"I can tell you what it says," she said. "That's what I can give you."
Dr. Hollins, to her credit, said, "That's enough for now."
Professor Greer looked as if he disagreed, but said nothing.
Ethan crossed the room and sat in the empty chair beside Nyla. He did it naturally, the way you sit next to someone you are on the same side as. "I'd like to keep going, if you're willing," he said to her directly. "Not for the record right now. Just to understand."
She studied him for a moment. He had the face of someone who had not yet decided what to do about something that surprised him, and she found that more trustworthy than confidence.
"Next section," she said.
Ethan slid another photograph across the table. She worked through it carefully. This passage sat near the lower quarter of the scroll, and the symbols here were slightly different in weight: denser, pressed deeper into the material, as if the hand that made them had been more deliberate.
When she had assembled the tonal sequence and run it twice through silently, she spoke it aloud. Then she sat very still for a moment before translating:
"It says, 'Those who misuse the land will awaken what was buried beneath it.'"
The room was quiet in a different way than before—not stunned, but uneasy.
Dr. Hollins set her pen down. "Awaken what, specifically?"
"It doesn't say, not in this section." Nyla looked at the photograph carefully. "But the way the symbols are structured around that line, it's not a metaphor. It's an instruction, like a legal consequence clause."
"A consequence clause in an ancient document," Professor Greer said slowly.
"Yes."
He sat down. The conference room had grown quieter and somehow smaller.
Outside in the main hall, the event was winding down: glasses being collected, guests beginning to disperse. But in this back room, the evening felt like it was just starting.
And then something happened that Nyla had not anticipated.
Dr. Hollins read aloud in her academic voice a particular sequence of symbols from the lower left corner of the second photograph—a sequence she had noted as structurally unusual. She read it in the flat, voiceless way of a linguist working with text she does not yet know how to sound.
Nyla's breath caught.
She was suddenly somewhere else. Not completely—part of her was still in the room, still aware of the table and the chairs and the bad overhead light. But another part of her was standing in a much smaller space: a room with bare walls and a low ceiling and a fire going in a metal barrel in the corner. A man sitting across from her, patient and careful, his voice shaping sounds that she was supposed to repeat. Not letters, not words in any language she knew. Sounds. Just sounds, and the shapes her mouth had to make to produce them, and the pitch that had to carry through them, and the sequence that had to be right or the whole thing was wrong.
She had been very young—six, maybe seven. She had not understood what she was learning or why. She had only understood that it mattered, because everything about the man who was teaching her communicated that it mattered enormously, with a steadiness that never became urgency and never became fear.
"Nyla."
She came back. Ethan was looking at her.
"You went somewhere," he said quietly, not accusing, but observing.
"I'm fine," she said. She straightened in the chair. He did not push it.