Endicott Saria Tablet Draft

Content

From the working notebook of Mr. Jasper Endicott, kept aboard the brig La Speranza

Item XIV. The Saria Tablet. Limestone, broken at the lower left, roughly nine inches by six. Recovered from the cave shrine on the eastern face of Saria, the small island that lies north of Karpathos, in circumstances I will not commit to paper in a hand that a customs man might one day read. Let it suffice that the thing is mine, that it has waited in the dark for a very long time, and that no Ottoman clerk has the first idea what he failed to stop at the quay.

The carving is older than anything Aegean I have handled. The figures along the upper register are not Minoan and not Mycenaean. A careless eye would call them fish. They are not fish. They are not octopi either. They are something the people of that shore knew well enough to cut into stone and then, I rather think, prayed never to see again. I have copied them faithfully below. I do not pretend to read them.

The lower register is another matter. It is Greek, of a kind, though so early and so worn that half of it dissolves under the thumb. A funerary text. An invocation for the drowned, which on an island that gives half its sons to the sea is no surprise at all. What survives runs roughly as follows. I give the sound of it as best I can reconstruct, and my rendering beside it:

martys … martyres : be our witness … be our witnesses anapausis … anapausin : rest … grant them rest idete … idete hemas : see … see us

It is a melancholy little verse, and I confess it has lodged in me these last nights more than a scrap of dead grammar has any right to. The form is not liturgy. There is no priest in it. It is the dead themselves speaking, in the first person, and they ask the living for three things only. To be seen. To be witnessed. And then to be given rest. Whoever cut this believed that the drowned want neither vengeance nor company. They want acknowledgement, and release.

A small thing, the verse, and I have given it more thought these last nights than it can possibly deserve. The prize lies above it, in the upper script, which no scholar in London or Vienna would so much as attempt. There is a man in Calcutta, among the philologists of the Asiatic Society, who I am assured can read what Europe cannot. Let him break it and the tablet is no curiosity. It is a discovery. It is my name in the journals at last. I should be very glad to be off this flat water and rid of the dreams.

(a later note, in a hurried hand, the ink pressed hard:) The knocking keeps time with the metre. Three, and a pause, and three. I have told no one. I am quite certain it is nothing.

Context

Endicott is a smuggler, not a cultist. The crate of Saria antiquities is exactly what it appears to be: illegally exported shrine goods bound for a Calcutta buyer. This is the heart of the misdirection. The crate is not the cause of the haunting. The ship has drifted over an ancient wreck site and the drowned would knock whether Endicott were aboard or not.

And yet the answer is sitting in his hold the whole time. He has copied and half-translated the very plea the dead are moaning, and he has filed it under Item XIV and gone back to worrying about customs and ventilation. He has the solution to The Funeral Rite and no idea that he holds it.

Clues Embedded

• The dead’s exact words. The three phrases (martys / anapausis / idete hemas) are verbatim what the dead moan on Night 2 of The Becalmed Ship. A PC who has read this page and then hears the keening can connect the two with no roll. This is discovery path four of five to The Funeral Rite.
• The shape of the solution. The text states the answer plainly: the drowned want to be witnessed and then released. Not fought. Not appeased with cargo thrown overboard. Acknowledged. This is the thematic key, and it pre-teaches the Calcutta counter-ritual logic (listen, understand the need, speak to it).
• Endicott exonerated. Reading his actual notes makes plain that the man is a tiresome smuggler, not an agent of anything. The crate is a dead end. The marginal note shows he is as frightened as everyone else.

Prop Notes

• Present as a single page torn or copied from a leather notebook. Aged paper, a careful copperplate hand for the catalogue entry, the figures and the inscription sketched in the same brown ink.
• The “not-fish” figures along the top can be a crude line drawing. Keep them ambiguous. Bulbous, too many limbs, an eye where no eye should be. Players will read Mythos into them. Let them. It is another red herring: the figures are old and strange, but it is the text, not the carving, that matters.
• The hurried marginal note should look visibly different. Darker ink, pressed hard, a steadier reader’s panic breaking through the scholar’s poise.
• Hand it over the moment a PC studies the tablet, searches the hold, or accepts Endicott’s invitation to “see something rather remarkable.” It can also be lifted during the Fracture (Scene 4), which adds a grim edge: they took the answer off a man the crew were about to drown.

Relationships

• Authored by Jasper Endicott — Endicott's catalogue note on the tablet. He has the solution and does not know it.
• Reveals The Funeral Rite — The translated inscription is one of the five discovery paths to the rite — the dead's own words, asking to be witnessed and given rest.
• Describes The Drowned — The funerary text is the exact plea the dead moan on Night 2.
• Located at La Speranza — The crate and notebook are in the hold of the brig.