced Deric in a fake air of gentle authority that he gravitated towards with every new day he was in charge. “As usual, you take this, and you compare it to your designated paragraphs.”

People got up and walked back to their teams’ appointed workspaces.

June was good. He had to give her that. In their team of two, she did not bring him down nor did she rub her better-suited arsenal of credentials and experiences in his face. They also had a well-oiled system going on, where they both worked separately and compared findings later. Dr. Marrero did just that and dove into his work.

It did not take long to verify the translation. The phrase was short and straightforward, and a good part of the vocabulary was something that they had seen before, which further accredited both data, old and new.

“I’ll update the catalog. You go ahead June,” he offered.

“Are you sure? You have been staying late for the past week. We can take turns like the other teams.”

“There is no need for that. You always come early, and I stay back late. Seems fair to me.” As expected, the older woman easily folded.

He started cataloging their newfound Etherean words as desk lamps turned off one by one. He ran his eyes through the folder in his hands and read through what they had received so far. When the last of his colleagues bid him goodnight, he brought forth his notebook.

They may have only dug out three out of the five fragments in North Carolina, but those were three additional sources of answers they were not allowed to examine. He had spent three months of sleepless nights and restless days on those fragments before The Call sounded. Those fucking bureaucrats will not render all his hard work obsolete.

Dave zi zela davo zo khibirahe, ivayo kid’bahe raghabasso.

Dave zi zela davo zo weweze, ivayo ged’jewa rafayasso.

______basso, ged’jeja malekez’he-d’he ghawabasso.

Yole ilahe geboghe ne veferaghe hajagasso.

Zo yerela chegeja-d’he iveve yakaghohe.

Zo yebeko kebejo-d’he kon’se yam’baghohe.

Yero zo kemeko hetereyo sessi banake bakasso.

Passe zi gheley’ miney’, kon’__________________

Zo bero keko-d’he banake yaralaghosse.

_________ jer’yo zewewa-d’he banake paralaghosse.

__________ meneteze vavanasso banake bararaghosse.

The sentences were sadly incomplete where the wall broke and eroded throughout the years. He read the words in a hushed voice. The sound of them rolled smoother off his tongue the more he read them out loud. He knew what some of the words meant as they had seen them previously; Khibirahe meant planet, Weweze was the plural of weweza, or life, as they had seen today, and so on. They also knew how the syntax functioned. As for the gaps in the vocabulary, there was no getting around that.

I can’t believe I endangered Pr. Wonton’s life and paid four fucking grands in bribes to smuggle these pictures only to do nothing with them.

He rubbed his eyes and spun his chair. Just what are they?

Dr. Marrero refused to give up. With every new translation that they had them verify he gained a new word to help decipher the writings from Cape Hatteras. He went back to the catalog and reread it in its entirety.

They had figured out the morphology of Etherean. The verbs were conjugated as follows: suffixes were added as subject and object pronouns. Nouns had something similar going on with different suffixes added as possessive adjectives, which means that with one known word, he could guess the translation of several others in the same lexical field.

From an infinity of planets, this (rock/planet/earth) ______.

From an infinity of lives, this _______ grew.

_______long, your (parents?/masters) eyes (roomed/searched),

until on you our pride and (our) attention ______.

The gift of this knowledge we then give you.

With the heavy weight of ___, we burden you.

For the promised day will__________,

where only one child of ours will be ___ with our approval.

They shall be gifted with the crown of fate

_____(seat/throne) of immortality,

_____________hearts ___, we shall gift.

Dr. Marrero had translated the majority of the paragraph. This is typical religious teachings. A trial and a reward, but it doesn’t mention what the trial is and what punishment befalls the losers. He looked at the other pictures he had. He wished they would dig out the remaining fragments already.

He reclined back into his chair. I better go to sleep. I got the most I could out of these translations. I need more material. He wondered if he could sneak into the temple. He chuckled at the naivety of the thought.

A commotion killed his little moment of rest. The noise was coming from all over camp.

He gathered his notes and pictures in frantic disorder and shoved them under the bottom drawer of his desk before he dared look at the open door.

Hesitant steps and hurried breaths carried him to the entrance of the tent where the commotion was no more and every face was turned westward where faint sunrays barely began to reach the sky.

He turned to the ocean. The dark sky was hidden by an even darker object. Helicopters circled a plane of incredibly large proportions overhead, casting their lights on it. It was parked some hundred feet above their heads like a whale in shark-infested waters.

However, it was not a plane gleaming in the night sky. No plane he knew about had that shape, like a smooth obsidian arrowhead sparkling in the firelight. No plane he knew about was that shade of black, so deep it could swallow you in its abyss. More importantly, no plane he knew about could levitate mid-air.