Buried Treasure

Where do we come from? It’s a simple question with no real answer. The sarcastic would say your parents, but that doesn’t really answer anything. Where did they come from? And their parents before them? There has to be some starting point. Every story has a beginning, so what is ours?

This is the one question that I cannot seem to answer, nor let go. Most are content to go on about their lives, never worrying about such things. I am not one of those. This question keeps me awake at night, nags at me during every waking moment. It’s there in the back of my head during every conversation, taunting me. Daring me to keep searching.

We couldn’t have just appeared from nowhere. There has to be a beginning to the story, a discernible point at which we began.

It is this mystery that has become my driving force. The sole reason I continue on. I have devoted my life to the past, searching for something that seems impossible to grasp onto. The further back I dig, the further away the solution seems to be.

That was, until a month ago. That’s when the tomb was discovered.

A construction company had been excavating a hill in the countryside in preparation to make a new storage cellar of some sort, when they hit a solid sheet of metal. Of course, their work could go no further at that point. They had neither the tools nor the experience to deal with something like that.

Once word got out, the Equestrian Royal Museum dispatched a crew to investigate. We’ve found strange panels like this in the past, but never so large. I was chosen to lead the crew, overseeing excavation and ensuring proper protocol when handling artifacts.

We began digging away immediately, quickly realizing this find was rather different. The others had been single panels, often broken at the edges. This was a whole piece, and seemed to go down further into the ground. It took us nearly a week to remove the earth from around the strange object, but what we found was more than worth the effort.

It was incredible. A hundred feet on any side, in what appeared to be a perfectly seamless cube. Though the metal was tarnished from its lengthy entrapment under the soil, it still gleamed in the sunlight. There seemed to be no welds anywhere on it, no apparent signs of tooling. It was as if it had formed that way, a perfect gleaming cube of silver metal.

After we had cleaned off the revealed surface we found that it was without any signs of aging at all. I will admit I spent more time than may seem rational staring at the artifact. It seemed as if it had come from another planet. Nothing in nature could be so perfect, so smooth and unblemished.

Had I known what it was hiding, I would have ordered it buried and its location struck from the maps forever. Alas, hindsight makes fools of us all, and my lust for truth had blinded me until it was far too late.