By the twelfth day, Leo's parchment sheets were filled with rows of hand-sketched symbols and crude translations scribbled beside them.
His torchlight flickered across the cluttered desk he had claimed as his own, illuminating the mess of scrolls, broken quills, and half-eaten rations spread across the stone surface.
He was close.
He could feel it.
But something was still missing.
Some of the symbols—particularly those etched into the mural or written repeatedly on the oldest scrolls—kept appearing over and over again. And yet, no amount of cross-referencing with the children's book or the vocabulary he had built gave him a clean translation.
These were not simple words, they didn't represent simple objects like fire or water, or simple actions like eat or run.
They were concepts.
Ideas.
Foundations.
So, Leo did what he had never done before and started naming things himself.
