Priscilla Sum

Part 18--Symbols and Signatures

We hiked back to the main camp and met Kayce and Tony just coming from among the mobile units.

I joined hands with Tony when he offered. "So how was your morning?" I asked.
My friend had the biggest grin on his face. "Oh, you'll never believe what we found!"

"Yeah, us too!" Derrick looked about ready to launch into a recital of everything we'd just experienced, but Jordyn interrupted him.
"What were you two up to?" she asked.

Kayce swung his head to flick the hair out of his face. "Well, I got hung up on the idea of using the sun, after seeing that phrase yesterday, so Tony and I were going back over the last few attempts at locating the path to the Temple, watching to see if anyone else had tried to account for the sun's position in following the ancient records."
"Yeah," Tony chuckled. "No sense in trying to start from square one and do all the work ourselves if it's already been done!"

We reached the table of food and started dishing up sandwiches and fruit. I was happy to see a pile of loukoumades at the end of the table for dessert. They weren't exactly fresh like the ones we'd had on the mainland, but they were still delicious.

"Anyhow," Kayce went on. "I found a few rituals that mentioned the sun's specific position, and at least one account that talked about the angle of the sun as it appeared over the temple itself, so I think if we keep going on this, we might actually be successful in finding the temple!"

Jordyn looked a little nervous at this, and Derrick waved his fork at the two guys. "You might want to rethink that after we tell you what Athanasios just told us this morning!"

"Oh, hey you guys!" Laila came striding over and joined our table. "Guess what? I cracked it!"
"Cracked what?" Kayce asked. He looked confused for a moment, but then his face cleared. "Oh, you were the researcher who came in with that rubbing earlier!"

Laila nodded. "Yeah, I got those from a way-marker we found on the trail out toward the village. And you'll never believe what Dane's team figured out from the markings on that stone!" She laid a piece of paper out on the middle of the table. It had some kind of picture key, and a few lines of text written on it.
"This is just a partial translation," she explained, "but it looks like the stone definitely uses this mark," she pointed to a whorling spiral design, "to represent the wind goddess Auraea, and this one," she pointed to a jagged crisscross symbol over a series of wavy lines, "to represent references to a storm god named Trikymios. And then look what the stone said along with it!" She pointed to the translated text.

Tony leaned in to read it out loud to us. "Whoso comes upon this path, him shall lightly tread; make supplication and turn aside for your fate... Is that all?"

Laila's hazel eyes danced as she drummed her fingers on the table. "That's as far as we've gotten since this morning. But isn't it just so cool?"

Kayce was still squinting at it. "What does it mean, though?"

The researcher gathered up her materials and stood. "We're still working on trying to make sense of the thing, so we're not exactly sure what the markings themselves mean, but one thing's for sure--we're definitely on the right track!"
She practically skipped away from us, and as everybody went back to eating their lunch, I stole a glimpse at the locket hanging around my neck.

Whorls on one side. Jagged lines on the other. Auraea and Trikymios.

"Hey," said a voice next to me, and I looked up into Tony's eyes. "Are you okay?" he asked.

I pressed my tee shirt collar over my locket and nodded. "Yeah, I was just... checking to see if I spilled anything on myself."

He was staring at my collar too--was it wrong to feel so uncomfortable about a locket I'd been wearing around these people for as long as I'd known them? Finally, his eyes returned to my face with a smile. "Nope, looks fine to me!"
I rolled my eyes. "Thanks for that," I said, and popped the last honey donut into my mouth.

After lunch, we separated, Derrick heading to the generators, Tony over to the research mobile, and Kayce headed to the surveillance mobile, mumbling something about satellite imaging. That left me with Jordyn, who was so excited she practically jigged from foot to foot as we waited for Athanasios to show up.