The Stone

It’s ridiculous how quickly mud can feel intimate.
You spend days fighting it, then one touch and you’re holding a secret.

I brushed the surface with my fingertips.
Something solid, smooth beneath the grit.
I switched to the trowel, careful, coaxing the layer back grain by grain.
The rain had made the clay soft as skin; it peeled away in ribbons.

A curve.
Then an angle.
Then—
a letter.

D.

I sat back on my heels, breath fogging the beam of my head-torch.
The line was deep, hand-cut, no tool chatter.
Another scrape, another letter.

M.

D M.
Dis Manibus.
The formula for the dead.

I should’ve called the team, logged the context, taken a photograph.
Instead I kept brushing.
It felt wrong to stop.
Like pausing mid-heartbeat.

The red pigment emerged next, faint but definite.
Not paint—iron oxide, maybe cinnabar.
Old blood color.
Whoever carved this wanted it to bleed.

More words surfaced in sequence, as if the earth were exhaling them:

LARTH LEG IX HISP.

I whispered it aloud, the way you test a language against your own mouth.
It tasted metallic.

The beam of my torch wavered; the generator groaned.
The letters seemed to drink the light.
They weren’t just inscribed—they were cut through.
Channels, not lines.

I traced one with my glove and felt warmth.
Not body heat—something older, stored, like the memory of sunlight in stone.

For a second, everything went still.
No wind.
No generator.
No me.

Then sound came back in pieces:
the flap of canvas,
a drop hitting water,
the low electric hum that shouldn’t have been there.

I crouched closer, my breath syncing to the vibration.
It felt… rhythmic.
Almost human.

I pressed my palm flat on the inscription.

The world pivoted.

The light from my torch stretched thin, bending toward the ground.
A pressure rose through my arm—slow, deliberate, like something recognizing its own name being spoken after a very long time.

In my head, or maybe in the soil, a voice moved—
not words yet, just the outline of a word.

Velathri.

I knew it wasn’t Latin.
I didn’t know how I knew.

My palm stung. I pulled it back, and the hum stopped.
Silence folded in, heavy as water.

I stared at the letters until they blurred.
Rain started again, soft, unhurried.

I whispered,
“I hear you.”

The wind carried the words away,
and somewhere beneath me,
the wall breathed back.