“The blast threw me clear into the waterfall room. I skidded across the damp stone, scrabbling for a handhold, and plunged off the edge. Just as I thought I was going to fall into the underground river and drown, the fingers of my left hand snagged on an outcropping of rock and I jerked to a stop so hard that I nearly dislocated my shoulder.”

“Hold on a minute,” Hank said, setting his wineglass down with a harsh ring of glass stressed nearly to shattering. “I thought you said that the passage between the waterfall and the pillar trap zigzagged.”

Oliver grimaced and pushed his stool back from the patchwork surface of the salvaged marble bar in his cluttered loft apartment. The fragments of marble were of all different colors and shapes, bonded together with strong food-grade stone epoxy. It looked a bit rough, but he liked things that way. As far as Oliver was concerned, too much of the world was sharp edges and clean lines, the sort his parents had been so enamored of during their seemingly endless remodeling projects in their northern Virginia plantation house. He turned away from Hank, took two steps, and buried his head in the refrigerator that rested opposite the bar, beside a wide sweep of countertop.

“Don’t hide from me in there,” Hank chided him, wagging a finger at Oliver as he used a finger and thumb of his other hand to tear off a chunk of bread from the loaf that had sat between them and dip it into the plastic tub of dressing. He crammed the sodden bread into his mouth and chewed contentedly for a moment, his eyes softening with pleasure at the taste of the freshly baked bread and perfectly seasoned dressing. He swallowed and said, “I’ve been listening to your stories since we were boys, Oliver, and I know when you’re lying.”

Oliver straightened and turned from the refrigerator with a bottle in each hand, kicking the refrigerator door shut with one slippered foot. “I’m not lying, Hank.”

“You mean to tell me that the blast picked you up, bounced you back and forth down the tunnel like a ping-pong ball, and deposited you safe and sound beside the bridge?” Hank asked, laughter bubbling just under the surface of his voice.

Oliver proffered a chilled bottle of red wine to Hank, who pressed his large stomach against the bar and leaned forward to accept the bottle with a grin. “Don’t think that this is a bribe to keep me from asking you again. I’ve listened to all your crazy stories over the years and believed most of them because you had evidence.” He paused to grunt as he pulled the cork from the bottle with the characteristic squeaking pop of synthetic cork, sniffed at the red-stained rubber dubiously, then smiled to himself and tipped the bottle into his glass. 

Oliver twisted the lid off of a bottle of cider and took a long drink, purposely keeping his eyes averted from Hank’s face. The memory of the events in that passage, deep under the mountains of a remote Pacific island, still haunted his dreams. In the week since he had returned, Oliver had repeatedly dreamed of the wave of blue fire, rolling over him and slamming him to the rough-hewn floor of the passage, the heat prickling against his skin as he curled into a ball and screamed at the realization that this was how his life would finally end. He would awake tangled in the sheets, prickling flesh covered in a sheen of hot sweat that had soaked into the bedclothes. 

Hank was talking again, pointing with his wine glass and a single immaculately manicured finger. Oliver realized that he had slipped back into the memory and lost track of the conversation. He took another swig from the bottle to cover his inattention and focused on Hank’s words.

“...Together for years, you tracking down relics, me helping you smuggle them back into the country with my ingenious little devices. I think you can trust me with what really happened and not feed me some ridiculous story. Next you’ll be saying you survived by hiding in a refrigerator and letting the blast throw you to safety.”

Oliver exploded in laughter. Cider surged up his nose, choked him, and turned the laugh into a coughing fit. He stumbled to a stool, set his bottle on the bar, and pulled himself up onto the seat. He continued to cough and splutter foam from his nose for half a minute as Hank looked on disapprovingly over the steel rims of his glasses. Finally, Oliver managed to get a breath down his lungs without gagging. He sat up and wiped his face and eyes with the collar of his t-shirt, then pushed his red hair back on his head and gave Hank a wide grin. “Actually, I escaped the fireball by pulling out a bullwhip and using it to chase back the flames.” 

“Ah, I should have known.” Hank’s eyes narrowed and he set his glass down on the bar and began tapping the rim with a single dark, carefully manicured finger. “So, are you going to tell me about it? I can tell you’re carrying a burden, Oliver. Allow me to help you with it.” 

“I think that wine is making you even more grandiose than usual, but just on account of our long friendship, I will tell you. Just, please, don’t ask me to explain it.”

“You have my word of honor,” Hank said, fumbling his wine glass over into his left hand, then holding up his right hand with three fingers extended. “One Star Scout to another.”

Oliver smiled, took another sip of cider, and leaned forward to rest his elbows on the bar. He looked past Hank to the painted brick of living room wall, letting his gaze rest upon the heavy oak bookshelf that concealed the door of the large safe, in which he had placed the shard. The others, he had captured five in all now, were hidden in bank vaults throughout Virginia, along with paperwork for the various false identities that he had established to use when traveling through dangerous territory. This mystery had consumed almost his entire adult life and, after nearly fifteen years, he was no closer to understanding the origins of the shards. At least he thought that he knew their effect, if not their cause, and that was enough to make him keep searching.

He took a slow breath, turned to look at Hank, then said, “The gas ignited, just like I told you, and the whole cavern filled up with fire in an instant. I was blown down the passage and slammed into the wall at the first turn. All around me the world was on fire. Everything, Hank. I couldn’t even see Leo through all the flames, but he must have been knocked from the pillar and burned to a cinder because after the flames were gone I went back into the cavern and I couldn’t see any sign of him.”

“Wait just a minute,” Hank said, holding up a finger between them. He stabbed at the air as if nudging bit pieces of information into place on an invisible abacus, then fixed Oliver with a befuddled expression. “I’m slipping towards drunk here, but I’m not stupid. Did you just tell me that the whole cavern exploded, killing your rival and sending  blasts of fire down the passages, and you walked out unscathed?”

“Not exactly unscathed, I did drop my flashlight when the blast hit me and when I found it the plastic lens had melted off and the LED was fused. I had to use my spare to get out of there.” 

Hank blinked twice and sat back in his chair. His mouth worked soundlessly, disturbing the neatly combed hairs of his black goatee as he tried to reconcile the story Oliver had just related with reality. Oliver waited, quietly sipping his cider and occasionally tearing off a bit of bread, dipping it in the dressing, and chewing it as quietly as he could. This was exactly why he had come up with the lie about being thrown into the waterfall room by the blast. Sure, that story was not especially believable, but it certainly beat claiming that he had survived a blast of fire hot enough to singe stone and melt plastic. He decided that it was a good thing he had not yet told the full story of this adventure to anyone besides Hank and, when the time came to tell his cousin Amber, he might just have to leave out the bit about the zig-zag passage.

Hank leaned forward again and set his wineglass on the bar delicately, then poked a finger at Oliver’s face. “You’re not lying to me again, are you?”

“No.”

“And you’re sure that you’re still alive? I only ask because after all the tales you’ve told me I wouldn’t discount talking to your ghost right now.”

That made Oliver smile. “I assure you, I am alive, well, and sitting here in this room with you.”

“I suspected as much,” Hank sighed.

“I don’t understand it any more than you, Hank.”

“Could it have been one of the relics that protected you? You had the heartwood around your neck and the shard in your bag.”

Oliver shook his head and sighed in frustration. “That’s the only explanation I can think of, but I’m not eager to test it again.”

“Obviously.” Hank lifted a plastic lid from the countertop and snugged it down over the tub of dressing, then shifted his bulk off the barstool, snatched up the loaf of bread, and rounded the corner of the bar with an elegant pivot that belied his three hundred pounds. He set the bread in an antique wood and tin breadbox beside the stove, put the dressing away in the refrigerator door, and began rummaging through the refrigerator shelves. “What about the interaction of the shard and the heartwood. Have you experimented with that further?”

“Yes. It’s really strange,” Oliver said, turning in his seat to watch as Hank pulled a cutting board from the wall and began dicing sausages. “The shard doesn’t appear to have any reaction to the heartwood. It remains still and cold no matter how close the heartwood comes to it. On the other hand, the heartwood reacts violently to the shard. If you move the shard towards it, the heartwood will slide away, as if it was being repelled by a magnetic field. If you force the heartwood towards the shard, it will begin pushing back. Keep pushing for too long and it will get hot.”

“That’s weird.”

“It is. I wish that I knew the cause, but since I don’t even know for sure that the shards are...” Oliver trailed off, eyes losing focus as he recalled the burning heat of the heartwood searing his chest when he lifted the shard from the altar. If only he knew the source of the shards, Oliver thought he might possibly be able to deduce the cause of the violent reaction between the two relics, but for all that he had devoted over a decade of his life to tracking down the shards, he still knew remarkably little about them. 

Oliver had discovered the first shard among his uncle Peter’s possessions in the attic of the family estate in northern Virginia. The shard had been hidden in a wooden puzzle box, which he had found at the bottom of a pile of papers in a battered footlocker while cleaning out his parents’ attic over Christmas break. It was that box of documents, and the clues that he found while perusing them over the next few months, that had introduced Oliver to the mystery of the shards. 

“I thought you believed the shards to be fragments of an ancient mechanism,” Hank said, interrupting Oliver’s reverie. He had finished cutting the meat and had a pan on the stove, butter already melting.

“Yes, that’s true. Something like the Antikythera Mechanism, but perhaps with a more mysterious purpose, one that would cause, or require, the parts to be imbued with a supernatural power. The Antikythera Mechanism was essentially a hand-cranked computer, built by the Greeks for calculating astronomical positions fifteen hundred years before Europeans were even constructing mechanical clocks. I have no idea what purpose my mechanism might have served, but it was certainly important.”

“So you’ve got a machine of unknown purpose and origin, created by persons unknown, at a time unknown, and you’re still hellbent on finding all the parts, the number of which is still unknown, and putting them back together,” Hank said. He turned from the stove and blinked at Oliver expectantly through the round lenses of his glasses. When Oliver didn’t reply Hank sighed and turned to the cutting board to begin dicing potatoes. “I’ll trust you that this machine, whatever it might be, is important, but I just wonder if there’s a reason it was broken and scattered across the globe.”

Oliver pondered Hank’s words, considering the implications as he watched Hank cook and finished his cider. It wasn’t the first time he had confronted the mysterious origins of the shards and wondered if he ought to give up his quest to capture them all, but even as he wondered how he might go about reshaping his life if he abandoned the search that had been so central to his existence for fifteen years Oliver felt the unquenchable urge to know rise up within himself. 

“I mean, think of this Oliver: You know where the heartwood came from, and I don’t think there’s any argument that it’s a good thing, right?”

“Agreed.”

“So if the heartwood, a fragment of perhaps the most unquestionably good relic you’ve ever found, shows a demonstrable dislike of the shards, perhaps that is a sign that they aren’t the safest thing in the world to be collecting.” Hank said, not looking up from the pan on the stove.

“You think I haven’t wondered about that?” Oliver finished his cider and tossed the bottle into the recycle bin beside the refrigerator, where it clanked against the dozen or so bottles and empty soup cans. “I can’t explain it, Hank, any more than I can explain why I’m still alive right now now. I just need to know the truth.”

“I’m not going to try and stop you man, I’ll even keep helping you smuggle the shards into the country, I just want you to think carefully before you assemble them, alright?”

“I’ll do that.”

“So what about that other thing you captured? Have you taken a look at the journals of the late and unlamented Leo whatever-his-name-was yet?” Hank asked, turning from the stove and leaning his large frame agains the counter. He held out a hand and Oliver passed him the wineglass that he had left on the bar. 

“Oh, you bet I have. Hell, I was reading through that thing the whole flight back here. Some fascinating bits of information.”

“Such as?”

Oliver leapt from his seat and strode into the open living room space, which was cluttered with book cases, boxes, and piles of artifacts. Along one wall stood a wide glass-topped desk, sitting opposite a worn leather sofa and beside a large television monitor and a rack of computers. In the center of the desk rested the leather bound book that Oliver had taken from Leo in the cavern of pillars, only an hour before the chamber had been shaken by a fireball that shattered several of the pillars, leaving them broken and scattered across the floor, and killed the previous owner of the book. Oliver grabbed the journal from the desk and carried it back to the bar, where he began flipping through pages.

“It’s more than just a research journal. Leo kept all of his hardcopy notes in this book.” Oliver flipped to a page covered in a tight scrawl of handwriting, then another on which Leo had pasted several folded photocopies of ancient texts. The space between each folded paper was occupied by dozens of notes in different colors of ink. “Here are his notes on the myth of Māui and Ro’e, the same story that led me to the island cave. He came at the problem from a different angle, but in the end we arrived at the same conclusion regarding the common origin of Maori legends.”

“I’m still astounded that you were able to track down an artifact that had remained hidden for hundreds of years,” Hank said.

“It wasn’t easy, but the truth is that you just have to know what to look for. My Uncle Peter spent his entire career researching the origin of Mayan civilization and only stumbled onto the first shard by mistake. It took him over a decade to uncover the location of the second shard, and he never even managed to find it before his whole team was killed in the massacre. Well, everyone but Amber, that is. Since then I’ve become more adept than him at tracking down the shards, but only because I’ve developed something of a system.”

“Care to share it?” Hank asked as he turned the hash over, unleashing a riot of mouth-watering scents and a sizzle that set Oliver’s stomach rumbling. “Unless it’s some deep dark secret. Maybe you sell a bit of your soul for each shard?”

“Nothing so dramatic, though the image of a crossroads at midnight is something we can work with. Picture it, then: A crossroads where weary travelers meet along two ancient roads that cut across the grasslands of some ancient land. As night settles, people mingle between camps, sharing stories, encountering long forgotten friends, meeting new friends. Before long they start sharing stories. A young storyteller wanders up the fire carrying an old scroll that he found wedged under a rock at the crossroads and tells everyone that the scroll contains a story he’s never heard before. He reads them the story, we’ll say it’s about a dwarf named Doug who found an uncommonly fine gem and all the trouble it brought him, and everyone agrees that it is a fine tale. The young man returns the scroll to the nook in the rock where he found it and goes to bed. At daybreak the camps at the crossroads break up and all of the travelers depart to the four corners of the land, bearing with them the tale of Doug the Dwarf and his Diamond of Detriment.” 

“I’m not seeing how this relates to your little quest to find the shards of some ancient machine,” Hank interrupted. 

“You’ll see it in a moment,” Oliver promised. “My point is this: How do you find the source of the story after a couple hundred years have passed?”

Hank pondered that question for a few moments as he pulled plates from the cupboard and set them out on the patchwork marble of the bar. He pulled the cork from the bottle of wine and refreshed his glass, then stood in the center of Oliver’s kitchen, swirling the wine in his glass and imbibing its aroma through his wide nostrils. Oliver did not hurry him. He had known Hank Thornton since childhood and, while their lives had taken significantly different paths during their college years, they had remained close friends. He knew that Hank preferred to quietly puzzle through a situation and arrive at a fully considered conclusion, an attitude that stood in contrast to Oliver’s own habit of talking through almost everything. 

After a time Hank stirred and began shoveling the hash from the frying pan onto the plates as he said, “I imagine that you might ask each person they encountered where they heard the story, then follow those clues back until you find a region in which everyone seems to know the tale.”

“That would make sense if they still had the scroll, but remember that the young storyteller returned the scroll to its hiding place after reading it to the group gathered around the campfire.”

Hank placed two plates of steaming hash on the bar and pushed one towards Oliver before hefting himself into a tall chair opposite. He stirred his plateful of hash with his fork a few times, then lifted a forkful and poked it towards Oliver saying, “So, if a concentration of stories doesn’t indicate the origin point, how could you find the source?” He put the food into his mouth and chewed slowly, savoring the flavors as he waited for Oliver to respond. 

“You need to find several different locations where there are concentrations of a particular legend, story, cult, whatever. Once you find those locations, you need to learn as much as you can about regional trade routes and historical migrations of peoples. With that information you can start looking for an empty place in the map, somewhere near the middle of everything that you’ve uncovered, where the people have drifted away and all the stories have dried up, such as in the ancestral homeland of a culture that has moved away and established a new capital somewhere far away.” 

Oliver stopped speaking and pulled his plate closer. He began enthusiastically shoveling food into his mouth. It had been months since he had enjoyed one of Hank’s meals.

They ate in silence for a while, then Oliver set down his fork and went to the refrigerator to retrieve a fresh bottle of cider. He unscrewed the cap, took a swig, and returned to his seat saying, “Of course, that only works when the shard hasn’t been found at any point in the past. People have been searching for these things for at least five thousand years, ever since the Creed scattered them. That’s why the last one I found, the one in Iceland, was especially difficult to track down. The Creed had discovered it before me and moved it about the most remote location they could.”

“You’ve mentioned them before,” Hank interjected, “but I’ve never been able to pin down what you mean. What is this Creed thing?”

“I don’t entirely know that, any more than I know where the shards come from. All I know is that at least five thousand years ago the shards began appearing all over the world. In places where the shards came to rest there was a brief explosion of culture and technology, which was soon followed by either a sudden decline or the people scattering outwards across the world, carrying their newly invigorated culture with them, but leaving the shards behind. This cycle repeats itself as the shards are captured, discovered, carried from place to place, until about a thousand years ago.” Oliver paused to wet his mouth with another sip. His fingers drifted towards Leo’s journal. He had rarely explained his theories in such depth. 

Years ago he had given a single presentation to his doctoral advisory board, one semester after returning from the Amazon with a shard that had been lost to the collapsed wooden empires of the lost city of Z. That presentation, and his refusal to abandon the radically unorthodox theories of cultural and technological development which it had expressed, had been the genesis of Oliver’s downfall from academia. Since then he had only opened himself up to his cousin Amber, who had accompanied him on the expedition to the Amazon, and Diana, a girlfriend with similarly mad theories. Both of those confidants were less than easily accessible these days, though, as Amber had married and settled down to a relatively calm life in northern Virginia, and Diana had managed to secure an additional year of funding for her research at the Louvre in Paris.

“You still haven’t explained what the Creed is.”

Oliver took a few bites, chewing them thoughtfully and staring at the pattern of patchwork marble in silence. It was one thing to say that he believed that the shards were somehow related to unexpected growth in culture around the world throughout the last few thousand years, to his mind that was no more unusual than claiming that cities tended to be built up around mines and wells, it was quite another to posit the existence of a global conspiracy that had spanned thousands of years. He finished his last bite of the hash, savoring the warm burn of spices in his mouth, then looked up at Hank. “I only have a few vague references to back this part up, and given what my former colleagues thought about my supposed evidence, calling this sketchy is probably the world’s greatest understatement.”

“I’m still here, Oliver. Just spill it.”

“A few years back I was searching for evidence of shards in Europe. With all the developments that took place there in the last thousand years I thought that there couldn’t help but be a shard there. Instead of finding anything like a solid clue, I ended up wasting six months collecting vague rumors that just ran me in circles. There were just too many things happening all in one place, everything overlapped and I couldn’t find an origin point. What I did find, though, was indications of someone working against people like me. Whenever I thought that I was getting close to a solid clue, I would find that some key record had been burned, or a castle destroyed, or a pagan shrine gutted and refashioned into a church.”

“That’s not so unusual in Europe. The Catholic church alone had enough internal strife as the political structure of the church developed, and that’s leaving out the inquisition, the reformation, the church of England, the crusades, and every bit of political intrigue that went on independent of the church.”

“I’m aware of the complexities of European history, Hank. This was different. The holes in the historical record were so precise that you could almost use them to track the shards, which as it turns out is exactly what I did. I started looking for other people who had uncovered the secret of the shards, both throughout history and in the present day, and I realized that there have been dozens of us over the last couple centuries. Different searchers encountered different levels of success, but one thing is clear: assemble too much of the puzzle, and crow too loudly about it, and you’ll end up dead.”

“You’re still alive,” Hank said.

“I don’t talk about the shards to many people. As far as my private clients know, I’m just a relic hunter, one of thousands throughout the world. As far as the world at large can tell, I’m just a travel photographer with a knack for getting into secluded historical sites before the archaeologists come and start digging holes everywhere.”

“So you keep a low profile because you’re paranoid that a shadowy conspiracy is going to kill you.” 

Oliver shot Hank a look. He would be the first to admit that his theories bordered on the paranoid, but it hurt to hear it from one of his few confidants. 

“Hey, I’m just painting in broad strokes here. You’re not giving me a lot to work with,” Hank said, his tone walking a line between defensive and joking.

Oliver sighed and pushed his empty plate away. He was not doing a good job explaining the situation and he wasn’t even sure how he could improve the picture for Hank. “Maybe I’m being too specific, too personal. You don’t need to know how I know all of this, especially since a lot of it is vague to even me, you just want to know what I’m facing.”

“Yes.”

“I believe the Creed to be a loosely organized collection of individuals sworn to protect the shards and keep them from ever being reassembled into the original mechanism. I know for sure that they have existed since the middle-ages in Europe, working against Renaissance thinkers like Leibniz who attempted to collect the shards, and I strongly suspect them of infiltrating governments and religions throughout history to direct people away from finding the shards. I even have an account of a priest from medieval Belarus who was the sole survivor of a massacre, which I believe to have been caused by members of the Creed attempting to wipe out everyone who saw one of the shards.”

Hank nodded thoughtfully, sipping at his wine as he contemplated Oliver’s words. Oliver watched his face closely, waiting for a sign that Hank’s apparent disbelief and uncertainty had slipped into distain. It was a familiar experience for Oliver, that appearance of scorn on the faces of people he respected.  

Finally Hank shrugged and took another sip of his wine before saying, “I don’t understand it, but I’m not going to call you crazy, Oliver. If you’d told me all of that a few years ago, I would probably have said that you’re paranoid. That said, I’ve seen a shard or two myself and I can’t deny that there is something strange about them.”

Oliver pulled Leo’s journal back in front of him and flipped it open to a page somewhere near the middle. He turned a few pages, scanning the tight scrawl of handwriting, searching for the beginning of a series of notes. “Here it is,” he said, turning the notebook to face Hank. “Speaking of believing in something now that you would have called insane a few years ago, take a look at this.”

Hank leaned forward, resting his elbows on the bar, and peered at the journal. His brown eyes flicked back and forth behind the glinting lenses of his eyeglasses as he scanned the notes. “May have found evidence that the eye is real,” he muttered, reaching out to turn a page. Oliver waited, not wanting to taint Hank’s opinion of the text any further. The index finger of Hank’s left hand idly traced a sketch of a tree in the margins of the page as he read, “This ritual may open the gate to Yggdrasil itself.” He drummed his fingers on the countertop, then turned another page in silence.

Oliver slipped wordlessly from his stool and crossed the room to his work table. Once there he pulled a battered old notebook from the small shelf beside the table, on which he kept notes and references that might prove useful to his current line of inquiry. This particular notebook was a collection of his own research notes from over five years ago, before he had begun keeping as much of his work as possible in electronic notebooks that could be easily encrypted and backed up in remote locations, or transferred to his phone for easy access in the field. Many of those old notes had been scanned and added to his digital library, those which he had deemed relevant to the ongoing quest to find the shards, or which had proven necessary to tracking down a more mundane relic for a client. This particular notebook, however, had never been so distinguished. In fact, Oliver had been more than a little surprised when he had managed to unearth it in a cardboard box of abandoned materials in the attic two days before. 

He settled into a padded chair and thumbed the switch to turn on the desk lamp, then opened the notebook and began paging through it. Oliver had an exceptionally good memory, but it had been years since he even considered the theories described in this notebook. He continued to page through the book until he heard the creak of springs announce Hank lowering his bulk onto the sofa behind Oliver. Without looking around he said, “So, what do you think?”

“It’s no more unlikely than anything else you’ve discovered,” Hank said.

“What about that bit about Yggdrasil?”

“I don’t know that I can take it literally, but how much more unlikely is it than the Creed, or the story you just told me about walking out of an explosion unscathed?”

Oliver smiled at that. He had to admit that his own stories were no more unbelievable than the clues he had uncovered in Leo’s notebook. Sometimes, as he stood at the gates of some ancient temple, or when he had trouble sleeping at night, Oliver wondered at the direction his life had taken and tried to imagine how his childhood self would react to knowing what lay in store. He turned to face Hank and tapped the open page of the notebook he had been perusing. “I only ask because of this,” he said. “Shortly after I got involved in the relic hunting game, I uncovered what I thought to be an ancient scroll from a monastery in Scotland.” 

Oliver pulled a photograph from his notebook and flipped it to Hank. Hank examined it, squinting at the photo and turning it to different angles as he attempted to read the faded lines of oddly squarish letters drawn on the ancient scroll in a precise hand. “That’s old English, so don’t worry about making out what the words mean,” Oliver explained. “I spent a month translating that text, then another four months searching for corroborating texts and unusually precise legends that had already been translated into modern English.”

“What is it?” Hank asked.

“An unusual version of the myth of how Odin lost his eye.”

“How is it unusual?” Hank asked. “I’m familiar with the general story: Odin is a powerful god. He trades his eye for a drink from the well of wisdom. Now he is very wise and has a raven that flies around gathering information for him.”

“Close, but not quite right,” Oliver said. “Odin had two ravens. One was named Hugin, the other Munin. Each day the ravens fly out from Valhalla to survey the whole world, from the deepest roots of Yggdrasil, where dragons lurk in the shadows, to the farthest corners of Midgard. They return each evening to settle on Odin’s shoulders and whisper news to him.”

“I had it close enough for someone who isn’t planning to use his knowledge of ancient myths to track down relics in ancient tombs,” Hank said. 

“True enough, but as you pointed out I’m a relic hunter who needs to get all the specifics right in order to work out the differences between reality and myth, especially when I’m trying to work out the aspects of the myth that are based on real events and relics. This text is unusual because it tells the myth of Odin surrendering his eye for a drink from the well of Mímir to gain wisdom, but it makes no mention of the ravens.”

“But you just insisted that there were two ravens,” Hank said.

“Precisely. Every account I’ve ever read of Odin’s journey to the well of Mímir includes mention of his ravens. Children’s tales in translation, old books in middle-English, ancient texts written in dead languages on the bleached skin of a goat, they all speak of Odin’s ravens. Every account, that is, except this one, and this particular text not only lacks an element that is present in every other, but contains specific references to the location of the well of Mímir.” Oliver leaned back in his swivel chair, crossed his legs, and pulled his old notebook from the desk to his lap. He began paging through it, reviewing his notes and thinking back to the weeks he had spent bent over ancient texts, searching for clues to support his theory that the absence of the ravens in this particular text indicated that the directions to the well were real. After while he looked up and saw Hank watching him.

“You think the well is real, don’t you?” Hank said.

Oliver shrugged and flipped the notebook closed. The notes in Leo’s journal had disturbed him, perhaps more than unexpectedly surviving the explosion in the underground temple. The evidence surrounding the well had been as strong as that which led him to the shards, but key parts were missing and he had been forced to abandon the search after nearly a year of fruitless inquiry.

“And if you do,” Hank continued, “what are you going to do when you find it? Pluck out your own eye and toss it in?”

That was enough to make Oliver laugh.

“I’m serious. I don’t want your next story to be about how you earned an eyepatch while trying to duplicate the efforts of a Norse god.”

Oliver shook his head and, with considerable effort, hid his grin away behind a serious expression. “I promise, Hank, I’m not going to pluck out my own eye. I don’t even know if I believe the well itself it real. What I suspect is that there may be a shard of the mechanism somehow linked to the origin of Odin, and that’s where Leo’s research journal comes in.” He stood and walked over to the sofa, reaching a hand out towards Hank, who held up the leather bound book. Oliver took the journal and began turning pages until he reached the page that had renewed his interest in the myth of Odin’s eye.

“This passage here, where Leo has translated a document that he stole from the collection of a neopagan priest in Germany. ‘The unenlightened choose to believe in the trappings of myth, of magical hammers, ever-dripping serpent venom, and talking ravens, but the true servant of Odin knows the truth behind the accreted lies of the ages.’” Oliver read, turning the page so Hank could read the words scrawled out in Leo’s precise handwriting. “That was written nearly five hundred years ago, if Leo’s notes are correct.”

“I saw that.” Hank said, tapping the passage with his finger. “And I read on to the bit about, what was it, ‘The path to true knowledge will carry the supplicant to the heart of Yggdrasil, and in the midst of its roots they will find the waters of wisdom.” He looked at Oliver over the rims of his glasses, one dark eyebrow raised in skepticism. “You don’t really believe this, do you? It’s only been, what, a year since you returned from Egypt with a genuine biblical relic, how can you believe that the Norse gods were as real as that?”

“I didn’t say that I do,” Oliver said. “And for your information I don’t believe that the Norse gods were actually gods, any more than I believe the world was formed from the body of a giant hung on the branches of an ash tree. What I do believe is that there are powers in this world that nobody truly understands, some of which are linked to the shards that I have been collecting, some to the Hebrew god, like the heartwood of the staff, and some to things that I can’t even give a name to. I don’t know the answers to everything, Hank, but I keep finding clues and that’s why I keep searching for the shards of the mechanism.”

He turned a page of the notebook in Hank’s hands and pointed to a pasted-in photograph of an ancient parchment. “This look familiar?”

Hank pushed his glasses up on his nose and squinted down at the photo. He held out his left hand and snapped his fingers, then opened his hand to receive the notebook that Oliver placed in it. Oliver was actually rather surprised that it took him pointing out the connection before Hank spotted it. Hank’s work repairing vintage cameras and, for a few select clients, engineering hidden compartments into everyday items, had developed in him a strong eye for spotting details in objects. 

Hank glanced back and forth between the notebooks several times, then looked up at Oliver and said, “They’re from the same parchment.” 

Oliver nodded. “I photographed that document in a museum in Berlin fifteen years ago. Leo stole his from the collection of an Aeser priest in Munich about two years ago, apparently while searching for clues that might lead him to a shard hidden somewhere in Germany.”

“Aeser?” Hank asked. “I’ve never heard of that before.”

“German neopagans. Started in the early twentieth century as part of a general surge in interest in European folk history,” Oliver said.

“I see. So what does this tell you, Oliver? It’s certainly interesting, both of you finding fragments of the same document hundreds of miles and many years apart, but it doesn’t necessarily mean anything.”

Oliver returned to his seat and settled deep into it, twisting around and swinging his legs up so his bare feet rested on the edge of the worktable. He steepled his fingers under his chin and tapped his pinkie fingers silently and he thought about Hank’s question, trying to decide how he should respond. According to Leo’s journal, the parchment Leo had stolen was only one of a dozen similar pieces, all related to Nordic culture. If he could arrange to inspect that collection he might find exactly the clue he needed to revitalize his search for the well of Mímir and Odin’s eye.

After a long moment he sighed, slapped his palms against his thighs, and sat upright, swinging his feet back to the floor. “I think I’m going to Germany,” he said. “I need to find the owner of this document and try to get a look at the remainder of their collection.”

“That might prove difficult, seeing as you learned about the collection from a thief,” Hank said.

“It’s worth a shot.”

Hank shook his head and gazed down at the notebooks on his lap, as if he didn’t know whether to argue with Oliver or compliment his tenacity. He ran a finger down the page of Leo’s journal and tapped on an entry, written below the translated text. “Your colleague noted the name of the man he stole this from. I’ve got a few contacts in Germany, collectors of antique cameras, who might be able to set up a more legitimate meeting for you, if you’re interested.”

Oliver nodded and grinned at Hank. “That would be perfect.”

Next Chapter: Narrow Escape