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Once again, by the time I finished writing this scene, I felt I was pretty in touch with Abe’s character. (Ah-bay, I think, would be the proper way to pronounce that.) It was all I could do to keep the insipid grin off my face as I wrote the last paragraph.

Yoshiro Abe sipped water from a tin cup outside the meal tent as the workers and archaeologists there passed around a tattered rag of newsprint. It was their latest edition of the Mail—dated 9^th September, some four days ago—arrived just that morning. Glen Wells, one of the senior archaeologists on the dig, passed it to Abe once he had finished.

“See if you can make heads or tails of it, Sensei,” he said in his amicable colonial drawl. “It’s a nice little story, but it never comes out and says who took command of the fleet.”

Abe nodded, setting his cup aside.

The print was smudged, but clear, and the headline was obnoxiously large: IMPERIAL FLEET WINS BATTLE OF KYOTO ATOLL. In smaller print, at the head of the first column on the left, the story went on to claim that the Mail had an exclusive tale to tell, revealed to one of their foreign correspondents by an officer of the fleet who spoke only on condition of anonymity.

Abe realized only as he put on his glasses that his hands were shaking.

On 6^th September, heavy units of the Empire’s Fast Battle Squadron met and defeated a force of fifteen ships of the Australasian Fleet, including six battleships, in honorable combat over Kyoto Atoll. While both Empires have kept details of the battle largely secret, this reporter was able to get a special scoop at a pub somewhere in South Africa.

For obvious reasons, I cannot say where precisely, but there I spoke with a lovely young lady, a lieutenant serving aboard Kodiak who was injured in the battle. She revealed to me that Kodiak had been the second ship in the battle line that day over Kyoto and that, by some tragic happenstance, the flagship Parapet had been destroyed before the battle began.

She further testified that, following Parapet’s loss, some of Kodiak’s bridge officers had been killed in action and that she was uncertain who took command through the rest of the battle…

The old teacher felt his breath catch in his throat, swallowing painfully at this news. “Wells,” he rasped, turning to his friend for help. “You’re certain it does not give the name of the commander?”

The archaeologist shrugged. “I couldn’t find anything in it. I thought maybe you could do better than me is all.”

Abe tried to wet his lips, finding his mouth again parched. “Yes, I see…” He forced himself to continue.

The entire battle line was forced to turn hard to starboard to avoid Parapet’s careening wreckage—forced to turn directly into oncoming enemy fire. Into this hell-storm they steamed, returning fire as they could. The lieutenant smiled as she told the story, proud of the courage of her fellow fighting men and women. Over the course of the next two hours, she said, the two squadrons exchanged nearly 3,000 heavy caliber shells. In the end, all units of the Australasian squadron were destroyed or forced to retreat…

He steeled himself, setting the paper down in front of him and weighting it with his cup so that he could hide his hands beneath the table. The account of the battle was uninteresting to him, not to mention obviously sanitized; the officer being interviewed knew enough to keep certain facts out of the public eye, and to keep certain questions from being asked.

…Following the battle, the fleet made for friendly skies to refuel and refit, to have their wounds healed and spirits lifted. I asked the lieutenant how she was injured in the action that day. At first, she declined to answer my question, but as she stood to leave she gave me this answer:

“Instead of interviewing me, why don’t you tell the story of the officers and crew of Parapet—of Lord Westland’s final battle and how, even in death, he lead his fleet to victory? This little scratch doesn’t rate a mention in your paper; I had all but forgotten it until you pointed it out again.

“Every person in the battle fleet makes some sacrifice. We set aside our hopes and our fears. We put our lives in the hands of our comrades. When I’m on board that ship, I feel a personal responsibility to each and every person under my command. Next to that, what’s a bit of shrapnel?”

With her words in mind, I have asked the Mail to print this list of the officers and crew lost when Parapet exploded…

All at once, he left the paper there on the table and walked away from the others, gasping in relief. To think of that little girl—his student—his Aria, fighting aboard one of those steel leviathans… He blinked until his eyes were dry again. Could he be sure it was her? But it had to be! That fool of a reporter had interviewed the Imperial Princess and not known it.

But then, what man would dare reveal a secret Aria Cantion had charged him to keep?

He felt Wells’ hand on his shoulder. “So it was her after all, then? She’s blooded now. A real admiral.”

Abe nodded.

“Stop worrying about it. She’s invincible. It’s that Cantion mystique.”

The old teacher sighed, looking out over the dig as the rising sun repainted shadows and holes with a brighter brush. “She would have been a great scholar,” he muttered, leaving all else unsaid.

“Forget about that. We’ve made a discovery at grid number 20, and I’d like you to take a look this morning, before the workers get in the way.”

Surprised, Abe peered into his friend’s eyes for a moment. “What kind of discovery?”

Wells gave his eyebrows a quick lift. The kind that meant a big one—in the softest, quietest way possible.

Abe took his canteen as they passed by the meal tent before heading down into the dig, passing through the outer gate and into the site proper. He kept his head down as they walked between the Teeth—the jagged, obsidian towers that marked the entryway to the site. Months of working in their shadow had not inured him to the feeling of dread that gripped him when he caught sight of them, silhouetted against the red desert sky.

Stepping carefully over the twine grid squares staked out everywhere over the dig, he and Wells made their way to the far end of the structure, a place they had come to call the South Wall. It seemed that the entire structure, sometimes jokingly called the Temple, was surrounded by giant walls of the same black stone that formed the teeth; they were only just uncovering what seemed to be the base of the outer walls.

What kind of god could they have worshipped in a temple like this? Abe felt a chill at the thought, even in the desert heat, as he imagined what the entire Temple complex must have looked like when it was first constructed thousands of years ago: walls of gleaming black glass, towers like jagged knives stabbing into the sky. There was even evidence of a ditch and moat structure, surrounding the outer wall. Preliminary evidence suggested that it had been filled with human skulls.

“Can you imagine the people who built this place?” asked Wells. Whenever he felt awed by something, his voice took on a breathless, childlike quality. Abe would normally have found that endearing.

Abe pushed away the bloody screams that entered his imagination and shook his head.

“They cut and worked with stones we can’t even identify—stones that our most powerful tools can hardly scratch. They built this place more than five millennia ago, at a time when a campfire must have seemed like magic. How many hundreds of years must it have taken? To think that ancient man could have accomplished anything like this…”

At last, they reached grid 20. A sheet of dirty canvas covered a small section of wall there. Wells jerked it aside and, his voice a scraping whisper, asked, “Can you translate it?”

There, chiseled into the blank wall by some impossible force, was a message. Writing like this had been found throughout the dig site, in dozens of nameless, forgotten languages, none of which had any meaning at all. Abe’s heart thundered as he realized this language was not yet completely forgotten. Hands trembling, he reached out toward the wall. His fingers traced the dusty characters, cut millennia ago by some ancient craftsman.

He swallowed, his tongue feeling swollen in his dry mouth. “Yes,” he rasped. “You brought rubbing paper?”

Wells passed him a large sheet of fine paper and a grubby hunk of charcoal, beaming a smile from ear to ear. “We’re going to change the world with this, you know!”