The Unfamiliar

Hrochka woke to the beginning of the night's exhalation from the looming cavern mouth and rolled over.  The cool, slightly musky wave washed over him, displacing the muggy suffocation that passed for air in the jungle and making him almost chilly.  Tide-driven breezes were his friends, often just enough to keep Scribe-damned insects at bay, at least until they turned and drew air back in.

As he moved, heard the clatter of a falling stone maybe two meters cave-ward.  Doing the only sensible thing, he froze.  Adrenaline-fueled awareness crept over him with the buzzing of blood in his ears and the wide-eyed stare straight out into the pitch beyond the meager light supplied by the camp's single glyph lamp.  Without meaning to, he stopped breathing although the thudding of his heart certainly seemed to move his chest as much as a breath might.

An audit of the practical application of novel grammar

His eyes would not rest on the breastplate.  As his gaze skittered across the dull metal, he could catch the embossed edges of glyphs, but somehow could not see them.  Light almost seemed to, Czigerrol lacked a better term, twist away before reaching the surface.  The effect was incredibly unsettling, but nothing new.  His cell had been playing with variations on these phrases for months now.

Perhaps the iconoclasts are right, he thought to himself as he glanced at the silent, masked auditor at the back of the room, Who are we to alter reality so fundamentally that we cannot look upon it?

Czigerrol, careful not to touch the front of the armor for fear of losing a hand, finished strapping it to the dummy and jogged back towards the other end of the room before the test could start.  Sitting down at the a desk, he opened the log book.  As he wrote the heading, he read it out to the other three researchers.  The auditor's impassive and featureless mask nodded as he listened.  "Terminal reduplication of erbe-haffcom ligation test one: minimally curved surface and high-velocity projectiles."