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After the fall of HADES, Aloy had been seized with the need to begin travelling the length and breadth of Carja and Oseram to find Elisabet Sobeck’s final resting grounds. Along the way, she passed through another of the Old Ones’ ruins, much like the place where she and Varl had helped vanguish the Eclipse assassins who’d killed so many Nora.
One building, a little more intact than the rest by some strange providence she knew not, stood out as she scanned the area with her Focus. Luckily, no machines were nearby, and in any case – maybe it was just her imagination – they seemed to be getting a little less aggressive around her. Her Focus alerted her to something: the building had an electric lock like those in the Metal World! And it had power, too, apparently, since it glowed with the usual red X in the middle of a blue and purple interface.
She crossed the wide grassy pathway, approaching the wide oblong entrance of the windowless building. Scanning the area again with her Focus, just in case, it caught age-worn raised letters affixed to the rust-streaked wall above the door: she was able to distinctly make out only one word: MUSEUM.
The scanner in her Focus proceeded to inform her that a MUSEUM was:
A PLACE FOR THE DISPLAY OF ITEMS CONSIDERED PARTICULARLY HISTORICALLY IMPORTANT.
Could anything in the building have escaped both the machines’ and Ted Faro’s destruction? Aloy’s heart raced just a bit even as she tried to tell herself that very likely she’d end up with nothing but wasted time for exploring the place.
Nonetheless, she extended her hand and twisted the lock. The door creaked and groaned as it shuddered along its long-disused tracks to permit her entry. The musty smell of something that put her in mind of some of the more faded Carja parchments wafted out with the outrushing air.
Even in this building, Aloy mentally sighed, the ravages of nature had not been staved off. As she walked along the wide hallway entering into the building, she could see openings above that had, over the centuries, let in the mosses to grow unchecked along the floor and up the walls. The roof had clearly weakened at some point and the simple weight of centuries had done the rest.
But even so, her Focus picked up a still-readable symbol on a pillar ahead, and purple light sprang to life over it: Cultural Artifact Preservation Hall
Had the Old Ones, she wondered, tried to seal this building up, hoping against hope that the machines wouldn’t destroy it?
Aloy walked ahead past the pillar into a large open room filled with more pillars. Her heart leapt as she approached the closest one, only for her to frown in puzzlement as she saw that it bore a faded, weathered carving of a man’s head. She could just make out that he was bald and had a rather well-cared-for mustache unlike any she’d seen. Any Oseram would have ridiculed the lack of sideburns, for one thing. Unfortunately, scanning the head and querying her Focus only revealed the name “VLADIMIR ILICH LENIN”.
Who was “Lenin”?
To her right was a glass case that had clearly been unable to protect the photograph within: it was now faded badly. Luckily, her Focus found a datapoint, which she could activate with the press of a button. It was so corrupted, however, that all she could make out of the scrambled text were the words “SALLY RIDE”.
The Old Ones, she reflected, had very strange names.
And on and on she went, getting such small, tantalizingly frustrating glimpses of the world’s past. Busts of people like GEORGE WASHINGTON and FRANKLIN ROOSEVELT, and pictures and paintings of people such as MONA LISA, and even round circular things called “compact discs”, attached to names like NICKI MINAJ.
An intricately carved round globe, faded with age, took up the exact center of the room: it was detailed enough to mark off boundaries, showing the names of the Old Ones’ tribes: “Russia”, “United States”, “Canada”, and so many more.
But of what use was a map of the Old World by itself???
Aloy almost growled in frustration when her eye caught a broken glass case not far from her that contained a squarish or rectangular tome unlike anything else in the room. She strode over, querying her Focus, impatiently awaiting the result. It identified the item as a “book”, and she quickly hit the datapoint: CODEX ARGENTEUS.
What on earth was a “Codex”, or an “Argenteus”? Her Focus unhelpfully informed her that “Codex” was a fancy word for “book”, and “Argenteus” meant silver.
It was strange, Aloy realized, that so far she had seen no actual written documents. Why was this book - which she knew would contain written words, having seen some in Carja - special, that made it an “artifact”? Maybe the written material had been secreted somewhere else, but this book was the only one of its kind, and merited such pride of place?
She reached out, plucking the broken shards carefully away from the book. Once the white pillar was clear of the broken glass, she reached out to open the cover, when it collapsed into a pile of dust!
Aloy stared in mute shock. The one chance she had of gleaning something from the Old Ones, and age and the elements of nature had disintegrated its substance until the merest touch wrecked it!
Aloy swallowed hard, and tamping down her rising fury, she carefully picked through the remains of the book, To her delight, she could see an intact fragment! She tugged the piece of parchment over to a corner of the pillar so she could read it—
Only to stare in dismay at the fact that the glyphs on the fragment did not resemble anything she’d ever seen. The words were all smashed together, and half the letters were nonsense. Aloy queried her Focus, scanning the scrap of paper again as she did so.
CERTAIN LETTERS APPEAR TO RESEMBLE THOSE ONCE USED TO WRITE A LANGUAGE KNOWN AS GREEK. PROGRAMMING DOES NOT EXTEND TO WORD TRANSLATION.
Getting doled out strange tidbits like this from her Focus was maddening sometimes. Whoever had had it before must have known fragments of Old World knowledge, since “Greek” was most certainly not a word Aloy had ever known to exist anywhere else.
In a final act of desperation, hoping to glean some meaning from the words, between her own recognition of Old One glyphs she could pick out, and the “Greek” ones her Focus changed into the glyphs she knew, she sounded out: “gah oo-aps sa-ey ha-bay aw-son-ah hans-gan-don-ah gaw-hans-gay”.
What the hell was that?
It was obviously a language; that much was clear – maybe it was “Greek”? The Old Ones obviously had writing, since her Focus had taught her how to read the glyphs it put forth in her vision, and the name “Meridian” for the Carja capital had clearly come from Old One glyphs as well.
But this “Greek” – if it even was – was no language she knew or understood. And there would be no way, ever, to puzzle it out and glean its true meaning. Especially not now that the damn book fell apart!
This. This was the legacy of the loss of APOLLO: the literal and figurative disintegration of the history of the Old Ones.
An old swear word came to her mind, one the Focus had informed her was very impolite in ordinary company, but it struck her as extremely appropriate at the moment.
And so she swore out loud, her voice echoing in the chamber as she ground out, “Ted fucking Faro!”