Night at Magna

The rain stopped just after nine.
You could hear the last drops falling off the scaffold poles — that metallic ping that sounds like time counting itself down.

The generator was still running outside, the tent canvas moving with each breath of wind. The smell of damp nylon and instant noodles, wet wool, wet everything.

I was supposed to be cataloguing finds — a few bits of coarseware, two nails, the base of a glass unguent bottle — but my notes had turned to mud along the edges, and my handwriting looked like someone else’s.

Everyone else was asleep or pretending to be. We’d all promised to meet early for core sampling, but promises at digs are weather-dependent.

I poured a little whisky into my enamel mug. Not much, just enough to warm my throat.
For a moment, I thought about calling my father — it was his birthday — but the signal up here dies after dark, as if the land itself decides when it’s done speaking.

I opened my laptop anyway.
The cursor blinked in an empty document titled Magna Field Notes – Day 19.
I stared at it until the generator coughed and the light dimmed.

Day 19.
We uncovered nothing new.
The wall holds its tongue.

I typed that and stopped.

Outside, the wind shifted, carrying that strange mineral smell again — the one that clings to soil disturbed for the first time in centuries.
It’s not unpleasant, just raw. Iron, clay, and something faintly electric.

I shut the laptop, pulled my boots back on, and stepped outside.

The sky was clearing, thin stars behind a scrim of cloud.
The trench lamps glowed sodium-yellow against the black mud, a small fortress of light on the edge of an endless moor.

I walked down to the excavation edge. My breath came in steam. The generator’s hum sank into the ground, blending with something lower, older — the sub-bass of water under stone.

Maybe that’s all history is: a kind of sound trapped in matter, waiting for the right frequency to shake it loose.

I crouched by the trench again. Ran my glove along the compacted soil, feeling the fine grit, the cold pulse of buried air.
I don’t know why I did it — maybe habit, maybe longing — but I said quietly,
“Alright, then. Speak.”

It wasn’t defiance. It wasn’t belief.
Just a sentence spoken into fog.

The wind answered first, moving through the plastic sheeting like breath under cloth.
Then the low hum again, almost polite.

I waited. Nothing.

But as I turned to leave, the ground gave a little under my heel — a shallow depression, maybe from last week’s rain. The light caught a faint curve beneath the mud, too regular to be stone.

A letter? A mark?
No — probably nothing.

Still, I knelt.

The soil there was warmer.