(continued from previous scroll)
The morning appeared, veiled in a thin mist. From the window of my quarters, I could see the tops of the temple columns wrapped in white, as if the heavens themselves had exhaled and held their breath.
I did not go to the colonnade.
Instead, I walked eastward, toward the House of Tablets—a place I had known all my youth, and yet today it felt altered, like a memory I was only now beginning to understand. The gatekeeper raised an eyebrow as I passed but said nothing. Perhaps he sensed I was not there for my usual duties.
Inside, the long stone shelves stood silent, lined with clay texts: contracts, prayers, inventories, omens, hymns. Each tablet was marked with a hand that believed its words mattered. And perhaps they did. Or once did.
I traced a finger over the spines of tablets in the corridor of kings. There was the chronicle of Nebuchadnezzar’s rebuilding of the temple precinct. The tax records from the harvest under Nabonidus. The hymns to Sin, god of the moon, offered during eclipses.
But it was none of these I sought.
In a recess near the back, where the lesser shelves had begun to crack under their own weight, I found a box of rejected inscriptions. Damaged tablets. Miswritten texts. Forgotten copies of prayers no longer recited.
I settled onto the floor beside them.
And there, in the quiet, I began to put into words what had not been said.
Not the parts I had already recorded. Not the visions or the dreams. But his silences.
The way he looked into the garden before speaking.
The way he paused after mentioning the Most High.
The way his voice dropped when speaking of judgment—not with relish, but with sorrow.
I etched a line of commentary:
“The wise do not shout. They lean close and speak softly. And those with ears bend near to listen.”
By midday, my fingers ached. I stood, stretching beneath the great dome, and looked out through the western colonnade. The mist had lifted. The sun pressed through a wide blue sky, gilding the tops of the fig trees near the scriptorium.
When I finished, I did not seal the tablet. I placed it among the rejected texts—not because it was broken, but because I did not yet know where it belonged.
I passed Bel-iddin in the inner court. He was alone, reviewing a text on omens from bird flight. He did not speak to me. But he looked up. And for the first time, he did not sneer.
That night, I laid aside my stylus and walked to the upper garden where the wind stirred the reeds. I sat by the basin and watched the stars appear.
One by one.
As if summoned. Tomorrow, the colonnade would welcome us again. But tonight, the House of Tablets had become, for a little while, a sanctuary.