The sun over the Thar Desert was a merciless, brass gong, beating down heat that made the very air shimmer. Salem Vale wiped a grimy sleeve across his forehead, his sweat offering no relief, only turning the fine, red dust into mud on his skin. He shifted on his knees, his trowel scraping gently against a stubborn piece of sandstone.
"God, I hate this heat," he muttered to no one in particular. "I swear, my laptop got a phishing email from a 'Rajesh from Microsoft' the second we landed in Delhi. You'd think in the birthplace of zero, they'd have invented a better way to scam people." He glanced over at the line of local workers, shoveling earth with a steady, practiced rhythm. "Present company excepted, of course. Those guys are machines. Good guys."
Professor Aris Thorne, a man whose white beard seemed to defy the dust, chuckled without looking up from his datapad. "Complaining about the climate and the internet, Mr. Vale? The two constants of any modern dig. Focus. The geomagnetic scan for this sector showed promise. A void. And not a natural one."
That was the Professor. All business. The team was his brainchild: a handpicked group of post-grads and professionals funded by a somewhat obscure Swiss foundation. There was Lena Petrova, their materials specialist from Moscow, whose sharp eyes could date a potsherd from a hundred paces. Kenji Tanaka, the quiet but brilliant surveyor and cartographer from Kyoto. And then there was Salem, the historical symbologist and linguist, the guy who could look at a chicken scratch on a wall and tell you if it was a grocery list or a king's last will.
They were a week into excavating what the locals called 'Bhukta Raja's Mound' – the Mound of the Buried King. The official story was a minor, forgotten trading post from the Late Vedic period. But the Professor's private briefing had been different. He'd spoken of a 'Sanskrit Pliny,' a text that mentioned a 'Vessel of Stars' hidden in a 'city of a single night,' a place that vanished without a trace. The foundation's money was on that text being more than a myth.
"Promise is one thing, Professor," Salem said, leaning back on his heels. "My knees are telling me this particular promise is a lie. All I'm finding is more sand and the occasional beetle that looks like it wants to sue me for trespassing."
Lena, crouched a few meters away, held up a blackened sliver of metal. "Complaining is not a methodology, Salem. This is iron. High-quality. Not typical for a simple trading post. This was a fortified location."
Kenji, perched on a tripod stool, was meticulously updating his digital map. "The ground-penetrating radar agrees with Lena. The structure's foundation is too deep, too reinforced. This was not a market. This was a vault."
The day wore on, the heat intensifying before beginning its slow, reluctant retreat. The workers sang low, rhythmic songs as they worked, a stark contrast to the tense, focused silence of the academic team. Salem's world had shrunk to the square meter of earth in his trench. Scrape, brush, examine. Scrape, brush, examine. It was a meditation, a fight against the impatience that gnawed at every archaeologist. You spent 99% of your time finding nothing so that the 1% felt like a lightning strike.
His trowel hit something with a different sound. Not the gritty scrape on stone, nor the thud on hard-packed earth. It was a clear, almost musical *tink*.
He froze. "Hey. Over here."
The others gathered around the edge of his trench. He put the trowel down and switched to a softer brush and a wooden pick. Carefully, painstakingly, he began to clear the reddish soil away. It wasn't stone. It was a metallic surface, dark and non-reflective, seemingly untouched by the centuries of oxidation that should have consumed it.
"Lena," the Professor said, his voice a hushed whisper of excitement.
She was already there, her portable spectrometer whirring. "Unknown alloy. Reading are... strange. It's not corroding. At all."
The shape began to emerge as Salem worked. It was perfectly ovoid, about the size of a rugby ball. It was nestled in a cradle of fitted stones, as if placed there with deliberate care. There were no visible seams, no hinges, no markings. It was just a smooth, dark, egg-shaped object.
"The Vessel of Stars," Professor Thorne breathed, his eyes wide with a kind of religious awe. "It's real."
The process of extracting it took another two hours. Every movement was cautious, documented with photos and videos. They rigged a soft sling and, with the combined effort of Salem and two of the stronger workers, lifted it from its ancient cradle. It was heavier than it looked, dense.
They placed it on a padded table in the center of the main tent as the sun began to bleed orange into the western sky. The whole team stood around it, a silent circle of disbelief. The local workers had been paid a bonus and sent back to their village, the Professor insisting on secrecy.
"It's inert," Lena said, running a dozen different scanners over it. "No radiation. No energy signatures. It's just... a lump of weird metal."
"But it can't be," Kenji insisted, pointing to his tablet. "The care taken to inter it, the structure built to house it... this was an object of immense importance."
Salem circled the table, his symbologist's mind racing. "A vessel. Not a cup, not a pot. A container. But for what? It's seamless. If it opens, how?"
The Professor reached out a trembling hand, not to touch it, but to hover just above its surface. "The text said it held a 'sleeping sky.' We must assume it's metaphorical. A record, perhaps. Crystalline data storage beyond our understanding."
That's when the first shot rang out.
It wasn't loud, not like a rifle. It was a suppressed *phut*, followed immediately by the sound of tearing canvas and a grunt from outside the tent. One of the two private security guards the foundation had hired slumped into view, a dark red bloom spreading on his chest.
Chaos erupted.
"Down!" Kenji yelled, shoving the Professor behind a sturdy crate.
Men dressed in generic black tactical gear, with no insignia, flooded into the tent. They moved with a brutal, professional efficiency. Their weapons were compact, advanced. These weren't local bandits.
One of them, his face obscured by goggles and a mask, barked an order in guttural English. "The artifact. Stand aside, and you live."
Lena, in a move Salem would later recall as incredibly brave or incredibly stupid, grabbed a heavy geology hammer from the table. One of the intruders didn't even bother with his gun; he simply stepped forward and struck her across the temple with the butt of his rifle. She crumpled without a sound.
Salem's world narrowed to a pinprick of adrenaline. He saw Kenji try to use his tablet as a shield before a burst of automatic fire tore through it and into him. He fell backwards, his glasses skittering across the floor.
Professor Thorne stood up, his hands raised. "Please! Take it! Just take it and go! Don't..."
A single shot cut him off. The old man looked down at the hole in his tweed jacket, a look of profound surprise on his face, and then he folded to the ground.
Salem was frozen. It had taken less than ten seconds. His friends, his mentor, were dead or dying on the floor of a dusty tent in the middle of nowhere. The sheer, brutal pointlessness of it all washed over him, followed by a cold, sharp fury.
The lead operative gestured to the Egg. Two of his men moved to pick it up.
Something in Salem snapped. It wasn't a plan. It wasn't even a thought. It was pure, raw instinct. This thing, this stupid, pointless rock they had all died for, was not going with them.
He lunged.
He didn't go for the men. He went for the Egg. He threw his body across the table, wrapping his arms around the cold, smooth surface. It was like hugging a piece of a mountain.
"Get him off!" the leader snarled.
Hands grabbed at him, pulling at his clothes, his hair. A rifle butt slammed into his ribs. He heard a crack and a white-hot pain flared in his side, but he held on, his grip fueled by a desperate, final anger. He wouldn't let them have it. He wouldn't let them win.
The leader stepped forward, his expression one of annoyance more than rage. He leveled his weapon at Salem's head.
"This is your only warning. Release it."
Salem looked up, his vision blurry with pain and tears. He saw Lena's still form, Kenji's broken body, the Professor's surprised eyes staring at nothing. He met the leader's goggled gaze and, with the last of his strength, he tightened his grip.
"Go to hell," he whispered, the words tasting of blood.
The leader's finger tightened on the trigger.
The world exploded in sound and light.
But the shot never came.
Instead, a different sound filled the tent, a deep, resonant hum that seemed to come from the Egg itself. It vibrated through Salem's chest, a frequency that made his bones ache. The dark surface of the object began to glow, not with reflected light, but with an internal, violet radiance that pulsed like a heartbeat.
The operatives stumbled back, raising their arms against the sudden, unnatural light.
Salem felt a pulling sensation, not on his body, but from deep within him. It was a hook in his soul. The violet light from the Egg intensified, enveloping him, flowing *into* him. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't scream. The pain in his ribs vanished, replaced by a terrifying, fundamental unraveling.
He was being unmade.
He saw the lead operative's eyes, wide with shock and fear behind his goggles. He saw the other men backing away towards the tent flap.
The humming reached a crescendo, a single, sustained note that felt like the end of the world. Salem's last conscious thought was not of Earth, or his life, or his dying friends. It was a simple, sensory impression: the cool, impossibly smooth surface of the Egg against his cheek.
Then, the light vanished. The sound stopped.
The tent was dark again, lit only by a single, swinging lantern.
The black-clad operatives stood in stunned silence. The table was there. The padded cradle was there.
But Salem Vale and the Egg-shaped artifact were gone. There was no flash, no smoke, no portal. They had simply ceased to exist. The only evidence that anything had happened was the faint, shimmering heat-haze in the air above the empty space where, a moment before, a man had died holding a piece of a forgotten sky.