The State of the Stolen Tablets

The Thombo Tablets, six ragged slabs of hard red clay unearthed by archaeologist Siferra 89 from the Hill of Thombo on the Sagikan Peninsula, represented the most significant archaeological find of her career. The tablets, found in two groups—three square ones from the third settlement level and three oblong ones from the fifth—were inscribed with extremely primitive scripts. The square tablets were written in an early form of the Beklimot script, while the older oblong ones used a completely unfamiliar syllabic script that even the university's paleographer, Mudrin 505, could not begin to decipher. Mudrin's preliminary work suggested the tablets contained an account of the destruction of a city by fire, the work of angry gods who periodically punish mankind for wickedness—a narrative that bore an unsettling resemblance to the teachings of the Apostles of Flame.

Theft and Suspicions

On the evening of the eclipse, just before Siferra left her office to join the astronomers at the Observatory, Mudrin came to see her with a new idea for his translation. When they opened the artifact safe, the tablets were gone. Siferra immediately concluded that the Apostles of Flame had stolen them, a suspicion she voiced to Athor 77 and Beenay 25. She had previously refused Folimun 66's demand to hand over the original artifacts in exchange for the Apostles' decoding material, insisting instead that he provide the textual key while she would supply copies. Folimun had refused, and now the tablets had vanished. Siferra felt the theft as a violation akin to rape, a personal desecration of objects she had uncovered with her own hands.

The Apostles' Confession and Use

Months later, after the chaos of Nightfall, Folimun 66 confessed to the theft during a confrontation with Siferra and Theremon 762. He justified the act as necessary, claiming that Siferra had placed the irreplaceable relics in jeopardy by keeping them in the university at a time when chaos was about to break loose and the buildings might be destroyed. The Apostles, he said, saw it as essential to place the tablets in their own safekeeping. Folimun further revealed that the Apostles had fully translated the tablets using their own ancient textual material, and that the tablets provided an accurate, uncorrupted version of the chronicles that had come down to them as the Book of Revelations. Unlike the mysticism and metaphor of the later text, the Thombo Tablets were straightforward historical accounts of two separate advents of the Stars thousands of years ago, and of the attempts by the priesthoods of the time to warn the populace. Folimun offered to let Siferra see all the Apostles' ancient documents when they returned to Saro City, implying that the tablets would now be used to help prepare the world for the next cycle of destruction, two thousand years hence.

Significance

The theft of the Thombo Tablets was a pivotal moment in the struggle between scientific and religious authority. The tablets, which Siferra had hoped would be her crowning achievement, were transformed from objects of scholarly inquiry into tools of theocratic control. The Apostles' possession of the originals allowed them to claim exclusive interpretive authority over the past, reinforcing their narrative of cyclical divine punishment and their own role as the appointed guardians of humanity. The loss also deepened Siferra's personal bitterness toward the Apostles, a bitterness that would later be tested when she and Theremon ultimately decided to ally with Folimun in the aftermath of the catastrophe.