The text on the tablets didn’t look like any of the other text he’d seen.

Instead, it looked like plain-ass English to him.

Which totally wasn’t weird.

The text was carved into the stone, and as he reached out and touched it, he could feel the indents in the stone of each letter. Why was this in English? Or... common or whatever. Kaldalis didn’t know what the languages were called in this world. Hadn’t exactly come up yet.

He thought back to when he’d entered the room. Had it been in English the whole time? He hadn’t thought so.

Magic, then?

Kaldalis turned around, putting his back to the tablet, and then turned again and looked closely at the first box of text in the first panel of the tablet. For a brief moment, the text was those strange characters made from curving strokes, but as he watched, the text swam, not just to his eyes, but physically moving. Each stroke shifted over the stone until it resolved back into readable English.

“Yep, that’s freaky.” He reached out and touched the tablet again, running his fingers over the stone. “This is carved into the rock. How are carvings moving like that?” He frowned, looking at the back side of the tablet and finding nothing but smooth stone. “I’m going to have to science the heck out of this.”

He turned his back again, waited a beat, and then turned again. As soon as he saw the shifting symbols, he reached out with his hand, touching the shifting stone. Under his finger, he felt the carvings physically moving. The stone felt warm and almost soft.

Almost like touching living flesh.

He snatched his hand back quickly with a shudder.

“Okay,” Kaldalis said, wiping his hand on the front of his armor, even though there was nothing visibly on it. “This isn’t a game for STEM majors. Less science, more reading. Message received.” He knelt down and focused on the tablet itself, trying not to think about the fleshy feeling of the shifting stone.

The rightmost tablet depicted the first act of an origin story. The otter person - called a lataxinan by the tablet’s inscription - was examining a tablet shrine much like this one. The hero figure depicted in that shrine was called Buoi the Swift.

This tablet's subject was named Kaia, and was inspired by Buoi’s feats. She studied his techniques, researching his methods thoroughly. She believed that Buoi - while decades ahead of his time - didn’t fully grasp the implications of his findings. In the ‘current’ era, Kaia had access to stores of knowledge that any lataxinan of the past would have killed for. With Buoi’s technique and the modern research to understand it properly, she knew that she was destined for canonization.

She was perched on the shoulders of those who had stood on Buoi’s shoulders, and she didn’t intend to let that legacy go to waste. On the last panel of this tablet, she had fire in her eyes, and went to work feeding it.

“A bit of a subversive take on the superhero origin story,” Kaldalis remarked as he shifted in place, moving to the next tablet. “Usually you want your heroes driven to greatness by righting some wrong, or suffering some injustice to spark a journey for revenge. Just doing something because you can is generally villain territory.”

The tablets didn’t respond.

And without anyone else to wax philosophical about that with, he turned his attention to the next tablet rather than lingering on that point.

Apparently, Kaia’s research delved into the nature of reality itself, and uncovered truths of Buoi’s technique that even he didn’t know. Even though Buoi was the pioneer who first walked the Paths Between Paths, all modern knowledge about them came from Kaia’s findings, not his.

The carving accompanying the text was no more attached to reality than what real-world comics did when a character was doing scientific research. Abstract shapes and formulae surrounded the figure of Kaia, orbiting her like moons and filling the sky around her like constellations. Despite the silliness of depicting a nerd floating through space with her brow furrowed when she’d probably just been sitting at a desk with a bunch of books, the art was well-done. It drew the eye from one of the little boxes of text to the next with the deftness of a master.

The final panel on this tablet depicted just her eyes, gleaming with determination. A speech bubble declared that her technique was ready. It only needed to be put to the test to help her achieve the greatness that was her destiny.

“I think my interpretation of this sounding like a supervillain origin instead of a hero says more about our culture than theirs,” Kaldalis observed. “Traditional heroes have power thrust upon them, or find themselves in circumstances where they reach for it out of desperation. It just feels weird to be expected to root for someone who decided that they had the tools and the talent to reach for glory.”

He moved on to the next tablet, which was another staple of the superhero origin genre. Kaia tested her ability, and the text explained what it did. Buoi’s power was to walk the Paths Between Paths, but Kaia’s technique let her remain there briefly. Someone threw something at her, and then she entered these Paths, and returned to the material world with the projectile on the ground behind her, having dodged it without moving from the spot. The panel depicted these so-called Paths with strange consistency. She stood on what looked like a blank field, with two large fuzzy shapes on her left and right, indistinct and unfocused.

“The Paths Between Paths,” Kaldalis said, scratching his chin. “An extra-dimensional space? The Blind Eternities? The astral plane? This story says that they know all about it from Kaia’s work, but it doesn’t say any of the stuff they supposedly know.” He grimaced. “I guess all of that actually useful information is what’s covered in all the scrolls that don’t helpfully self-translate.”

Kaldalis moved on to the next tablet, and Kaia was shown among other otter people - lataxinans, he reminded himself - in various settings. She stood before them giving a speech in one, where the text praised her for spreading the knowledge she gained. She was one of the greatest teachers of the Paths Between Paths that the world had ever known. However, it wasn’t enough to fulfill the destiny she sought.

The next panel showed her with wrinkles on her face and her fur visibly thinning around her mouth and neck. She was visibly angry, yelling with worn teeth bared. The text said that she was denied canonization. Traditionally, no lataxinan was granted a place alongside the great heroes of the past without daring deeds to earn it. She was calling them fools. Short-sighted. Stuck in the past. Her heroism had come and gone. She had risked all to learn of the Paths Between Paths. She had done what no one else could, and selflessly shared her secrets with the world. Not just through publishing her findings, but by spreading them. Teaching not just her fellow academics, but the children of the world as well.

But they would not be moved. The panels depicting her campaign and struggle to be taken seriously were dramatic and Kaldalis could feel the bitterness and resentment building with every carving.

“So, absolutely a villain origin story,” he said, stepping gingerly over the skeleton on the floor to get to the final tablet. “That can’t be just me. Enormous intelligence, harnessing powers from some mysterious unknown, but unappreciated? Denied the recognition she deserves by a callous system that rigidly values antiquated virtues instead of adhering to the spirit of their order’s goal system. Now we just need her to, in a rage against the system, do something monstrous for revenge. Bing, bang, boom. Another mad scientist for the rogues gallery of, I don’t know. Buoi’s grandson or something.”

The final tablet surprised him, though. The first panel showed an overhead shot of a familiar-looking island. The coastline looked very much like what he imagined the island they were on looked like. Only instead of a dense jungle, there was a massive city.

On the horizon was a storm like the one that had wrecked the Persimmon, shipwrecking the expedition here. He could even see, in the delicate carvings of the choppy waters, tentacles poking out of the ocean here and there.

The text spoke of The Great Storm that came, and would have spelled doom for every Lataxinan in the archipelago. No further details were given about the storm, and Kaldalis suspected that this was quite a famous event, needing no more introduction than its name.

The next, smaller panel, showed Kaia standing alone against the storm. Other people scattered, visibly terrified, but she stood resolute on the edge of the city. She looked old and frail, but with steel in her spine. The storm came, and she raised her arms.

And suddenly the whole city was floating on a featureless plain. Two large, but fuzzy shapes to the left and right of it. And then the city was back on the island, the sun setting on the horizon, and the storm hours gone.

Kaia was never seen again, having been lost on the Paths Between Paths to hold every soul on the island safely upon them until the danger had passed. The rest of the archipelago had been hammered by the destructive forces, with thousands dead. But this island suffered no losses, and with their manpower and supplies, aid was rendered to the others. Kaia could very well have saved the entire civilization with her sacrifice.

Thus, posthumously, she was canonized, never knowing that her destiny was fulfilled.

“So despite all the setup, she was a hero after all,” Kaldalis said, “I’m glad it had a happy-”

Kaldalis stopped short and blinked as he was interrupted by a pop-up in the center of his vision.

Would you like to learn Kaia’s Flicker?