36

It had been some time since the farmer had run to tell people of the beautiful stone he had found in his field. As a farmer in a place where it was almost impossible to farm the nearest neighbours weren't close plus he'd gone there on foot and wasn't a young man anymore

The donkey he had owned with his family had died during the winter so there was only a ox in the barn now. An ox he couldn't risk taking on this journey, because he would need it to be in peak condition once the ploughing started.

After two days of walking on the steep mountain paths and broken roads his feet were beginning to make him feel like that may have been a stupid idea. His feet would probably never be the same again. It felt like his entire foot was one single blister and it damaged his pride as a farmer that he was in any pain at all.

Deep down in his bones, he knew that this was a journey that he needed to take. It was like destiny had taken his hand and was pulling him alongside it. His grandmother had always said that they had stayed farming on the mountain for a reason.

That reason had never been explained throughout all the long years of her life and here he was finding something that felt desperately important. All it had taken was his spade and the need to follow the old farming traditions.

Maybe this was the reason.

Maybe this was his reason.

Grandmother had always said that everyone was put in the world for a reason.

Grandmother had said a lot of things.

Out on the plain he reached the first small house built from mud brick and turf to keep out the wind and the freezing winds in winter. It was here he had spoken the first news about the marvellous stone, asking for directions to a large town with someone who would know what to do.

Word spread throughout the region moving from hamlet to village, town to town just as he did. Eventually it reached the nearest city and drew the interest of some archaeologists.

~~~

Piles of books and papers littered the floor of their office as they searched for any mention of a structure in the vicinity of where the stone had been found. Diligent students rifled through library shelves that hadn't seen a single human in decades, thick with dust and the scent of aged paper. Hundreds of obscure texts and maps scoured for even the faintest hint or any kind of construction using this kind of stone but despite this they found nothing.

If there had been a building, there wasn't anything among their written documents that recorded it. That wasn't to say there hadn't ever been something plenty of documents were lost to history. Floods, fires, a desperate need for loo roll during an epidemic of some diarrhoea causing sickness, there were many reasons written records were lost.

If the farmer who had found the stone was correct in his description of it, the highly decorative masonry was a first for the area. In the archeologist's experiences, circumstances thus pointed to this being a stone meant for some temple or municipal building down in the plains. People in the plains lived in small clusters of settlements around the winding rivers and lakes dotted across it, barely anyone lived in the mountains. The road down from them to the larger settlements was bumpy.

It always had been.

Not hard to lose a few stones with how much it would jostle a cart. Even now people lost things on the challenging roads.

The stone itself was interesting enough to send a team to go look at it in situ but the increasing possibility that this might be a genuinely unknown discovery was scintillating.

Discovering something like this had the potential to make someone's entire career. The search for answers and the absolute wonder at finding something under the earth that hadn't been seen before in living memory was what an archaeologist lived for.

They packed up equipment and supplies heading out to find this important stone and the secrets it was hiding. Tracking the news back the way it had come from city to town to village, eventually to the farm where it lay mostly covered in dirt. Every town and village that they stopped in along the way was filled with curious locals curious why they had come from the city and filled with stories they were desperate to tell about the stone.

But no-one had any actual information about the origins of the stone. There wasn't even any folk stories even in the settlements closest to the mountain and the field it was sitting in. They talked to elders everywhere and leafed through local documents but there wasn't even a vague mention of anything that the stone could have belonged to.

Still everyone they met had a theory about its origin and meaning.

So the archaeologists resigned themselves to having to go see the stone and see if the patterning and colour were anything like other known buildings in the area it might have been made for. There were also rumours that there was writing on the stone. If that was true it would be incredibly helpful to determine where and when it was from.

The group of archaeologists were brought to see the oldest member of the last village before they had to start their ascent into the mountains. He was the oldest man any of them had ever seen. Someone so old that you were constantly marvelling how they were still alive. Someone that made you constantly anxious that they could pass away at any given moment. Which made what he was about to tell them all the more vital to document. For it would soon be lost forever.

As they sat in his house all crammed in together around a kitchen table that took up eighty percent of the room, he told them the tale once told to him by his own great grandmother. The man was almost entirely deaf and dealing with significant sight-loss caused by his advanced age so the details of the story took some time to figure out.

According to this now long dead great grandmother, once upon a time there had been a beautiful temple on the side of a mountain. All built from carved and carefully polished white stone.

White stone that wasn't found occurring naturally in a hundred miles of the place the stone had been found lying in a field. An entire temple built out of it would have taken decades to build and a mind-boggling amount of both money and manpower to hew, form, transport and erect.

There had been more people living in the valley then. The worn cobbled roads filled with grass and small thorn bushes that laced the plateau valley and mountains had been properly paved back then. People had followed them, climbing the many steps on the side of Mount Dytcier laden with offerings to the temple.

Praying for good harvests.

Not to a mountain god that much the old man was sure but to someone who would watch over the fields.

Young people had completed the climb, kneeling in the temple praying for a lover, a life partner... a child.

If you had problems with your bread his great grandma had told him you went to the temple and threw the offending loaf into the ritual fire and the deity that lived there would help you make a better one next time. People in the village still burned bread like this when there were problems but only a slice... grain was too precious a thing to waste.

It had once grown abundantly in the mountains and increasingly copiously out on the plains but they could barely grow enough to eat themselves. In recent years many fields had grown entirely barren.

In both growing and burning the results were unpredictable now.

Who this helpful deity was, was long lost to history. Local belief had dwindled to only its most vestigial traditions since the day the mountain collapsed. It was these things that you did because your parents did and it didn't hurt to continue doing because they reminded you of your family, that had been helping to keep someone alive.

The temple had apparently been lost under the landslide from the mountain caused by a fight among the gods and demons that made the earth tremble or so the story passed down from family member to family member had said.

This tale was the first clue that maybe there was more than just this one singular stone. Maybe it was more than just a stone falling out of a wagon. A forgotten temple find would be a massive event. A temple lost in an earthquake was a find even rarer than being able to pick a needle out of a haystack. There was going to be so much information stored under the ground, waiting for them to uncover.

It boosted their energy and determination to reach the stone. Now they had a real bounce in their collective step that carried them over the steep mountain pass and down into the valley below.

There they met the farmer who had originally reported the find and with his permission set up several tents in a fallow field.

After a short rest they were all gathered looking at the stone they'd heard so much about, where it lay in the ploughed field now filled with germinating wheat.

The archaeologists stood around it brandishing almost every tool of their professional ready to record whatever they could. It was just as beautiful as the community whispers had said.

This first stone was likely the first of many many more if there truly was a temple here hidden beneath the soil.

With intricate carvings and still somehow polished edges it truly was a remarkable stone. Not a single crack or scuff on its surface, the flowers somehow survived completely intact. To the casual observer it looked like someone had come along and buried a freshly cut stone in the ground and then made a fuss about it to draw attention.

It was the writing carved into its surface that proved this was something much older.

It was three weeks into their archaeological investigation when trowels and brushes actually met the dirt and they began digging.

Not long after that, they found the first bone.

The first human bone.

Mini Theatre

Farmer: It's no big city hotel like what I'm sure you're used to but it's got no big rocks in it.

Archaeologist leader: Thank you for letting us stay in your field.

Farmer: *leaves*

Archaeologist leader: No big rocks you say? *picks up a pretty large looking rock* I'd hate to see what he considered to be a big rock.

a/n: Just know that every time I wrote 'archaeologist' in this chapter I wrote 'architect' first by accident and had to go back and change it. I blame watching 'Love in the Air' for that. ʕ̢̣̣̣̣̩̩̩̩·͡˔·ོɁ̡̣̣̣̣̩̩̩̩✧ My brain really feels like it's full of fluff right now.