Honestly, Kerberos felt a little ashamed of himself for not putting more effort into learning to read the languages of his world. One of them, the one that was in all the sacred texts he found scattered around the temple complex, the one the priests preferred to communicate in, that he’d managed to figure out. Maybe he’d simply looked at it so much that it finally started to click, maybe it had something to do with Irit’s memories, he wasn’t sure; but it was certainly the writing he’d dealt with the most, in his time pawing through the old temple complex for every secret he could possibly find.
The thing was, it wasn’t the most common writing, by far. He’d found notes and books and journals in a different language—similar, but just different enough to drive him batshit. And it seemed to be the language where the interesting stuff was, which made the process all the more annoying. He was pretty sure it was the more common tongue, used by the average Kerberan, rather than the more formalized language kept to the priesthood, and frankly, Kerberos wanted to read all of it.
There was only one way he could think of, at least at face value, to do that; the same way that, once upon a time, Egyptian hieroglyphics had been cracked by the Rosetta stone. He’d have to find two identical, or close to identical, documents in each language and work his way through. He would also have to hope that they had relatively similar grammatical structures, but as far as he could tell, they did; the more common tongue had clearly evolved from the older version in the same way modern English had evolved from Beowulf, and he had to believe the exercise was worthwhile.
So he’d started digging, pawing through the old priestly archives, hoping to get lucky and find, perhaps, a public publishing of some piece of philosophy, or two copies of a law, or…literally anything that might help him.
It had taken time, but he’d finally found it, and ironically,h e was pretty sure he was looking at a translation project of its own. Two pieces, in the same handwriting; he was pretty sure it was a piece of poetry, written by one of the priests, musing on a trip he’d taken to a different world and how it compared to the home he knew. Clearly, he had worked on translating it into the common tongue for distribution, and that was exactly what Kerberos needed.
The same poem, in two different languages, one he could read and one he couldn’t. And that was his start.
It would be a lot of labor and study. But this wasn’t the first thing on his world he’d put a lot of work, time, and effort into, and he intended to not let it be the last.
So he settled in, battery operated lantern on the desk, and got to the same work a priest had once done a thousand years ago: translating a poem, back and forth.
[wc: 518 words]
