It would seem that you and I have not yet been acquainted. I am an explorer, or, well, I would like to be: my current profession can be called "royal smart person", because I handle most of the town's logistics. I am called Georg, and I live as close as one can get to the center of town without being part of the royalty, so I guess that makes me something like a noble. I'm a fairly boring person: I live on my own, I keep to myself, my appearance is dull and does not invoke any wonder or awe; my brown hair is of a shorter medium length, and I come from a family that does not exist.

    Or, well, the whole 'my-family-isn't-real'-thing -- that was something close to a hyperbolization. Naturally, as "royal smart person", I have access to the entirety of the town library: or, in other words, the "Vault" of the town royalty or fiefdom or something like that. The town, of course, has other libraries as well, but they're objectively inferior: they do not have the funding or donations from nobility's private collections to amass a proper wealth of knowledge; not that this means anything for the nobility or for their overall intelligence, because evidently they did not bother to stop me from having access to things beyond what I could ever conceivably need as a town logistician. You could call me egotistical or self-centered for using this accidentally-bestowed privilege to immediately look up what the town had on myself, but you would probably have done the exact same thing if you had the world's knowledge at your fingertips. Bizarrely, there was a book with my surname on it, and nothing else: the entirety of the title was my family name. Even more bizarre was the circumstances where I had discovered it: tucked away, having once been placed into the abyssal recesses of the most deepest parts of the Vault; given that the Vault is said to span the entirety of the town's underbelly, situated far below the cobbled roads and homes of the fiefdom and even further below than the sewer systems themselves, this is something to behold. A treasure buried beneath time and distance, not dirt and soil.

    The book itself was wreathed in cobweb and dust, coated with evidence of perpetual stagnation; with certainty I can say that the book was not moved once placed into this archive. The only reason I was able to separate this clandestine store of my family's secrets was the nature of the book's title: it was embossed or otherwise decorated with a gleaming gold, which was brightest at the points of its serifs, an untouched reservoir of brilliance and shine, much like the book itself.

    Or, so I had hoped.

    I immediately freed this book from its confine of web and ashen dust, powered by nothing more than the lust for intimate knowledge of myself and my ancestors. Fervor obviously doubled when, upon excising this novel from its equally dilapidated brethren, that I had discovered it was quite heavy. Unusually heavy, if I were to comment. The book itself was thicker than the breadth of my forearm, and had a height to match its length: I would estimate that no fewer than four-hundred virgin pages were embraced between leather cover and leather cover, ready to be defiled by my own prying fingers, desperate and voracious, craving a certain knowledge known to few others. Even in my blind rush, I noticed something: the book's weight belied its thickness, its pages; immediately, intoxicated on adrenaline and excitement, with my hands trembling in anticipation, my mind entertained the idea of a vast material wealth hidden away in a hidden compartment of this tome. Naturally, I thought, it would be fitting that my ancestors would bequeath me with such fortune, such wealth, from beyond the grave! A capsule of another time's opulence, for me! I eagerly opened the book, revealed its contents, and was treated to immediate disappointment.

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

    Inside the tome, was nothing that dazzled me: no vast wealths, no hidden jewels, no clustered coins laying in secret. Nothing. I was, however, correct in my original assumption: there was a hidden compartment, carved into the books. The hole was rectangular, beveled down along its long sides to create a curvature in order to fit a cylindrical object: which made sense, given that it were a cylinder that laid in the compartment. The object was not extravagant by any means when viewed with nothing more than a cursory glance; nothing more than what resembled a blackened steel paperweight, lacking any distinguishable features or detailing or anything to please the eye. However, upon closer analysis, I could discern an extremely faint, crevice between the upper and lower half of the cylinder, spanning its circumference: this unusual separation was not from any kind of damage, and was far too finely worked to be accidental by any means. With its origin out of the way, this posed a new question: I have known no such smithy, high- or low-born, rich or impoverished, masterful or a novice, that could ever hope to achieve this kind of careful, minute detailing; there exist no such tools to produce such a fine fissure in this dense and sturdy of a metal.

    The cylinder enclosed within this book was not of identifiable origin. I reaved my thoughts for anything that might resemble an explanation for how this finely worked object could come to be, when a particularly devilish hypothesis overcame me: if this split was intentional, then was this strange thing meant to be cleaved and separated into two separate halves? My clammy hands, dust and cobweb caked into them having since integrated and adhered to the sweat, set to enact my insatiable inquisition. I firmly grasped one end of the cylinder, its base flush against my palm, my fingertips resting just below the junction of metal, and my other hand rose to a similar position at the top of the cylinder: inverted, but otherwise identical. Using my right hand, I tried to lift the top half of the cylinder -- and succeeded. Shivers, pangs of revelation ambled down my sides, and I became aware of the coldness of the metal, undoubtedly accentuated by the nervousness associated with unearthing and pilfering of a lost artifact.

    Within the cylinder was something dissimilar to anything I had ever seen. It, arguably, was another layer of storage: it had become evident that the metal exterior served as a primary protective layer, designed to protect its interior from undesirable forces and damages. The interior protective layer was made of something like glass or maybe some sort of smoothed crystal, and much like its metallic coat, its existence also defied any technology or skill possessed by any glassblower or crystal-shaper of the modern day. I say this with no exaggeration: perfectly smooth glass, totally devoid of imperfection or blemish upon its surface, and clearer than open air -- had the ample light of my small lamp not gleam on it, I would be more quick to assume that it were, dare I say it, magic: and I would have dared to assert that sorcery was afoot, knowing very well that no such thing exists and has never been documented to exist outside of arbitrary explanations for incidents of such unparalleled likelihood that nothing else could serve as an equally worthwile cause. Did I mention that this shaped glass was, like its exterior, perfectly cylindrical as well? It was, it was -- but, with all other qualities this unusual antique possessed, this impossible curvature almost seemed normal.

    But, within this last layer? Concealed by metal, protected by glass, in the most intimate depths of the relic?