“The entrance?”
René nodded. “Yeah. You wouldn’t notice it unless you were looking for shade or a place to piss. It’s half-covered in vines, and there’s no airflow from inside, so it doesn’t feel like a cave. It feels like a dead end until you get close.”
Ward’s brow lifted. “And the markings?”
“They’re maybe five- or six-meters in and it looks like they are carved straight into the wall. But the lines are so faded, you canbarely see them. When you brush off the dirt, it looks like they were burned into the stone, but there’s no soot, and no charring that I could see. I thought it was a trick of the light and shadows, you know? Until I ran my fingers over them and realized there was depth and shape to them.”
Ward didn’t answer. He didn’t even dare hope this trip had been worth it, because that was the exact description from the scans.
Étienne gestured toward the trail. “You’ll want to see it yourself.”
Yes, yes, I do.
“Yeah,” Ward said. He dropped his large rucksack inside the tent, but paused long enough to grab his Indiana Jones pack—his Indy-pack, as he’d affectionately dubbed it—from where he’d stuffed it inside the top and zipped the main ruck closed again. “Lead the way.”
If this is a hoax, it’s one hell of an elaborate one.
The jungle thickened almost immediately past the edge of the camp. Ward fell in behind Étienne while René jogged ahead like a hyperactive goat, narrating their steps with a running commentary that grated and charmed in equal measure.
“Watch that root—it twists left. That tree there? Full of ants the size of thumbs. Don’t lean on it. And those birds—don’t let them fool you, they’re assholes. One of them divebombed my cousin for eating a banana too close to the nest.”
Ward grunted. “Noted.” It wasn’t a long hike—maybe twenty minutes of steady climbing through uneven terrain. He made a mental note of the changes as they went. The soil grew darker, heavier, almost sticky. The trees thinned, probably from the hardness of the ground beneath them. Basalt veins of rock hadcrept to the surface here, twisting up through root systems like ribs.
“Right up here,” René said, pushing back a thick curtain of creepers. The path narrowed and steeped into an incline that turned, then leveled again. Suddenly, the air changed and got cooler as if the atmosphere gave up and stopped bothering to circulate.
Ward stepped through the vines and studied the entrance. So far, René’s description was holding up. It was no more than a shallow dip in the rock face, wide enough for two men to stand shoulder to shoulder, and appeared to be no deeper than the length of a car. But the moment his eyes adjusted, he saw the wall, and his whole focus snapped to what he’d come to visit.
Nine symbols lined the wall from left to right. His first impression confused the situation even more, because each appeared to have been carved with mechanical precision. But there was a ton of natural erosion, yet they lacked the inconsistent tooling of tribal rock art. The spacing was symmetrical and, as René claimed, they looked as if they’d been burned or branded into the rock.
How is this even possible?
He walked forward, slowly, watching where he stepped and paused in front of the carvings. He lifted his hand, his fingers hovering an inch from the surface. “Étienne,” he called, without turning. “You didn’t touch these?”
“Not even once. I ran my finger around them, but not on them.”
These cannot be real.
It doesn’t make sense.
How on earth are they here?
Here?
Holy sweet baby shitballs. If these are real… wow… just wow.
He closed his eyes for half a second, then opened them again, expecting the lines to have disappeared, but they hadn’t moved, and the shapes hadn’t changed. They looked identical to the photocopies of the impressions on his years-old Irish copybook. He’d spent hours studying them on the journey here.
They are identical. I’m sure of it.
“I’ve seen this,” he said quietly.
René blinked. “You’ve seen this exact set?”
“No.” He shook his head. He wasn’t sure how much he wanted to reveal until he’d investigated the carvings fully. However, he figured both René and Étienne had earned some sort of explanation. “Not the full sequence. But the fourth, sixth, and eighth symbols—those are documented in theory. My theory. From a study I did in Waterford, Ireland, fifteen years-ish ago.” He reached into his Indy-pack, pulled out the photocopied pages, and flipped through them with practiced fingers. He pointed. “This one here—the triple-line spiral? It showed up on a submerged stone in a corrie lake called Coumshingaun, in the Comeragh mountains. It was later carbon dated as older than Ogham, but Irish archeologists couldn’t connect it to anything else.”
Étienne crouched beside him. “Do you think it’s Irish?”
“If these are authentic,” Ward hedged, “then I think we have to look at the possibility that it’s pre-Irish, pre-Goidelic, and maybe even pre-Ogham. This is language, but it’s not Celtic as we knowit. It’s like a proto-root of every Celtic language that stemmed from it.”
