The one we called "the boss," Cyclops, whose real name was Simon Du Brissac, was the owner of our private archaeology company and my former professor in the archaeology department at the university.
He wasn't a venal man, but rather an arrogant and naive scholar, who found those around him intellectually inferior and thus constantly displayed a disdainful air.
During his classes, my Paichelan face had never really caught his attention. However, ever since he learned that not only did I know how to use Paichelan tomb raiders' probes, but that I had even managed to reproduce an authentic traditional Paichelan excavation tool, this old professor's attitude towards me had completely changed.
As for the reason why I learned to make and use this kind of probe, that's a long story.
After my maternal grandmother passed away, I was twelve, my mother and I, while tidying her room, discovered an old dusty chest under her bed.
Old photos, dating back many years, were the first to slide out of the chest. My grandmother, young, wore a white shirt and trousers, with a short, neat haircut. Beside her stood a thin man, dressed in a suit and wearing thick glasses. His fingers rested delicately behind my grandmother's waist, and he smiled with a certain shyness.
From his features, I judged that he could be my biological grandfather.
I only knew that my grandmother had remarried the man who was my current grandfather, Pascal Morel. Charlotte was Pascal and my grandmother's second child, meaning my aunt. I perhaps found it easier to confide in my aunt than in my mother.
My mother glanced at the photos. She had never known her biological father and this discovery didn't seem to surprise her – she even appeared rather distant. During her lifetime, my grandmother had always been very reserved about her past. All this, before my eyes, suddenly seemed to open a breach, allowing me a glimpse of the years hidden behind her silence.
I would have liked to see more, but my mother urged me to go downstairs and do my homework: "Why stir up a past that your grandmother didn't publicly acknowledge? To share the suffering? What advantage is there in defining ourselves as victims? I am me, you are you, and your grandmother is your grandmother."
I replied that I would obey and left the room. But I couldn't help but glance back through the crack of the door, surprising my mother who continued to tidy up, her head bowed.
I am sure I saw her wipe away tears.
Perhaps it was because of her Paichelan face. Having grown up in Libélin, she had suffered greatly from being looked at differently, considered from a young age as "the different child." Later, she never really seriously learned the Paichelan language and never showed any interest in her past.
A few days later, she moved the chest to the cellar of the storage room. Taking advantage of my mother being asleep, I secretly went to the basement with a flashlight. As soon as I opened the chest's lid, a smell of old paper and mothballs hit my face. On top was a diary bound in old leather, its clasp rusted and its pages yellowed.
I opened the diary. Besides a few hand-drawn sketches, there were several brick-like objects, carefully wrapped in kraft paper.
I opened the kraft paper bags to look: they were film negatives. At first, I delicately picked up one of the rolls, holding it up to the light. The small negatives gleamed with an amber sheen, vaguely revealing successive silhouettes. The perforations on these old film reels were strange, their craftsmanship very crude, as if they had been dug out by hand, with irregular edges. Later, after many adventures, I finally managed to get these negatives developed. It was from the photo shop printer that I learned they were actually cinema film. I tried to project them, but what flashed quickly on the screen wasn't moving images.
They must have been used as photographic negatives.
I expected to find more photos of my young grandmother, but after searching for a long time, there wasn't a single portrait. Half depicted grayish, dusty objects, the other half ancient documents, damaged papers covered in dense characters drawn with a brush, very different from the modern pen writing in the diary.
These photos and the diary's handwriting, all seemed to be hands reaching out from the interstices of another world, gently pulling me with invisible threads. I began to secretly learn the Paichelan language using an old dictionary found in the school library.
At first, it was just out of interest. It was only after a few years that I gradually began to understand the neat and elegant texts in those photos and the quick, hasty handwriting in my grandfather's diary.
For example, on the back of that old photo of my grandfather and grandmother, it was written: "人间亦自有银河— The mortal world also has its own Milky Way."
My grandfather and grandmother had been archaeologists. It was also because of this curiosity that I became interested in archaeology. Especially in writings.
Before this departure, while I was still in Cyclops's apartment near the university, looking for information about this treasure map in a book of hours, a package arrived: a wooden plank half a meter wide and nearly two and a half meters high.
He asked me: "Guess what this is?"
I examined it for a moment and randomly guessed: "An indigenous weapon?"
He smiled slightly and shook his head: "Keep going."
I frowned: "But even for primitive men, this would be too rudimentary to serve as a simple floating plank, right?"
He said nothing, simply motioning for me to continue. I thought for a moment and finally gave up: "I can't guess." He softly uttered a sentence: "This is a book."
"... A book?" I was stunned, looking at this wooden plank in disbelief.
There was no text, no pages, only a few strange small circles scattered on it.
Cyclops, looking at this book, explained: "Each of these circles represents a story. Only the elders or priests of indigenous villages know their meaning. It is only during major festivals that they take out this 'book' and, by pointing to these symbols, tell the stories. As for ordinary people, they may only see it once in their lifetime."
Thoughtfully, I murmured: "An oral tradition language. But recorded using simple symbols."
I slowly approached this book, not expecting it to suddenly open, like a hidden door. In an instant, tumultuous floods invaded the room, engulfing everything. Before I could even scream, I had lost my footing and fallen into the deep sea behind the door.
Around me, nothing but infinite azure. The paintings hanging on the walls, the sleeping books on the shelves, the characters scrolling on my phone screen, and even the glow of the neon signs outside, all whispered, murmured, confided in this ocean.
Today, humanity has already mapped an almost flawless world, only the abyssal depths and subterranean darkness still conceal the unknown. I was sinking into this deep ocean, woven of languages and words, enveloped by dense layers of symbols. The water pressure became increasingly crushing, compressing my chest.
Letters and pictograms floated, undulated, tangled before my eyes like jellyfish. I struggled desperately, trying to breathe, but I found myself immobilized by the ocean of words... ... I was going to suffocate...
I forced my eyes open with all my might, gasping, my face still pressed against the back of the tablet. The warmth of my palm reminded me that this time, I hadn't drowned, I had just dozed off.
The cabin door burst open with a sharp crack, and a dazzling flashlight beam hit me right in the face. I squinted, instinctively raising my hand to protect myself, while Cyclops's low, hurried voice echoed in my ears: "Sphinx, come with me."
His tone was graver than usual; at that moment, I perceived a tension he rarely showed.
I jumped out of the helicopter. The moment my heels touched the sand, I still swayed slightly. My brain seemed poorly connected to my body, I could barely walk in a straight line to follow Cyclops's steps.
The Frost Moon was then hanging right above the island. This orbital position occurred only once every 487 years – coinciding exactly with a full cycle of the Era of the Ashen Wheel.
The camp had already taken shape, light filtering through the gaps in the prefabricated barracks, tearing through the darkness. Several dozen people had just disembarked and were busily and chaotically unloading equipment, pulling cables, and installing pipes.
The diesel generator rumbled, and the air was permeated with the smell of freshly turned earth and metallic clashes.
"Tonight, it's grilled seafood buffet, brothers!" Cobra shouted at the top of his lungs, brandishing a net of struggling fish.
I called out to him: "Don't think about eating right now, come with me!" He stopped dead, threw the net into a bucket, and ran to join me. We crossed the temporary lighting zone on the outskirts of the camp to enter a darker area, near the edge of the forest.
The sea breeze grew cooler, rustling the shadows of the trees. The ground changed from loose sand to more compact, dark earth, and a few clumps of plants swayed in the light beams. I glanced back – the camp shone in the
distance, like a newly awakened mechanical fortress embedded on the coast, while the yacht behind it resembled a sleeping white whale, floating silently in the night.
Not far away, a flashlight beam was fixed on a specific point on the ground.
Anubis was crouching there, motionless. His gaze seemed nailed to a detail on the earth. I quickened my pace.
As I approached, I saw he was staring at a white protrusion, its texture clearly contrasting with the surrounding earth.
"... A sculpture?" I asked instinctively.
Anubis didn't answer, only slightly lowering the light. I then immediately saw the shape – the forehead, the brow ridge, the curve of the nose: the upper part of a skull, emerging thus from the earth.
I squatted down, delicately touching the top of the skull with my fingertips.
"Most likely a man."
"How do you know?" Cobra asked, peeking over beside me.
"A man's skull is rougher to the touch, a woman's more delicate. This... the sensation is quite abstract to explain," I replied in a low voice.
Cobra looked at me with eyes one reserves for killers in horror movies.
I turned back to him: "Why are you looking at me like that? This is basic knowledge, I'll teach you later."
Anubis also squatted down. His fingers silently slipped into the skull's orbit, his knuckles slowly curling into a hook – this gesture made me shiver, and yet, I found it absurdly appropriate for him.
Between him and "death," there was always a kind of unspoken complicity. After all, he had chosen "Anubis" as his codename.
At that moment, Cobra bumped into something a few steps away. He bent down and picked up a curved, rusty metal object, removing the sea salt crystals covering it.
In the moonlight, the blade reflected wavy patterns similar to fish scales – a typical Kilij scimitar. The sharkskin that originally wrapped the hilt had disintegrated, leaving only a layer of residue.
Cyclops approached to take a look, then turned to Anubis: "The inscription on it, can you decipher it?"
Anubis took the saber, examined it for a moment: "It's Tinay script, it must be three or four hundred years old... I don't know it very well. But the last word..." He paused. "It's probably... 'return'."
I stepped back a few paces, tightened the handle of my probe, took a deep breath, plunged the probe head vertically into the ground, gripping the T-handle firmly, and began to slowly rotate it downwards. The earth was damp and sticky, a strange resistance traveling up the shaft to my arms.
Just as the probe was about to reach a hidden depth, a distinct "click" suddenly sounded from underground. My hand froze instantly, my heart skipped a beat, my pupils dilated slightly without me realizing it. Exhaling, I slowly rotated the shaft in the opposite direction.
Accompanied by a metallic scraping sound, the probe painfully ascended from the ground, centimeter by centimeter. When the head finally emerged, it brought up a core of deep black earth, a color clearly different from the surrounding brownish-yellow soil – in the center of the core was even a fine, shiny crystalline powder, glinting strangely in the dim light.
Cobra immediately approached, obvious concern on his face: "What's going on?" I raised my hand to signal him to step back cautiously, carefully examining this section of abnormal core: "There's a fault here... There might be a huge cavity underneath."
I had barely finished speaking when a faint but distinct cracking sound was heard nearby, as if an ancient, long-dormant structure had been inadvertently awakened. The ground beneath Cobra's feet began to slowly sink, the earth rapidly collapsing to form a deep hole, darkness spreading like a vortex.
"Get back!" I yelled, while jumping violently backward.
Amidst a rumble of earth and stones, a large amount of soil collapsed, revealing a dark, wide pit, about two meters deep. Still in shock, I looked around, but suddenly realized Cobra was gone. My heart pounded violently.
I called out anxiously: "Cobra? Cobra!"
After a brief, agonizing silence, his voice, slightly panicked, finally rose from the bottom of the pit: "Cough, cough... I'm here, I'm okay!"
I let out a sigh of relief. Anubis reacted quickly, leaning down to extend his arm into the pit. Cobra firmly gripped his wrist and, thanks to Anubis's strength, managed to pull himself out of the hole. He was covered in dirt, in a pitiful state, but fortunately unharmed.
Cyclops approached slowly, his face grim. The beam of his flashlight tore through the darkness, revealing the blurred and sinister outlines of the bottom of the pit. The underground space was much larger than imagined; one could vaguely distinguish rubble and remnants of ancient constructions scattered at the bottom.
The stone walls were covered with mottled moss, like some kind of mysterious tomb sealed by time. He silently raised his flashlight, the beam sweeping the edge of the collapse. An enormous black stone slab then appeared, resembling the cover of a deliberately sealed entrance. The surface of the slab was covered with fine cracks and strange, blurred patterns, adjoining the half-visible face of a white marble woman.
I took a few steps forward. In the dim light, the face of this sculpture was half-buried in the earth, the forehead smooth and pale, the gaze empty and mysterious.
I asked in a low voice: "Cyclops, is this an 'imago'?"
"Imago?" Cobra asked, perplexed.
I nodded: "A type of Libélin death mask, usually made of beeswax, molded directly onto the deceased's face to accurately record their features. They were usually carefully preserved in the family courtyard."
"It should be an imago," Cyclops added in a low voice. "The word 'image' we commonly use comes from 'imago.' It actually emphasizes the act of 'copying.'"
A sudden wind gusted from the underground fissure, bringing a brackish, putrid smell that was chilling to the bone.
"The right of images..." Anubis murmured. "It was once a privilege reserved for the aristocracy."
We remained silent for a moment. Cyclops finally gave the order: "Let's stop here. This isn't something we can deal with tonight."
Cyclops and I exchanged a knowing glance, understanding each other without words. The fact that there were so few documents about this island was in itself a dangerous signal – it meant that even if there were so many treasures here, very few people had left, one could even say, almost no one.