Message in stone

Alexis forced her eyes away from the towering structure for a few moments.
For one to check wether she was still unobserved, but just as much to keep herself from succumbing to a dream-like daze again. She couldn’t afford that, not here.

Thankfully, no one seemed to be around. Alexis took a few extra seconds to get a grip on herself anyway before turning back to the obelisk.

In the pale moonlight, the surface of the stone seemed impossibly smooth. She reached out to carefully touch it. No imperfections could be felt under her gliding fingertips. Was this even stone, really? What kind of? She had never seen the like before.

Slowly her gaze wandered downwards, towards the base, the only part where she had spotted some unevenness. Were those… symbols?

Alexis carefully set some of the many trinkets and flowers on the ground aside so she could kneel close to the inscription without damaging the offerings. She followed the series of carvings with both her eyes and her fingers. It was like they were somehow catching the meagre light, well visible despite the darkness. The carvings felt flawless in their own right, like they had not been forced upon the stone by a mason but rather always been there, a natural part of this monument.

Alexis finally focused on the symbols themselves. They were all around the obelisk’s base, so she had to circle the structure to see them all. Now, what was this…?
There were two tusks, crossing each other. She thought back to the tusk that bore the map. It was a long shot, but could that mean something? And if so… what would that say about the one who made it?
…
No speculating without further insight.

There was more. This here… wavy lines. Water maybe? And this, on the other side of the tusks… lines as well, but arranged differently. Reminiscent of the endless dunes of the desert. So - the desert? Sand?
There were more symbols she could not make sense of at the moment. Like this one, it almost looked like the peaks of Fang, but that might just be the mountain girl in her speaking.

It felt like the carvings might be conveying a message or a story of some kind, but she couldn’t really grasp it. She probably just didn’t know enough about the history and the twin gods to understand.

Oh, there. This looked like a depiction of the obelisk itself. But there were two of them. And finally, a large domed building. Alexis had seen this before.

She turned her eyes towards the city proper. Above its defensive walls towered the impressive dome of what she assumed to be an important temple. Just like in the pictogram. Two obelisks, and the temple. Three marked points on her map. Not a coincidence most likely.

So it seemed she had plans for tomorrow. Hopefully the temple was open for public and either very well or very poorly visited.

But for tonight… she reached inside her clothes and pulled out her notebook and coal pen, glad she brought them along just in case. Kneeling down again she began to painstakingly copy the runes onto the paper pages, adding notes referring to their position on the obelisk.

After all it was quite possible that not only she was lacking the background to fully understand what was shown here.
It might also not be complete.