You wake early the next morning, face in the pillow, oddly refreshed and revitalized. The sun is barely cresting the horizon, when you pillage the hotel breakfast, out the door before they even notice you’ve put half the cereal bars and muffins in your bag. You did pay for it all. Technically.

Today is a cloudier day, massive white cathedrals block the sun intermittently, darkened only at the base where the earth has sullied them. The world is empty and peaceful, the square lacking its salesmen, the streets populated only by the odd dog.

You are a morning person after years of effort. You used to begrudge each day for coming too early, too soon, and too bright. But once you found your dream and worked toward it every day, there were never enough hours, sleep seemed almost a waste.

You don’t check out, but don’t plan on returning. If this morning turns up nothing then you are bound to the next site, somehow still trusting the map that has given you nothing so far.

Speaking of the map, you duck into an alley and pull it out, placing your coffee cup on the ground. You meant to do this in your hotel room but hunger and the need for a cool shower had pushed it from your thoughts.

The map is the same, all soft gold and worn paper. You check, but the next closest location is several days south, the bloody mayan ball courts. No chance to avoid the glowing tour guide without delaying your quest for knowledge more. You are patient, but not that patient.

Knowing magic is real is one thing, but seeing a person covered in it was quite unsettling. Especially since the last one had tried to kill you. Fear of the unknown is powerful, but you are still a man of science. More or less. Assumptions and hypotheses are useless without proof.

You shake off the dark thoughts and return to the map.

The dot on top of the Stairs to Heaven is bigger now. You press it and once again it expands into the ruins. This time though, instead of showing the stair itself, it is an image of a blank stone wall.

Helpful.

You look closer, taking off your glasses, eyes almost pressed to the paper. There is a dot of lichen in the corner, shaped like a heart and in the center are three horizontal bars, maybe an inch across, nothing you recognize offhand. The rock almost seems too clean to match the walls of the ruin. You head there anyway.

The Stairs, bereft of tourists, is a magical place. On a whim, you climb them carefully, wishing to see the world from their perspective. Your breath comes in bursts, but you make it to the top after a few minutes. They don’t make stairmasters for this, you think, well, not yet. You glance at the rope in the center disdainfully. Using it would make the experience less authentic.

The stairs end abruptly like someone forgot to make the next floor, forgot to make heaven, and you stare out over the tops of trees from the perspective of a bird mid flight. It is beautiful, even jaded as you are by high rises and the fact that some people own homes that are taller than this. It makes it better somehow, that another civilization did it first. Or maybe it's better because it means that people have always longed to rise to the stars and you are just the latest in a long tradition.

You look back the way you came and see the village waking up, venders wheeling out their carts into the square, unfolding their blankets and laying out their wares. The sky darkens and reality beckons.

The temple is more reverent today. Maybe it is the humidity or the way the clouds block out most of the sky, but there are fewer people inside. Those that wander through are quiet and thoughtful, perhaps a product of only half of the lights being on. You see no sign of the guide yet, thank God.

The coffee starts to hit your system and you remember that there are new things to explore. A discovery is on the tips of your fingertips if you are patient and attentive. Your memory holds the image from the map captive so you wander from room to room, watching the walls like a stonemason looking for inspiration.

You see nothing on the walls on either the top or bottom floors. The marks you are looking for are exceedingly small though. You may have missed them.

There is a test that you’ve been putting off so you find a small room far removed from the main path and take out your jar of grave dirt. The hourglass is motionless in its case. A little discouraging.

The dirt is black and soft. Grave dirt makes good planting; the duality makes it strong, some texts have said. The death of one thing giving life to others. An ancient egyptian tradition, black brings life.

You pour it on the stone floor and shape it into the hieroglyph for death, a sort of sideways cane. You wait ten seconds then blow on it. Instead of turning into an Ankh, it just blows away. Either there is no magic here, or the ritual didn’t work.

Or maybe this a Mayan ruin and that one only works for the Egyptian variety

You feel patently ridiculous.

If only you had time to experiment in the Tomb of the Blue Rose (That’s what you’ve been calling it in your head) before it was destroyed. There were so many theories to be tested, so many finds to be reevaluated. There have to be rules here in this land of magic, but you are lost without them.

You vow then and there to start writing every instance of magic down, giving it a quantity and a rule system. Tedious, but considering the current cost to your sanity, necessary.

Kneeled as you are on the floor, you notice that the stones of the floor are worn, not by time, but by the footsteps of millions over the many years. They haven’t been allowed to darken with dirt or mildew, but are almost brushed clean. You feel like a moron.

It's not the walls you should be looking at, but the floor.

You start at the ground floor and work your way along, eyes down like an embarrassed schoolboy. Then, in a room in the center of the temple, you find it.

Where many of the other rooms have stone altars or wide benches, this one has nothing. A blank floor with lichen growing in the corner, the horizontal lines more like short deep gouges. This is the place.

There is no one around, so you get on your knees and look for seams, taking out your bronze lens and going over every inch of the floor before moving on to the walls. Nothing. You tap on them experimentally but the stones sound like stones.

Nonplussed, you sit back, staring at the lines in the floor. What was the solution? What would the Mayans have done?

Oh right. Blood sacrifice.

The only knife you have is one you do not at all want to cut yourself with so you have to improvise. You dump out your pen case and grab one of the fountain pen tips jamming it into the pad of your thumb before you lose your nerve. It cuts deeper than it should, the broad, blunt tip cutting through your skin like a razor blade. Blood drips and you guide it into the indents, grimacing slightly. There is little pain, so easily did it pass through your finger.

The indents fill slowly, the stones hungrily devouring the droplets as the fall. When it’s filled, you wrap your thumb in your only handkerchief and apply pressure, the white turning red immediately.

Nothing happens.

You narrow your eyes angrily. “Jump'éel ti'ibil óolala' dada le jump'éel p'aax adeudada,” you remind the gods.

Your Yucatec Mayan is rusty, but the door obliges, turning into a set of stairs with barely a whisper. Stones gliding past each other soundlessly. A torch flickers to life at the bottom of the stairs.

Well hot damn.

You descend the staircase, stepping over the place where your blood is resting, still perfectly contained in the staircase, not a drop spilled.

You get to the bottom and turn to consider the new staircase. It’s a very shocking addition to a ruin should only change under the unstoppable onslaught of time. John would be losing his mind in excitement right now.

Hopefully, the room is out of the way enough that it is unlikely it will be found for a while. You will have to be fast though. Not your specialty.

The hallway is short, opening almost immediately into a torchlit room.

The room is empty.

At the far end, there is a shelf, but it holds nothing now. On the floor are dust outlines of several things but there is no indication if the dust is ten years old or 500.

You take out the lens and look around the room, but there is no glow of any sort, no sign that magic still exists in this ruin. The grave dirt ritual turns up nothing again.

The walls are covered in writing, the logograms of the mayan people. You start deciphering what you know, struggling. You are more used to Yucatec Mayan in latin script.

There are a lot of references to a feather which made sense given the chosen deity of the mayan people, a feathered serpent. The feather was also called a weapon though, a sword to rid the world of…

There was a glyph there that was the same they used for a corn husk. They wanted to rid the world of the husk of corn. To make cooking dinner easier? And how would a weapon help with that.

The husk is described as blind. And part of the stem. Which is somehow all-seeing.

You put your head in your hands. Sometimes being an archaeologist was a blessing and sometimes it was trying to put together a thousand year old puzzle in the dark with your hands tied behind your back.

There is scuff of a footstep at the entrance to the room. You look for something to hide behind but the entire room is empty.

The tour guide enters, still in uniform, still wearing his sunglasses. He stands by the door with his head cocked. You don’t move.

Both of you sit there for a few minutes, neither one of you moving. Finally he breaks the silence.

“Professor, I know you’re there”

“Obviously,” you grumble, sharp in your nervousness, “what do you want?”

“Please come with me. This section must remain closed to the public.”

So someone took the artifacts recently. Sneaking in in the dead of night and carting away treasures that should remain on display here, the last remnants of a brutalized civilization. There had been enough looting, all covered up by history and given the rubber stamp of approval by the new settlers. But here, history just repeated itself. The only question was, why did they stick around?

A sudden thought occurs to you. “I’ll come, if you take off your sunglasses”

He sighs and his shoulders slump, then he removes the glasses and polishes them on his shirt.

He looks normal.

Then you look closer. What looked like closed eyes at first is actually smooth skin, no sign the eyelids ever opened. It’s completely seamless without eyelashes or wrinkles. If you hadn’t looked at humans all your life, it would be impossible to tell an eye socket ever existed.

“Husk.” It is a statement, not a question.

It sighs again, “At least I’m part of something, can you say the same professor?”

It is unbelievable that a thing like that is lecturing you. It replaces the glasses and you can pretend you are talking to a human again. You keep seeing that blank face. Running seems like the best bet here.

“Enough,” comes a familiar voice from the corridor. John enters the room, dressed exactly the same as yesterday, “Show courtesy to such a learned man”

“I thought better of you, John,” You say, as the husk ducks its head in embarrassment. You’re tired of people not being who they seem, “You had so much to offer the Mayan people.”

“Like you said,” He smiles pulling down the collar of his shirt. A pair of eyes blinks back at you from under his collarbones. Deep-set and angry.

“Jump'éel ti'ibil óolala' dada le jump'éel p'aax adeudada. An offering given is a debt owed.”