Using the rock, Kre tapped out a rough one-foot square where the metal object seemed to be buried. He then dropped the rock in favor of his knife, and he began to cut into the wiry, tangled moss around the spot until he could freely lift up the squared section of overgrowth. Peeling it back revealed a strange object, dirty now, but with patches of a bluish silver metal showing underneath the earthen stains.
He gave a tug at one corner with absolutely zero result. Whatever it was seemed to be stuck fast in the ground and the ground had no intention of letting it go without a fight. Digging with his fingers didn’t help, as the ground was simply too hard, so he resorted to chipping away at it with his knife.
It took several minutes, but he finally managed to reveal what he thought was a bottom corner and he tried lifting it out again. This time, the object seemed to rise up a bit with a slow, wet, squelching sound. As the mud underneath lost its grip, the object got easier and easier to lift until it was finally free.
Turning it over and over in his hand, Kre tried to figure out exactly what it was… or at least, what it used to be. It was about an inch thick with an odd shape. One side of the object, the side that had been facing up, was completely smooth but the opposite side seemed to be carved in some sort of relief. Unfortunately, the object seemed broken as two of the four sides were jagged and splintered unlike the other two sides that appeared smooth and even.
He brushed off as much as the mud as he could, but the piece he had was too small to tell what the entire thing once might have been or what the image depicted by the raised lines would have been. Still, the bluish silver was oddly fascinating, and the object wasn’t as heavy as he thought it should be given the fact that it was solid metal.
“Maybe there’s more here… whatever this is…” he said aloud to himself. It should have felt strange talking to himself, alone in the woods, but it was oddly comforting given the vastness of the forest and the recent discovery indicating that something… someone had been here before. Long before, if the caked-on dirt and mass of overgrowth was any indication.
“It is osmium,” a voice called out. It was familiar. Almost sad but in a song-like sort of way.
“You know,” Kre answered back without turning around, “I have half a mind to believe you’re just a figment of my imagination.”
“I could be. Do you often imagine women who look like me?”
At that, he finally turned around and spotted the Blue-eyed Lady in the same white dress she wore at Cootsman’s house. “I don’t know that I’ve ever known that I could imagine a woman like you,” he said with all the honesty he could muster.
“So young and so sweet,” she said, still with the sadness there at the edge of her voice. “My Terync was the same.” She turned away slightly and brushed one of her long black strands behind her ear.