"Ask the roots where they are going, and they will tell you: down. Ask them what they are building, and they will not answer." – Echo Rivera, survey notebook 31
FIELD REPORT – Bureau of Impossible Geography SURVEYOR: Ottoline Marsh REPORT 8 OF 14 SUBJECT: The origins of Glossolaria, and the Root Galleries The Bureau's file lists three hypotheses for the origin of this Shard and asked me to test them. I have tested them. The Bureau will not like the result. The first, which the Bureau calls Aleph, holds that the Shard condensed out of the accumulated weight of every language that ever died, and that the Glass was its nucleus, the way a pearl has a grain of sand. The second, Beth, holds that Glossolaria was planted: a cutting taken from some older place and grafted here. The third, which the apprentices call Gimel and the Bureau has asked them to stop calling anything, holds that the city did not come from anywhere, but grew toward somewhere: that it is the place every dying language travels to as its last speakers fall silent, and that enough of them arrived for the destination to become ground. None of them explains the roots. The roots are...
From the lore of The Architecture of Babel.