Archaeological Discovery

[I was ordered to suppress a terrible evil thing here.

No, I should use "creature" or "being" to describe it. The Scales could see into the heart of anyone who looked at it. It could communicate with me, tell me what I wanted, and also tell me exactly how I should obtain what I wanted. Perhaps because I had been alone too long, I might already have gone mad, and all I heard was the voice of my own delusions.

Three months ago, I was ordered to come to Alexander to investigate the disappearance of the Wizards stationed on the coast. Ever since Greece across the sea cut off contact with us, the astrologers in the Cairo observatory had been reporting signs of approaching evil to the Pharaoh every day, but they could never explain anything clearly. We had no way of knowing what the Greeks were doing, why they had severed contact with us, or when the dark clouds that had gathered for thirteen years would finally disperse.

In my view, even if the Greeks living beneath those dark clouds had been wiped out to the last, they were still far happier than us. At least their fear and anxiety existed only in the instant of death, while we lived every day in terror because of the celestial signs across the sea.

Most of the people in my family had already completed their service on the coast through the rotations held once every half year. Observing that mass of dark clouds was even more pointless than watching a pool of stagnant water. At least, according to my elder brother, it was just as unchanging as stagnant water, only constantly breeding green algae—which was also the evil the astrologers spoke of.

Three months ago should have been the time for