The mirror symbols had never made sense.
They appeared on Class I stones throughout northeastern Scotland—circular forms that scholars had never successfully decoded. The comb-and-mirror pairing. The double disc and Z-rod. The triple disc and crossbar. Scholars had proposed dozens of interpretations: status markers, tribal identifiers, celestial bodies. None quite fit.
Margaret had proposed in her research notes—never published—that the disc symbols might indicate practitioners of some kind. She had noticed that different configurations clustered in different regions, as if marking territories of practice rather than political boundaries.
Now, perceiving the symbol stones through ARCHIE's multiplexed synthesis, she understood what she had been looking at all along.
"They're not decorative," she said. "They're a taxonomy. Different interface protocols for different kinds of access."
The Rhynie artifact sat in its containment field, the crystal blazing with structure visible only through neural-linked perception. But it was the disc symbol on the artifact's mounting that held her attention—a double disc configuration she had catalogued hundreds of times without understanding its function.
Through the synthesis, she could perceive how the symbol connected to the chronicle's deeper architecture. The disc forms weren't representing physical mirrors—they were encoding methods for accessing different aspects of what the chronicle contained…
