Cannon-fire ringed in Hessian's ears to the point where he didn't know whether the blasts were coming from the battle lines or from his own head. The pain just behind his eyes had started again. He rubbed them with two dusty fingers, squinting and sighing. Soon enough the aura would come and he'd have a blind spot for an hour or two. He shook his head. It was the ringing in his ears. There was no battle, not yet anyway, and he hadn't seen combat for two weeks or more.

"Colonel Rost," a man in uniform sprang up the steps. Hessian was standing at the top of Fort Nystagma, on a small flat terrace that overlooked the main citadel, the rest of the fort spread out under him. Men in uniform was moving back and forth in coordination like ants, some moving rocks around to fortify the outer wall, some moving around food and carts and horses, still others moving supplies into the camp hospitals tending to the sick. Beyond the walls of the fort, a handful of men were trudging up the hill, muskets resting up on their shoulders, pointing at the sky so that the mass of men looked more like a porcupine than men. They wore the uniforms of Utar, the purple and blue with white stripes on the chest.

The man in uniform stood behind Hessian as he saw the field of men below him. "At ease," he grunted without looking back.

He heard the man walk up to him, stand at his side. "Sir. Lieutenant Baj-Harrakal's platoon is shoring the north-eastern wall with rubble and rock from here and the quarry to the south." He paused.

Hessian waved his hand, nodding, "Yes, Private Sian, get on with it."

Sian nodded. "Sorry sir. From some rubble just outside the walls, the Lieutenant and some of the soldiers were loading some of the rocks when they found one with... markings, sir."

"Markings?" In the bottom left of Hessians sight, when he could have seen the dusty gray floor of the stand he now just saw white-gray fuzz. Some tension in his head started in the right of his skull, just deep enough where no amount of scratching or massaging could help him. The aura. "What markings?" Hessian rubbed the right of his skull.

"Yes, markings. The Lieutenant ordered everyone to stop loading the rocks. He looked at them and it seemed like they were cut off at the right and bottom. He ordered us to look around if we could find the rest of the rock and we found two more that seemed to complete the markings."

What the hell was this private on about?

"What the hell are you on about?"

"Err, well," the private shifted his feet and looked down, suddenly finding them very interesting, "Sergeant Zinzi said some of the markings looked like writings from ancient Luscian."

"How does a Sergeant in the Utaran Military picking up rocks and putting them in a wall know anything about ancient Luscian writing?"

The private looked up and shook his head. "He practices Oum, sir, and he said that in their youth they must learn to recite a few passages, and it looks like that." He furrowed his eyebrows, then, "sir."

Hessian sighed. The Otorran military was on their way west to them but here he was being told about weird markings on some rocks. He looked out to the fort where the men were filing, turned to look at the small table he had brought up, at the map of the area around it. He had scribbled days, troop numbers, where the general was, the other colonels, the forts around them the Utaran s controlled, and the ones they didn't. He could barely see half of it for the aura that was spreading on his left.

"Take me to them," he told the private. He wouldn't be able to read much for the next hour anyway.

"... and you see here, these letters match up to the Kustu Ba Nam," the sergeant was saying, pointing first to the stones laid on the ground then to the tiny book with even smaller letters he had pulled from his breast pocket."

Hessian had his arms folded, face frowning, looking down with concentration at the stones neatly arranged on the ground. There were three pieces, one larger and whole piece at the top cut off in a diagonal past the halfway point. There were two more pieces that, put together with the top, formed a large, rectangular, grey-stone block. And what a block it was. All put together it was maybe just shorter than Hessian, and Hessian stood taller than most.

"We were going to break it up with the Lieutenant noticed the markings. When I looked closer I recognized the Oum and now that I see it closer, there are some passages that seem straight out of the Oumuestii," the sergeant shook the little blue book in his hand.

"Colonel Rost," the Lieutenant was standing at the head of the three stone blocks, "if you see here, there seem to be three distinct sections, maybe four. The bottom seems Oum, as the Sergeant can see, and there are two other scripts here that none of us can recognized." He was pointing to the stone at each distinct block, and the Colonel could see now what he was saying. The Oum portion, or at least what the Sergeant insisted was Oum, took up the bottom portion of the block and headered by a line, then two more similar blocks were marked up the stone.

"It seems cut off at the top, the break is uneven," Hessian pointed, "like there should be more."

"Yes, it seems so. Who knows how large this stone must have been."

The Colonel pondered. "Sergeant, do you know anyone who could make use of this stone?"

"Unfortunately, sir, I only know of the script through my religion sir. I know of no one working in any historical department."

"I do." Lieutenant Baj-Harrakal knelt at the top of the stone, brushing off some dust with his hand. "I know someone at the University in Valensha, a professor of law and history."

Colonel Rost nodded. "Have your men bring this into the fort. We'll wrap it in cloth and keep it deep in the bowels of the citadel. If the Otorrans make it through here, well, the stone will be the least of our problems. But write to him, describe what we have here, what you see. I'll make preparations once we hear from him to get these stones to him and see what worth they have, if any." His sight was starting to clear. "Be quick with loading and wrapping this stone. I am not sacrificing the strength of this fort for the sake of a stone with dead writing on it. Do you hear me Lieutenant? Be quick on it."

"Yes sir," he clicked his heels, held his right hand to his left shoulder. "As you wish sir."

"Have at it then." Colonel Rost turned at trudged back to the fort. The sun was setting behind the fort, sunlight ringing the citadel. As he walked back, his vision started to fill with swirling images of the chiseled markings on the stone.

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The Stele of Nystagmene was created millennia from the present day, a translation of several religious creeds present in the ancient Oum scriptures. It was found even further still, by a group of Utaran soldiers at the town-turned-fort Nystagma. It was fortunate that the stone was recognized for its importance, as it held several different scripts apart from the Oum found on the bottom. In particular was the as-of-yet undeciphered script of the ancient Hortens, the script first created in Ibandr, now termed the Nystagmene script. It is a complex logographic-syllabic script, with different forms for specific words and a syllabic alphabet set aside for words that could not or did not have a specific shape or symbol.

It's now well understood that the script originated from the system formed by the Qet-Savaq to the northwest of what is believed to be the range of the Hortens. While it is now called the Nystagmene script, due to the Stele of Nystagmene being vital to its deciphering, the script originated hundreds of miles north of Nystagma in the ancient city of Ibandr, a site only recently uncovered.

Another name for the Nystagmene script is "sticks and hoops," so called due to the repeated use of single lines and small, teardrop circles for each symbol. The script has both logographic symbols and the ability to create novel words using syllabic symbols, such as the symbol for Ibandr, created from the symbols for I-B-AN-DR.

The Nystagmene script is one of the earliest examples of writing. The urbanized Hortens used this script primarily for transactions and keeping records of the removal of goods and the amount of grain stored. But it was increasingly used for religious purposes as well, chiseled into temples, on tablets, and statues erected throughout cities such as Ibandr. The script would lose its prominence in Xanthea and other regions as other civilizations dominated the Luzum, Sreer, and Xanthea, and other forms of writing became predominant. However it still maintained some relevance, as the need for its translation from Oum script, the entire purpose of the Nystagmene script, shows that it remained a significant system for writing and information dissemination for a long time.