Chương 29: Prologue 0.2 - An Ancient Relic [START OF BOOK 7]

"Tonight is the night," the Archaeologist muttered to himself as he walked out of the horrid slums that people seemed to call the Mires. He paused, taking a moment to double and triple check that he was heading north. While he could still follow a map quite well, he couldn't find the hand-drawn, almost incomprehensible drawing of Gilbratha's streets in any of his pockets. He must have lost it somewhere. Without that, or something else to anchor him, his sense of direction—of location at all, really—was rather shot.

It hadn't always been that way, but he had gained some things and lost others. He couldn't be bothered to miss the things he once had, though being unable to remember street names or how to make it back to the safer alleys where he could sleep was, admittedly, rather inconvenient.

"Very inconvenient," he confirmed in another low mutter, his fingers playing rapidly with the fraying wool on his fingerless gloves. They'd had fingers at one point, but he kept picking at them without realizing it. Despite his lack of navigation skills, he knew the museum was northward, and he could remember a few landmarks. His goal itself was unforgettable, so he would make it there eventually. A museum in Silva Erde had lent Gilbratha the relic—a spike from the Radiant Maiden's sun-ray crown.

Supposedly, it had been sliced off during a battle after her last "descent" into the mundane plane almost three thousand years ago. That was well before the Council of Aquila and even the war with the fey! As soon as the Archaeologist had learned of the relic's existence, he'd been captivated by the thought of it. He had a vague image of it in his head, though he wasn't sure if it was a lingering memory from the man named Edgar, or if he'd simply imagined it.

Or perhaps, he had been instinctively able to sense its qualities, as if its weight in history were radiating outward to those few who weren't so magically thick-skinned and unresponsive. He was going to steal it. He had waited until it was late at night and more people were asleep, both because that seemed to be the right time for a heist, and also because he couldn't stand being around the hustle and bustle of people and their grating presence all the time.

They didn't notice at all, but he couldn't even pretend to ignore the way they pushed against him until he felt small, jostled him around until he was discombobulated, and scraped away like coarse sandpaper against his right to exist. He wouldn't have come here if not for that man who found him half-sane and wandering out in the countryside and brought him to Gilbratha a couple of weeks ago. The man hoped that the Archaeologist could at least have a chance to survive through begging and almshouses.

The Archaeologist had to admit, the Undreaming Order, where they paid for people's attention in food, was probably the only reason he was still alive—even if it was irritating to have to constantly listen to talk about that upstart, bird-themed woman who styled herself a queen. At least it wasn't as bad as getting food from the Church of the Radiant Maiden. No one from the Undreaming Order ever wrinkled their nose at him because he smelled.

They'd never refused to let him enter because he couldn't stop muttering to himself. The Archaeologist knew he wasn't quite "right," not even well enough to fulfill his purpose properly, but he was lucid enough to realize that he needed to stay in Gilbratha. Even though it was overwhelming, grating on his senses and very being to exist around all these people and their thoughts and their magic, it was the safest place for him to hide. He blended into the crowd, as invisible as all the other destitute people.

The researchers would never find him and take him back. He froze as an image of a small, dark room glowing with spell arrays engraved into the wall flashed into his mind. In the center sat a reclining chair covered in rods, arcs of metal, and cuffs meant for the neck and four limbs of a human.

"Not going back," he reassured himself.

"I'm invisible." He had to stop and think hard about where he was and what he was doing for a few minutes before continuing on.

"Tonight's the night," he muttered to himself. He was going to steal it. There were still a few people out on the streets, mostly drunks or people who worked during the night. The Archaeologist avoided them. He passed by the stripped-bare bones of some creature, eaten by rats or—just as likely, hungry people—lying in the gutter. He froze for a moment, seeing bright shininess in its eye sockets, wondering if it was watching him. He forced himself to shake the thought away.

No, its flesh was gone, and its bones would disappear soon. There were no eyes, and it was not watching him. It was dead, and soon even its memory would fade from the world. Before he knew it, he looked up and found himself in front of the museum. He looked around for the large spike atop the domed building nearby, reassuring himself that this was, in fact, the museum. He crept closer, up to the wrought-iron fence surrounded by bushes.

The bushes themselves made for great cover and even provided a little shelter against the cold. A couple of small birds that had made a nest within chirped angrily at him, but he just stared back at them. After some time of his eyes staring into their dark little beady ones, they settled down and determined to ignore his intrusion, though he could tell it was begrudging. The museum was mostly dark at this point, but it was not deserted.

Some number of guards were on patrol, walking through and around the building with lensed light crystal lamps beaming around to expose anything or anyone intruding. The Archaeologist remembered enough to know he needed to stake out the place for a while. Once he'd gathered enough information about the guard rotation, he could slip through a gap, or perhaps create some kind of distraction. He sat crouched in the bushes watching for a long while.

Belatedly realizing that he was hungry and cold, he pulled a hard bun from his pocket and nibbled on it, wriggling his half-frozen toes. He had learned several tricks for surviving from his fellow street-living people—some of the most bearable people in the city—and his shoes were stuffed with newspaper, but he only had one pair of socks, and they still managed to grow cold and clammy. He couldn't remember the last time his toes had felt comfortable. Socks were very valuable.

The author's content has been appropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon. Maybe the Undreaming Order would hand out socks as payment for attendance soon. He would suggest that next time. If he could remember. The guard shift rotated without him realizing somehow, and one of the new guards was a cambion. More specifically, a half-sylphide, from the Plane of Air. That was probably why she'd been hired—with her affinity to the wind, she was unlikely to be caught off guard by anyone trying to sneak in.

Truly, those kinds of inherent skills made people slightly less versatile than mundane humans, but they also could be so useful. Just like him. His mind's eye flashed to a pair of serene, pool-like blue eyes that somehow reminded him of the ocean. He had vague memories of a man named Edgar, and after that, of a man who wasn't Edgar any longer, but still not yet the Archaeologist as he was now.

That man hadn't trusted those eyes, and the Archaeologist thought it was more than the damage of the Black Wastes that caused his paranoia. He hadn't liked people who were noticeably different from himself. He had feared them, and his fear had turned to spite and hatred. In fact, that hatred had run so deep it was one of the last things to be discarded. The Archaeologist as he was now couldn't understand that perspective.

Strange biases and personal opinions were irrelevant to his purpose, and even antithetical to the purity of discovery. Anything that hindered his purpose was to be discarded. He chuckled to himself.

"The Radiant Maiden isn't even human!" She was an angel from the Plane of Radiance, and obviously her relics, the traces of her history reaching back so far into the ocean of time, were invaluable.

"Humans are so absurd," he muttered to himself. The birds chirped. The Archaeologist couldn't understand them, but he pretended he did.

"Yes, I know I'm human too," he said softly.

"But I'm not as stupid as Edgar." Edgar had disappeared without ever coming home from the Black Wastes. But just like that small dark room, thinking about the Black Wastes wasn't good for the Archaeologist. Memories rose up from somewhere in the depths of his fatty, wrinkled brain. He remembered the look of madness growing in his companions' eyes as they traveled through that place, so subtle, but so undeniable. He remembered the stench and the fear as they walked across a stretch of land that breathed.

The pale earth cracked and burst with suddenly appearing pustules of gas and burning liquid. It was as if they had been ants walking across the back of a giant who had been cursed with a wasting disease, yet was constantly healing, forever in agony. It had seemed endless, but of course nothing was constant in the Black Wastes, and soon the desert morphed into a garden of flesh. The Archaeologist shuddered violently, clutching his chest, where his heart was beating so hard it hurt.

The madness had grown in Edgar's eyes, too, and eventually, he lost everything unnecessary about himself and became the Archaeologist. He focused on the beating of his heart, the smell of the air, and the stinging cold in his nose and extremities. He looked at the birds, which had not changed into anything disturbing or dangerous.

"I'm here. I'm still here," he whispered.

"I'm now." He was pulled too easily into the past. This was a curse, because he was still human and needed some measure of stability to survive. It was a blessing, because he was the Archaeologist, and his purpose was to uncover what had been buried so long that the sands of time had eroded all but the faintest traces of it from living memory. He wished he knew how to find that girl Amelia, the one he had met during his rather pleasant time at the Retreat.

What a useful, soothing tool she would be, helping him reach the balance he needed to fulfill his purpose. He'd lost some time again. If he kept doing that, the night would be over, and he would miss his chance to steal the Radiant Maiden's relic. But, as he tried to plan his path inside, he suddenly gasped. Eyes wide and mouth open, he turned to the small birds huddled in their tangled nest.

"I forgot something critical!" People didn't just give up when priceless treasures were stolen. They put a lot of effort into retrieving them. Wasn't that how the Raven Queen had gotten so famous? If he wanted to stay free long enough to study it, he needed to have an escape route planned. And worse than that, he hadn't even considered that the building would not only be guarded, but warded.

"Wow, I'm completely unprepared." He was so unprepared it was literally astounding. How had this happened? The birds chirped back mockingly, then turned their backs on him, trying to sleep.

"I can't forget this," he muttered, fumbling for the small notebook he kept tucked into the inner pocket of his patched jacket. He shuffled out of the bushes and to a streetlamp. Under the light, he took the stub of a small lead pencil and flipped through, looking for an empty page. He froze, looking down at the clumsy handwriting on one of the previous pages.

"Need a proper escape route and a safe place to hide with the relic," he read aloud.

"Must plan more thoroughly." His heart pounded with the panic of a small animal, and he slowly tilted over to lean against the lamppost. He had no memory of writing this. He tried to restrain his horror, because panic—stress of any kind—seemed to make him less sane. After a few minutes, he tucked away the notebook and pencil and walked off to find a discarded newspaper. He needed to check the date. When he finally found the one he was sure was the latest, he sat down on a park bench to read it for a moment.

There was nothing of particular note, or particular interest, but it was calming, and he got sucked into some meaningless article about how often unexpected rain had been stymying the weather diviners this year. One of the best experts had retired the year before, and though he'd been replaced by his apprentice, the younger man kept getting the forecast wrong, so many times that the old diviner had been called out of retirement to address people's complaints. But then the old man got it wrong, too!

Experts thought there might be some anomalous force at play and suspected that some aquatic magical beast that could bring rain had made a home near Gilbratha. Some people were calling for the Charybdis Gulf to be searched and cleared by a city-funded beast hunting team, which would also make transport and fishing easier. By the time he had finished the paper, the Archaeologist was calm again.

He drew up his knees and sat cross-legged on the bench, then pressed the pencil stub to his chin, frowning hard as he tried to come up with a plan for his heist. It was difficult, and he kept getting distracted. The coppers shooed him away from the park come morning, and after several hours of wandering, a bit of begging, and eating the last of the food in his pockets, it was somehow afternoon and he still hadn't figured anything out.

He was walking around the western area of the Mires, trying to remember the way to the Undreaming Order building, when he felt it. The sensation was distant, like a faraway scream that never ended, but more like the vibration of a whale-call, so deep he felt it in his bones. And with the call came the impression of time and timelessness both, of a place where echoes of everything since the beginning remained. He could smell the faintest whiff of that ancient knowledge, feel it as an itch in his marrow.

If there was ever something made more perfectly to call to him, something that better suited his purpose, he couldn't imagine it. He turned toward the direction it came from and began to walk.