You stare at him in shock, “You what?”

He smiles and ignores your question turning to the soldiers. “Well done men”

They can’t help but crack smiles at that. Gordon looks like a schoolboy whose parents got a good report card. It sickens you somehow.

“Why do you need me if you have them to destroy monuments?”

“Well Professor, these men are the jackhammer and you are the file. They deal with things that require less finess more...” He pauses, jaw working up and down, “finagling”

“What are you?” the question comes out all at once, so impolite you almost clap your hand over your mouth. But it needs to be answered.

“You can know,” He says ponderously, “Or you can live”

The others walk away. Rather than stepping out of earshot, they keep going until they disappear behind the trees. Self preservation said to join them.

But self preservation has little sway over a man that enters trapped tombs for a living

You are a man that could never stand puzzles. They are the thing that kept you at your desk when everyone was celebrating their latest find. The simple act of knowing and sharing the solution is as close to happy as you can get. It’s the reason you are the best. It’s the reason that you took a job to find magic. If it is out there, you had to know.

So faced with such a choice, you have to know. For not knowing would drive you down a dark path. Death at a peak is better than death at a valley.

You stand your ground.

“Very well, I am an Eater,” He laughed out loud suddenly, “Was that worth dying for?”

“That means nothing to me,” You say, desperate for answers but now more desperate to keep him talking.

“Should have asked better questions then. Some professor you are.” The last words are muffled as Dr. Caville unhinges his jaw and begins to breathe deeply. A slight breeze starts from behind you.

His face is too long, jaw opening wider and wider, cheeks stretching more and more until the corners of his mouth begin to split. It is disturbing to watch, but you can’t look away.

The wind picks up and there is this awful tugging in your chest, like someone is taking the force that keeps you breathing. Panic sets in.

You need a solution, something to get you out of this. But none of this makes sense.

A world that doesn’t make sense is a world that is hard for a man of science to live in. But your curiosity burns and if nothing makes sense then perhaps the solution doesn’t make sense either.

You snap your bag open and reach inside, desperately groping alternative materials that have to do something. You know they have no more magic to power them, but you have to try.

You feel your bones start to ache, your joints begin to bind and your fingers slow their frantic motion in the bag.

Then, at the apex of the pull, you touch a cool stone and suddenly you are back in your office.

If it wasn’t for the dust on your coat and the way your knuckles whiten around the bag, you would think it was a dream. You sit heavily, not bothering to pull out a chair, just collapse to the floor, breathing hard.

Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

The pains in your heart and bones slowly recede until you can only feel the normal pains of a man in his mid forties.

You almost died right there. It is enough to send your heart back into overdrive. You have to run, you have to hide. You have to abandon your work. To live you have to leave it all behind. They will be coming.

But you also have to know.

If Dr. Caville had answered your questions, you could have gone to your grave a happy man, finally understanding the world, finally putting the last puzzle pieces into place. But he left you with nothing but more questions. You have to know.

But no library is going to help you this time. You are a boat without a dock, adrift on the waves of the new and the uncertain.

You stand up quickly with new strength then realize your hand is still in the bag. Gripped in your fingers is a necklace.

You know the necklace intimately. It is jade with beautifully wrought gold beads, one of your first finds. The find that let you know you were in the right field. On the front of this one is the Quechuan word for “Seeking”.

It’s twin, with the word “Finding”, is staring back at you from its case on your shelf glowing faintly under a layer of dust.

“Seeking” stayed with you because you felt a kinship with it somehow, always seeking rarely finding. Now it has saved your life.

You sweep everything off your desk, pens and pencils bouncing off the floor, monitor screen shattering. The papers and notes you let down gently, like a mother putting her child down for a rest.

Then, without ceremony, you dump the alternative bag out. The items cover most of your desk. There are a lot of random knick knacks you’ve picked up in your travels.

Half of them are glowing.

The core group of items were given to you by Dr. Caville to measure magic, but once you had them, you kept adding to the bag. Any indication of special properties or references to old abilities earned the items a spot.

Now it seems that quite a few of the ancient scrolls and wall carvings were telling the truth. There is power here. They just needed a spark to make them work.

You push all of the non-glowing items into the trash, withholding only those that were made to measure magic.

There are several items left. The jade necklace doesn’t glow anymore, but you put it around your neck. It always had a place in your heart but now it earned a place on your person.

There is a bottle with a wooden figure that used to be suspended in a colorless liquid. Now the liquid glows a vibrant green and the figure has its eyes open, but sits otherwise motionless.

A golden compass with a sapphire in the center glows with a blue light that makes you think of the rose and the tomb.

It would be nice to know what any of these did. You don’t have time to examine them in the detail you long for.

A map container catches your eye. You found it in the ruins of an ancient city, some 3000 years old. Despite its age, the map was always a perfect representation of the earth today, somehow as accurate as the satellite maps on your computer.

Golden light shines out the moment you uncap the tube. You unroll it and your dark office comes alive with a light show that almost reminds you of a planetarium. Golden circles cover the map like drops of molten metal.

You press on one experimentally and it winks out then expands into an image of an old stone village, roofs and walls bent and broken by time.

That dot is somewhere in Asia so you click one closer to home. The closest one is several miles from the mexican border. One you are familiar with actually. You were there ten years ago on a doctoral thesis, before you met Caville, before you looked for answers to questions too ridiculous to be written.

This is a trip that you would normally take a week to plan, reaching out to others in the community to get the supplies and the manpower to excavate history. Now you barely pack a bag.

The “Finding” necklace almost goes in your bag, but you think better of it and throw it in a cardboard box. You scribble an address and slap enough stamps on it to go around the world. In a few minutes it is in a mailbox near your place and you are on a bus to Mexico.

You aren’t ready for this, you think, staring out the window at the people on the street, all living a life that you opted out of for a few answers. It is all happening too fast and too improperly. Your religion of science and reasoning is dead. You are a man fallen through the cracks

But there is one belief you can still hold. One thing that keeps you going as the bus ride drags. One light in the sea of darkness that keeps your feet on solid ground.

You have to know.