Mariah's Arc

Chapter 1 of 5

Mariah had three days before the university reclaimed the archive room, and the only clue to the lost library sat under her hands in a language nobody alive could read. The page was a photograph of a photograph, taken sixty years ago from a manuscript that had since burned. Six lines of script curled across the top. Mariah had cross-checked them against every alphabet in the reference stacks. Nothing matched. The rhinestones on her sleeves clicked against the table each time she turned a page. She had chased rumors of this library since she was twelve — a place said to hold every answer humankind had ever asked for. She had found the reference. She could not read the reference. She photographed the script, packed her notebook, and took the late bus to the edge of the city, to a cottage she had written to twice without answer. The retired linguistics professor opened the door in a pink scarf and reading glasses pushed up into silver hair. She looked at Mariah's sparkling cuffs, then at the folder under her arm. "You're the girl who keeps sending letters," she said. "Come in before the moths do." Inside, a green moth the size of a dinner plate rested on the window screen, its wings marked like kudzu leaves. Mariah tried not to stare. She spread the photograph on the kitchen table. The professor bent close. Her smile flattened. "I can't read this." "You taught dead languages for forty years." "And this isn't one of them." She tapped a cluster of marks. "But I've seen these three glyphs before. On a rubbing a student brought me from a temple ruin in the south. Cracked stone, broken carvings, half swallowed by vine." She looked up. "The rubbing had more script around them. If the temple still stands, the full inscription is still there." "Translate the rubbing for me." "I can't translate three glyphs out of a hundred. I need the whole text. And I'm not traveling." She slid a small photograph from a drawer and set it beside Mariah's. "But you can. Take this. Match it to the wall. Copy everything around it. Bring it back and I'll try." Mariah studied the rubbing. Dense inscriptions in four bands of color, split by a jagged crack. A stone fragment, photographed against grid paper. "How far south?" "Two days by train. Then you walk. The forest there grows fast." The professor's eyes moved to the moth on the screen. "Wear long sleeves. The vines have thorns." Mariah folded both photographs into her notebook. Her translator wasn't coming. Her answer was a wall in a ruin she had never seen, guarded by a forest that ate roads. She caught the first train south at dawn.