《Finding Magic》A new Lead

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There is definitely magic in the world.

There has to be. Any idiot could tell you that the pyramids weren’t built naturally. And Stonehenge must be for rituals. That, or it’s the world’s worst house.

But now that you’ve been to all of them, you can say for certain that there is no magic there. Just massive slave labor or weird coincidences of astronomy and rock formations.

There’s no magic, if the alternative tests you run actually work.

The crater in Syberia had potential, but it seems to be a rogue meteorite. The Devil’s kettle loses millions of gallons of water, but it’s just re-entering later underground. Sacsayhuamán’s stones, the ones that fit together like puzzle pieces, are just a result of nothing but a lot of effort and time.

You keep thinking that Dr. Caville will fire you after so little success. He’ll get bored of this fantasy and move on, but it continues site after site, year after year. Every negative report just makes him push harder, look further. For each bad site, he comes with a list of ten more.

The devices he gave you to detect magic are certainly odd. You scoffed at the idea of stacking four round stones on top of each other under starlight. You are a man of science. Research and data are your gods. You bow to no other higher power.

“How do I even know if they worked?” You ask him.

He just laughs, “You’ll know.”

So you take the rocks, the bronze looking-glass, the jar of graveyard dirt, trying them only when no one is looking.

Not crazy, just careful.

Dr. Caville seems to be running out of places to look these days you’ve started to augment them with some of your own. Who can blame you, this is your last chance to do research before the funding runs out. Even still, you do the rituals out of habit. Like taking sugar in your tea or using proper punctuation on your letters, it feels right.

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This latest find is a tomb, recently discovered. It barely made the news when you got on the first plane. One briefcase full of scientific instruments, one full of alpaca fur and brass hourglasses.

The plane has a few people on it, not many people wish to fly into tiny villages at 2AM. You keep the briefcase full of weird devices, letting your instruments be stowed. You hope they’ll be ok down there.

The ruin is a three day march through the jungle, but with some good old fashioned bribery, you get there in two. It’s been a while since you’ve been second on the scene and you aren’t willing to let any more “experts” tell you the least important parts of a discovery.

Plus the government has ruined your research before, trashing the site and claiming the artifacts as cultural heritage. Throwing them behind glass out of their original place is blasphemy to you, a trait you share with few archaeologists. Museums should be the ruins themselves. No need to make it more accessible to people that won’t appreciate it anyway.

It’s dark when you arrive, but you can still see the hulking stone, a silhouette in the torchlight, weathered by time. It’s an old ruin, but a new section was found a hundred meters from the entrance, hidden under a patch of bamboo. Not many people in their right mind would bother to look under that stuff. Unless you are a hungry villager, you think, looking at the patch where bamboo shoots were clearly harvested.

The new entrance, surrounded by torches, looks like a bomb went off. The stone slab is cracked into small pieces and piled to the side. You shake your head. Any later and they probably would have done the same with the inside.

You pause by the entrance, as though hooked by an invisible string. Sighing, you open the one briefcase and take a sample of the stone for later analysis. Then you open the other and start stacking rocks under the eyes of the stars.

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It’s done in a few seconds. The round edges have a slight indent which helps. Nothing happens, but nothing ever happens. You stand up and stretch your back, still stiff from the plane.

Someone approaches you, a man that looks to be a local. He tries with a few languages before you recognize an old dialect and start to talk. He is from the village and wants you to know that there is a curse. He can lift the curse, of course, being the village's holy man. You brush him off. He gets insistent. Then, halfway through his tirade, he freezes, eyes on the rocks you placed.

You follow his gaze and see that there are no longer rocks there. A small sapling wraps it’s roots around the stone, trunk like that of a bonsai. Its delicate leaves sway gently in the breeze. Neither of you move.

A blast rings out from inside the tomb and the ground shakes. The tree topples over and, just like that, it’s four rocks again.

Hesitatingly, you pick them up and put them back in your bag. The holy man bows low then backs away slowly.

Another blast sounds and you rush into the tomb, almost forgetting the test in your hurry to preserve.

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