Buried Treasure
08 Feb 2021Today’s prompt: “A character discovers an object hidden many years ago in a family home.”
You were digging up some tenacious, deep-rooted ivy when your shovel hit the tin box. You worked your shovel around the corners and carefully resurfaced it. Mud cakes the rusted latch. You open the lid.
Inside are browned, curled papers with browned, cursive letters. You take off your muddy gloves and pick up the papers one at a time, unsure where to even begin reading them. They are unnumbered and written in a shaky hand. You make up your mind to study them later tonight, when you’ll have more time to decipher them.
Below the last page is some kind of medallion on a chain. You pick it up. It seems to be shaped like some kind of rune, with a dull emerald in the middle. You rub the emerald with your thumb, trying to make it shine.
A dusty vapor pours impossibly from the emerald. It gets in your eyes, and you squeeze them shut. It gets in your mouth, and you can’t stop coughing. It gets in your lungs.
From that point on, I think it’s fair to say that you were dead. The thing that inhabited your body went around for a while, though. I would rather not say what it did to your family, to your dog, to the neighbors, to your entire community. When it had had its fill of blood and screams, it tried to open up a rift between worlds to let its brethren through. It failed, because apparently some of the utterances required to open the rift that way are not pronouncable by a human vocal system.