Excitement hung in the air like thick smog. Erickson choked on it, blinking hard and questioning his luck.
His heart leapt into his throat and he watched, eyes riveted on the excavation site as though he'd be killed if he dared move his gaze. The workers moved torturously slow as they packed up for the day, oblivious to his stuttering anticipation. He licked his parched lips, gulping his heart back down into his chest.
"I can't believe it," Erickson's colleague, Drew, whispered. "Nobody thought this would show up here...it's miles away from the main settlement."
Erickson couldn't respond; he jerked his head in a nod and took a few steps closer to the pit.
As the workers packed up their tools, Erickson took shaky steps down the ladder into the excavation pit. Before him lay a slab of stone, nearly ten feet wide by ten feet high. Its surface reflected the toil of time; cracked, fragmented, and faded. He knelt down beside it, eyes skimming the surface, fingers brushing the mysterious fragment of history.
"It looks like a typical piece of ancient artwork," Drew said, walking the perimeter, looking it up and down. "A damn good one, I might add."
"Yes. But the question is..."
They looked at each other, the question burning in the air between them.
"What is it doing here?" Drew sighed. "Who even knows."
Erickson smoothed his hand over the frieze, questions clouding his mind. "This piece is obviously a product of the Alatari culture. But this is almost two hundred miles away from their main settlement. No other existing settlements are known. So why is this here?"
Drew paused at the bottom of the slab, tilting his head back and forth as he pondered the artwork. "Look at the image, Erickson. It's one of the ancients."
Erickson stood and absorbed the image. There was a faceless figure of a man, standing off to the side of the image. His arm was pointing away from him, beckoning to the distance.
"What's he pointing at?" Erickson asked, squinting.
"It looks like the sky."
Erickson knelt down, peering closer at the sky. "But it's completely black."
"Every night isn't a starry one."
Uneasiness gnawed at him; something wasn't right. Erickson's entire career was devoted to this ancient civilization, and he considered himself to be the foremost authority on Ancient Alatian culture. For a culture with so few fragments and so little information linking up the pieces they did have, this stone slab was an unnerving addition.
"Something's not adding up." Erickson knelt beside it once more, skimming the surface for hidden clues. "We may not know why it's here...but we can at least figure out what it's trying to say."
"It could be a common astronomical scene....maybe used in one of their schools."
"Possibly..." The image was so plain it made Erickson question why it had even been drawn. Alatari art was notoriously elaborate and cryptic; foggy mysteries from the ancient past. This image was disturbingly stark. A man pointing at something. Pointing at the sky...
"He's not even pointing up."
"What?"
"Look. He's pointing in front of him. At something ahead of him."
"He's pointing not at the sky...but at blackness?"
Erickson didn't respond. He skimmed his fingers across the smoothed black surface and closed his eyes. It was just smooth stone...until his fingers ran across an irregularity in the surface.
He opened his eyes, expecting it to be a crack in the rock. It wasn't. He ran his fingers against it again, feeling a long line of irregularity.
"Drew...I feel something."
"What do you mean?"
"This whole stone is smooth...abnormally smooth. But run your fingers across here...and suddenly, it's raised and pitted."
Drew touched the irregular area and furrowed a brow. "It reminds me of Braille..."
Erickson ran his fingers across the blackness, tracing the irregularity for nearly five feet. It abruptly stopped at the end of the blackness. "Drew...I think it says something. They obviously polished the rest of the stone....except for this section." He paused, looking at Drew. "Are you fluent in Alatian?"
Drew smiled as he continued to study the stone. "You know I've been having trouble finding a fluent teacher."
Erickson's heart throbbed behind his ribs as he absorbed what lay before him. The remaining fragments of the Alatian language were still being picked over in universities across the world. At the very least, this discovery would contribute to understanding their alphabet, but if this added up to be something more...Erickson shivered at the thought.
They stood, observing the slab one last time. The monumental span of time between this piece of artwork and present day made him shudder. The murky mysteries of the past were being forced into daylight.
A shiver ran up his spine as he skimmed the blackness...the native wasn't pointing at the sky. He was pointing at something black...empty...something, Erickson suddenly realized, terrifyingly ominous.
"Whatever this artwork means," Erickson said, "I don't think it's very good."
"It could be the answer to why the Alatari's disappeared," Drew joked, turning and climbing out of the pit.
Like a burst of clairvoyance, Erickson knew. The location, the years of being buried, the stark image, the hidden language...This piece held more information than he realized. Ancient civilizations didn't go hundreds of miles out of their way to place a meaningless piece of artwork. They didn't deposit clues like this unless it held information of startling magnitude. The secret had to be broken...immediately.
"In typical Alatari behavior, we're presented with something that means more than what meets the eye," Erickson said. "And this, Drew, has the potential to unlock the greatest secret of the Alatari civilization...
"Why it disappeared."