Archive Shorts

The Artifact

Written by Minirigby

Wind whistled through the desert while the bright mid-day's light cast its glow over me as I continued my march through the sands. After nearly two-hundred years of combing over maps, digging through archives, and trekking across every environment you could imagine, finally I had the lead I had been waiting for.

Just a few weeks earlier, in a village not far from here, some local Toa who passed through this desert reported finding the entrance to some strange old ruin out in the sands, a ruin matching the description of what I've been searching for.

After three long days of searching for the ruin, praying to the Great Spirit that it hadn't been buried for good by the ever-shifting sands, I had finally found something worth getting excited over. A small stone entrance, totally alone out in the desert, with intricate carvings all over its surface I had only seen briefly before during my archeology work.

Right away I knew, this was what I'd been searching for...

As I carefully let myself down into the old ruins from above, making sure not to slip on the mound of sand that had fallen in through the entrance, my attention was immediately grabbed by how overgrown the inside was.

Even all the way out here in the desert, with barely any water to speak of, the vines and moss inside these ruins were growing stronger than any flora I had seen before.

I pulled a lightstone out of the bag on my hip and continued my way down the dark corridor, tracing the vines along the wall with my fingers, until I noticed a strange feeling pulling me further in. Deciding to follow through with it, I kept moving deeper and deeper into the ruins, passing by more thick vines and strange carvings, and avoiding plenty of archaic traps and pitfalls along the way until finally reaching a door at the end of the path...

Moving closer to the door, I held my lightstone up to get a better look, only to be startled backward by the sight of a long dead Toa laying off to the side of me, covered over by thick vines just like everything else down here. An unfortunate victim of one of the ruin's many traps most likely, but nothing that would convince me to turn back now, not from a pull this strong.

I pushed aside the door with as much force as my Matoran arms could manage, exposing the room inside to the light from my lightstone.

At the center of the room, where all the vines from the corridor finally met together, lay a round pedestal covered in the same ancient and ornate carvings found all throughout the ruin. The real treasure however, was what sat atop the pedestal.

A beautiful deep red gemstone, no bigger than my own fist, sat there in the center of the room, demanding the attention of anyone who entered.

I knew as soon as it caught my eyes that finally, after all my years of research, I had at last found the greatest treasure of my career. As I lifted the gemstone up off the pedestal to get a better look at it, I let my mind wander about the possibilities, and the renown I would finally gain for all my work as an archeologist. Carefully placing the stone into my bag, I thought to myself;

Tuyet, this is the sort of discovery they'll remember you for.