Eirian's shriek of glee came out much, much louder than she'd intended in the cellar and both Li and the other soldier tripped over themselves and each other rushing to her side.
"Look!" She shoved one of the clay tablets at them. "What does it say?" Because she had no idea what language it was written in. She did know it wasn't the same as the unknown language carved into Ardain, but languages weren't Eirian's strong suit.
Li's eyes crossed when she shoved the tablet in his face.
The soldier broke away to examine the other shelves. "There must be hundreds of them. They could be poetry? Or accounts?"
Li took the tablet from Eirian's hands and studied it. "I think this is some form of Tirish."
"Tirish?" Eirian had never heard of it.
"It was one of the dominant languages of the tribes, but it has faded from use in recent years. I've seen individual symbols, but I've never seen it written down like this."
"The tribes don't keep written records," Eirian remembered that from one of Chenzhou and Yuze's conversations.
"No, that's part of the reason Tirish has fallen out of use. It's not…big enough. There aren't enough words or symbols when the entire world isn't one tribe."
Eirian nodded in understanding. "They can't trade or negotiate in it."
"No. It's not spoken anywhere else and most of the kingdoms in Song and Snow have actually banned it from being spoken."
Eirian snorted. "Not surprising, they've never been very accepting of anything that's not theirs."
Sadness flashed in Li's eyes. There were plenty of refugees that had made their home in the Camelia after being forced to flee from Song and Snow's policies. "It'll die out completely in a decade or two. Only a few tribes still teach their children to speak it."
"Some of these are in a different language." The soldier calls out from a few rows down. He brings a darker tablet over to them, the symbols drastically different from the one Eirian and Li were studying.
Li sighed. "That's Cuma."
"Older or newer?" Eirian asked.
"Older."
"Okay." Eirian turned and made her way through the rows in the opposite direction as the soldier. "So, if those were older, these should be newer."
"If they're in any order at all." Li pointed out.
Eirian carefully maneuvered through the columns of shelves. They got closer together and more cramped the further back she went.
"Tira-Lian was burned almost forty years ago. That's too recent for Cuma, but there's a chance some of the records from that time were in Tirish." Li added. "Otherwise, they'd be in Sorrian. Most of the villages on this side of the borderlands adopted it for trade and writing generations ago. The alphabet is simpler than the different groups of symbols different tribes use."
Sorrian was a dialect of the Low Tongue, the language spoken across every land East of the Spine of the World. There were hundreds of dialects and most of them were similar enough that they could understand one another without issue.
Eirian started to recognize a few words here and there as she checked the tablets. "How many years between the Song's leaving and Chenzhou's mother?"
"Probably a hundred years, give or take." Li started checking tablets further back. "They're packed in tight back here. Hard to tell how many years they cover."
"Or what they even are," Eirian muttered. Numbers were starting to pop up that she recognized, but she wasn't familiar with how these villages kept their records or even what information they considered important enough to try and save.
In Aontacht, the City Administration kept a record of every birth on scrolls that covered multiple generations, but they didn't record the child's name and family information until they were a year old. And Eirian wasn't so optimistic that she believed every woman in the city cared enough to tell them about their births. The City Administration usually had to send its agents out to survey the poorer parts of the city, where the birth of a child wasn't celebrated or announced with the fanfare it was in the richer areas. Unless there was an issue of illegitimacy, noble families often threw grand parties to celebrate a new family member.
Any excuse to drink and gossip, according to Eric. Eirian enjoyed the parties a lot more than he did and often had to drag him out of whatever corner he'd hidden himself in.
She found the wall and the end of the room before she found any tablets she could read entirely on her own. "I found the wall."
A few seconds later Li announced he'd done the same. They both waited to hear their third member, but when he didn't call out, they made their back together.
"Where'd he go?" Eirian peered into the darkness, but not even the third torch was visible.
Li muttered something under his breath in a language Eirian didn't recognize, but she understood its meaning just fine. "I'll go first." And he slid in front of her before she could argue.
They made their way through the rows of shelves, but they ran into another wall before they found the missing soldier.
"Damn it." Eirian groaned and yelled. "Song Ran. You better not be down here!" No angry ghosts crawled out of the dirt to attack, and Eirian sighed. "Suppose that would have been too easy."
Li snorted and then froze.
"What?"
"Quiet." Li cocked his head to the side, listening, and then turned in a different direction, waving his torch in front of him. "I think I hear-"
"-lp!"
Eirian snapped around. "I heard that. Sound off!" She yelled as she tried to follow the noise.
"-elp!"
As much as noise seemed to echo in this cellar, it took Eirian a moment to figure out why they couldn't hear him. "It's almost like he's in a different room."
"I didn't see any doors." Li found another wall. "Cold storage is usually only one room."
"This is definitely more than cold storage." Eirian stripped over a fallen tablet and hit her knees with a crack.
"Are you-"
"I'm fine. I'm fine."
"HELP!"
Eirian looked around frantically. "Where are you?"
"Here! I'm down here!"
Holding her torch close to the ground, Eirian crawled across the floor. Watching the flames shift as she finally found the hole in the floor.
~ tbc