Bill woke early as usual. He made a mug of coffee and watched as the rays of the sun slowly started filtering through the trees. It was the best time of the day for him, the time when his brain entered a meditative state and just free-floated without any direction. He wasn’t unaware of his surroundings, in fact, he had discovered many years before that he was more aware of what all his senses told him than others who were focused on watching for threats. It had served him well during his years as a soldier, and now it was force of habit.

As Bill sat mulling over what he would do for the day, he found that he had a vague itching feeling that seemed to come from somewhere at the back of his brain; a feeling that was unlike almost anything he had felt before. He had experienced the fleeting “six sense” that warned of danger before, and this wasn’t that. It also wasn’t the nagging feeling of something left undone, rather a feeling somewhere in between the two, something almost other, external...

Getting up and rinsing the dregs from his mug, Bill took a few minutes to pack up his gear and throw his backpack on, then, almost in a fugue state, he started following the sense of direction to the feeling. He found that the more he concentrated on it, the further away he seemed to push it. If he simply walked without thinking, he felt a sense of rightness when he was going in a particular direction.

Bill followed the feeling for almost two hours, weaving between trees and crossing two streams on the way before finally emerging in what he could only describe as a grove. Stopping as he finally felt a sense of having arrived, he inspected the little patch of forest. There was nothing unusual that he could see at first, simply a slightly more tightly packed group of trees. They were magnificent trees, he had to admit, larger on average than most of those he had encountered for the last few days.

Bill decided to push in between the trees to get into the centre of the grove, thinking that there might be a clearing of sorts. At first, there was resistance from the undergrowth as he tried to get in until with a suddenness which made him stumble, he burst through and found himself in the centre. As Bill looked around at the heavily overgrown area, he thought it a little strange at first until his mind managed to make sense of what he was seeing and he realised there was some sort of ruin that had been completely covered by vines and a variety of fungi.

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

Bill hung his backpack from a broken branch of one of the trees and extracted his Machete from its sheath on the back of his backpack. It was a particularly high-quality blade that he had bought from Gerber online, after having the cheap mass-made ones prove to be prone to breaking and losing their edge almost before they were of any use. With blade in hand, he started hacking at the flora, trying to clear it away to see what it was that he had discovered.

After almost three hours of work, with the intermittent breaks for water that his body craved, Bill stood back to admire his handiwork. His first thought while hacking away the undergrowth had been that it was a natural outcropping of rock, but as he had worked he had seen that it had been heavily engraved at some point with rune-like lettering which wound in concentric circles from the top and stretching down the stone into the ground. Bill was pretty excited to have found this plinth-like stone because it looked nothing like the Mayan ruins he had been exploring, although it did bear a faint resemblance to the Mayan Calendar Stone, with similar complexity. Bill started at the very top, cleaning out the grooves in the lettering so that he could see them better. He slowly worked his way down following the lines of the runes, brushing them out as he went and cleaning with a little judicious use of water from his canteen.

When he eventually reached the last rune at the bottom of the plinth, Bill stood back to consider what he had found. It was nothing like anything he had ever seen or heard of in his exploration of Mayan ruins, other than the superficial resemblance to the Calendar, and it seemed to Bill that it was old. No, ancient. Almost as if it had predated the Mayan presence. That made no sense to Bill, not within the context of everything he had heard or read about anyway.

Bill sat down a few meters away from the Plinth and contemplated it. As he did, he started to get that feeling again, the nagging feeling of something that needed to be done, something that was missing. Following a strange impulse, Bill stood and moved closer to the Plinth and, almost in a daze, cut his hand and let a drop of blood fall on the very first rune on the top of the plinth.