He saw nothing out of the ordinary, just as he had every time he had looked save that first time.
The man let out a deep sigh, resignation in his breath. The failure was not unexpected; after all, how many times in one lifetime can one be handed the keys of Time?
He dug dispiritedly beneath the prow of the skeletal ship he had been searching through, trying to catch sight of any scrap that the sea had not claimed, any glint, any tiny sparkle like the one he had seen that day, but to no avail.
The red-orange arc that had cracked the horizon at daybreak swelled to a complete sphere, filling the heavy, vaporous air with opacity. Full sun.
He sighed deeply, remembering the moment of his discovery fondly.
He had been a much younger man then, a man with unrealistic dreams of youth and the itching desire to see them to fruition being lessened a little each year as those dreams dissipated. He had all but settled into the resentful acceptance that his life would turn out to be no more than ordinary when an impetuous dawn stroll along the black sand beach had yielded a fortuitous glimmer.
He had almost missed it; he caught it out of the corner of his eye, like a distant movement, and it had set his heart to heavy, painful thudding; legend said that gray lions, living ghosts of hunter-predators, prowled the Skeleton Coast, blending into the mist to invisibility until they were upon their unfortunate prey. He had seen enough human bones scattered amid the bones of ships to believe the tales. The purple glimmer on the periphery of his vision had terrified him, caused him to stop, frozen, where he stood, praying to the All-God to allow him to blend into the mist, to escape the jaws of the ghost lions.
When nothing sprang out of the fog at him after a few minutes he had cautiously made his way to the dark bones of the ship, the outlines of its crushed timbers turning from shadows to gray, then black, until he was there, inside what had been the hull. He had dug carefully in the sand, brushing the grains on the wet surface gently away, oblivious of the blood that was seeping from his fingers, his skin sliced into thin ribbons by the volcanic shards.
About a knuckle’s depth down, hidden in the lee of a broken timber, he found it.
At first he had thought it was a shell of some kind, or perhaps a piece of mother-of-pearl; it was violet in color, irregular in hue, flat as a whisper, with a ragged edge running the perimeter of an asymmetrical oval. It had taken him several moments to work up the courage to touch it, in fear that it might be a kind of poisonous coral or other sea plant he had never encountered before. When finally he did, he found it smooth as glass, but scored with fine lines, as if inlaid with countless tiny, perfect tiles.
However long it had been wedged in the sand had given the sea the opportunity to grind it down, blast the surface with uncounted gusts of wind and grit, and yet, still etched into its surface was a rune of some kind, a type of writing he had never seen. Gingerly, and with the greatest of care, he picked the odd thing up and held it up before his eyes.
At that moment the sun broke through the mist again. The ray of light touched the glass like surface and caught each tiny line; the object flashed with a glamour that almost blinded him. Ray upon ray of multicolored light rippled in a heartbeat over the pale violet surface, running in glistening rivers off the thin, tattered edge, dazzling his eyes.
And then, when the light moved on, it darkened again to the flat violet hue once more.
He did not feel the pain in his bloody fingers, or the sand in his eyes, or the growing heat of the sun as it climbed into the sky. All he felt was the magic radiating in his hands, the beating of his own heart keeping time with the ticking of some great unseen universal clock, a melodic hum in his mind telling him, without words, that his life would never again threaten to be ordinary.
He had feverishly sought its origins from that moment forward, had indentured himself as a ship’s cook on voyages to Manosse and the Hintervold. taken a position as an acolyte in Terreanfor, the great cathedral of Lord God. King of the Earth, Sorbold’s basilica of Living Stone, had served scholars and clerics and Filidic foresters, all to no avail. None among them had in their libraries, their memories, or their recounted lore a story of such a thing, and of course he could not ask anyone directly what it was, let alone show it to him.
He grew more and more frustrated as the years went by, searching for any clue, any explanation, but could not even find a sample of the writing that formed the rune on the object’s surface.
Until the day, quite by accident, he had happened upon the Cymrian museum, a little repository of dusty relics, rarely open and even more rarely visited, in the small keep known as Haguefort in the Orlandan province of Navarne.
The keeper of the museum was a pleasant young man named Lord Stephen Navarne, the duke of the province and an unabashed aficionado of Cymrian lore and history. He had inherited the responsibilities of the position of Cymrian Historian from his own father, who, like the other historians before him, had kept artifacts and records of that era locked away in secret, ashamed to be of the lineage of the people who had come to this continent as refugees from a disaster, and ended up consuming it, first in colonization, then in war. Those who were descended of that line rarely spoke of it, and almost never acknowledged its shameful history, its atrocities and destructive arrogance.
Stephen Navarne had been different, however. Knowing the advances that had been made before the Great War, the building of roads and cities, harbors and lighthouses, castles and cathedrals, he had chosen instead to be proud of that heritage, albeit subtly. He had lovingly built a small, unassuming depository of the historical treasures of that era with an eye toward preserving them, displaying them with a pleasant combination of pride, humility, and scholarship. He was always more than willing to give of his time to those seeking to know more about the time period and the race, the diverse, fragmented population that had escaped the volcanic fire of the Sleeping Child that had consumed their homeland, only to turn around and revisit that destruction on the lands of their hosts, then disappear into history.
It was there, in that tiny museum, amid the carefully tended displays, that the man who now stood beneath the Sorbold sun, wrapped in the mist of the Skeleton Coast, had discovered, in the tattered, water-soaked pages of a fragment of a book rescued from the same skeletal ships, several of the answers he sought.
The book, from the looks of its remains, had once been a thick tome, bound in leather and calligraphed in a careful hand, the annoyingly meticulous hand of a scholar. It existed now only in pieces, crumbling bits of pages and smeared ink, carefully preserved under glass. A few sections were intact, but by and large what remained was unreadable, or torn beyond recognition, or paste.
But one thing that had survived was the tide, embossed on the tattered leather cover.
The Book of All Human Knowledge, it read.
He had missed a good deal of the explanation that the Duke of Navarne had proffered about the book, struggling to contain the exhilaration that was ringing in his ears, making him sweat in nervous euphoria, all the while attempting to come across as calm and mildly disinterested. It was the first of many subsequent performances in which he was able to utterly deceive the person talking to him, appearing in one face, while hiding a very different other one.
What little he had heard he had mostly forgotten now; it was some sort of incessant babble about an old-world Nain explorer named Ven Polypheme, who had compiled all the great lore and teachings he had discovered in the course of his travels around the world. It had also been necessary for him to inquire of several other meaningless entries in the book in order to avoid allowing Lord Stephen to suspect which item he was interested in, and so a good deal of the historical background had blended together.