It had been raining for fourteen days when the great oak tree perched over the rocks finally gave way and the earth caved in.

A local farmer was the first to spot the new crevasse opened where the dirt washed from the jagged black stones. "Didn't think much of it at first. Not terribly odd for it to rain for days on end up here in northern Scotland, is it?" he later said. "It happened up near the tors there where not many go poking about. Folks around here mostly mind their own business. But then me dogs started barking something fierce, and I felt the ground give a wee tremble under me boots, and I decided it'd be best to go see what it was."

It was his wife, a hearty, no-nonsense kind of woman, who first spotted the bones peeking through the fallen tree's torn roots. "I imagine the soil got too wet for the old thing and a good breeze finally gave it the final shove," she told her neighbor. "And up with it came much of the ground below, pulling open that strange cavern. I spotted the bones right off, mind you. Michael's never had an eye as keen as mine. I sent him right into town after that to get the police."

The inspector who came to the scene studied the bones and discovered the broken, inscribed tablets peeking through the sodden clay. "Whoever it was," he reported. "They've been dead for a long time."

He relayed the incident to his superior, who phoned his superior, and eventually a call went round to the bigger city of Inverness, where the authorities thought it best, considering the age of the bones, to leave the scene be and hand the whole mess over to the academics. That was how, after five more days of continuous rain, graduate student Sonya Marston found herself standing on the edge of the rocks, peering into the dark below.

She was a slight woman with pale hair carelessly gathered at the nape of her neck, dressed for the weather but heedless of the water misting her face and bare hands. She stood and squinted and huffed as she tried to make out any details through the gloom, but the shadows stayed thick and unobliging.

"Mind yourself there, Sonya," said Dr. Rangel as he wiped rain from his phone's screen. He held his umbrella up by the crook of his arm, and it had begun to slip, water droplets pattering onto the old professor's padded jacket. "Watch the ground. The edges have reportedly been crumbling further inward with every day of this continued deluge."

"The stone here is sturdy enough," Sonya replied, but she did take a step back. Cold air leaked from the crevasse where the hard rocks that had been split over the decades by persistent tree roots formed a kind of maw, hiding whatever lurked underneath. Her torch could only illuminate the upper crest and roughly a meter of striated earth—but the hollow echo and steady stream of water vanishing below proved the crevasse was much, much deeper than it appeared.

The three other graduate students selected for this impromptu expedition were currently more interested in the bones and tablets that had been the reason for their trip from Cambridge than they were in the gaping pit. Sahar crouched by the sodden mound of dirt at the tree's base with the camera in hand, craning her back to snap photos while Callum held an umbrella over her and sniffed about the weather. Kirstie took the initiative to cover the tablets and struggled to get the pop-up canopy free of its storage bag.

"Whoever put this in here last did a bloody awful job, Dr. Rangel!"

"Most definitely, Kirstie. Endeavor on," he replied without looking up from his phone. Kirstie scowled, not that Rangel noticed. "Not a lick of signal in this part of the country. Sonya, have you any reception?"

Sonya tucked her hand into the pocket of her jeans to find her phone, but given she owned an outdated model, she didn't have much hope. As a scholarship student, she couldn't really afford a better update. A solid 'x' crossed through her empty service bars. "No, professor."

"Damn it all." The man shoved his own phone back into his canvas bag and kicked at the mud, readjusting his grip on the teetering umbrella. "I can already tell our survey will demand a much larger plot of excavation than our current permits allocate. We will need to get the department director's permission before expanding the scope of our flags."

Said flags barely stuck their red tops out from the land's thick greenery, spaced every few meters around the crevasse and the emerging root ball.

"There might be a massive system of caves just under our feet, undiscovered after all these years. I warned them we'd need a bigger team. I did, I tell you! And I'll be proven right, ha!"

Callum and Sahar shared knowing looks.

Dr. Rangel's short rant dwindled into more scholarly exclamations of thought as his four students began the preliminary stages of their survey. Sonya was excited; at only twenty-three, and with a preference for theoretical anthropology, she had never been selected for any of the university's joint expeditions or field exercises before. With the poor weather threatening to degrade or ruin any revealed findings, it had been a matter of urgency to pick the first ready and able students and supervisor to go on this sudden trip. They had no assurances of finding anything genuinely noteworthy, but Sonya liked the mystery of it all. She didn't even mind the rain.

Kirstie finally had the canopy set up and was inspecting the first of the tablets. "These will need to be dated, of course, but the language looks to be Scandinavian in origin," she called over the plop of water on the stretched covering. The Glaswegian woman dug a stiff brush out of her kit and used it to slop away some of the muck. "If these are from any of the Viking invasions against the Picts, they could be over a thousand years old!"

"Well, our friend here isn't nearly that old," Sahar replied, flicking through the camera's shots. "If it weren't for how tightly interwoven with the main root system it is, I'd say the skeleton is barely a decade old." She shook her head, clearly puzzled. "The skull and mandible aren't here."

Sonya walked away from the main pit along the crevasse, instead moving toward the long fissures splitting the earth. She shone her torch over the boulders, bushes, and sodden dirt, searching for the missing skull or more of the mysterious tablets. Nothing caught her attention.

"Anyone have a guess at how long the tree's been here?" Callum asked.

"Reports from the locals say it's been here well over a hundred years, longer than anyone's memory."

Dr. Rangel reached the small enclosure Kirstie had wrangled together and knelt by the first of the curious slate sheaves, bringing out a magnifying glass to observe the deep carvings. "Lang can eat his heart out," he muttered in reference to one of the other professors at the university. The rivalry between the two had been subject to the student rumor mill for years. "Our poor dead chap there might not be a Pict or a Viking, but these certainly ring authentic...."

The afternoon progressed, and the rain did not abate, looming bursts of thunder sounding over the distant firth as Sonya took over use of the digital camera and Sahar started extracting the bones. Callum kept up a light-hearted stream of conversation as each piece found a place on a folding table in the enclosure, and Sonya dutifully snapped photos from every angle and held up the ruler for scale. It should have been grisly work, but Sonya thought it morbidly fascinating—though, she admitted being happy no meat remained on their dead fellow. She wouldn't have found it quite as enthralling then.

Bending at the waist, Sonya tucked her long, wet hair behind her ears and brought her eyes closer to the skeleton's tibia. A quick squirt of distilled water from a bottle cleaned off more of the grit, and she saw strange but familiar lesions in the bone. That's odd.

"Dr. Rangel?"

"A curious cluster of runes here...Thurisaz was often used to symbolize a warning, but with this here....a baffling hybridization of the Elder Futhark...."

"Dr. Rangel?"

"Oh! Yes, what is it, Sonya?"

She gestured him over to her table. "There's odd marks here on the leg bones." The professor took out his magnifying glass again and nibbled on the edges of his mustache as he peered through it. "See these healed calcifications? It looks similar to something I've seen on photos of an Ancient Grecian man attacked by dogs."

"Quite right, quite right...."

Sahar came to set another bone on the table—part of the hand, Sonya guessed—and swept her wet fringe out of her eyes before squinting at the tibia. "Big dog," she commented. "Look at the spacing of the teeth impressions there. I would guess it was wolves."

Dr. Rangel frowned at Sahar. "Wolves?" he said. "Why, there haven't been wolves in the British isles for centuries!"

"They might not have been from around here. The marks had healed over, after all."

Grumbling ensued from both the professor and Sahar, while Kirstie and Callum glanced over the Norse slates. "There's no plant fibers from clothing left, no labels, not a bit of meat to be found," Callum pointed out to the group. "So the bones are older than they look, definitely. What with them being found with these Norse slates, is it possible we're looking at a Viking?"

Sahar snorted. "Bones don't lie, Callum, and these just aren't that old."

Bickering about advanced preservation or the possibility of it being a hoax broke out, and when Kirstie suggested the dead fellow might have stolen the slates and died out here by accident—or by someone else's design—Dr. Rangel looked entirely upset and not quite as eager to phone the university. If this expedition didn't prove worthwhile and he raised expectations too soon, his credibility would take a hit.

Sonya sighed, all too used to the impromptu debates that plagued the departments, and she took the camera with her to take more shots of the site. The rain softened for the moment, and she enjoyed the reprieve as she walked past the perimeter and climbed over the rocks, snapping images of the area. The canopy with its red top stood out among the gray tors and deep green vegetation, as did the butter-yellow of their rented all-terrain vehicle. She turned her face into the sea-breeze and let it tug at her windbreaker, wincing when tiny pinpricks of water peppered her eyes. Fog gathered at the mouth of the firth and crawled in their direction, making progress over the shore as it inched into the highlands. Sonya, born and raised in London, thought it a beautiful, if austere, landscape.

From the enclosure, she heard Callum laugh, and someone had the good sense to start the generator and power their portable lights. The position of the hill and lower woods made it seem as if they were entirely alone in the world, perched above the shallow, swirling clouds creeping inland and over the village in the lower valley. The downed oak tree made for an odd inclusion in the otherwise picturesque scene, what with its roots and snapped branches splayed wild in the air, the leaves still green and flushed with life. Sonya walked along its side and balanced herself with one hand on the trunk. The rough bark scratched her palm.

A hawk landed on one of the branches not far from Sonya's head. Startled, she looked up at the bird—and the bird looked back, its body held with haunting stillness and its talons curled tight upon the branch, leaving furrows in the wood. Its feathers had a sheen of gold to them, caught and gilded in the scant bits of sunlight phasing through the clouds, and the beak looked sharp enough to bite fingers clean off.

Studying it, Sonya lifted the camera and held the viewfinder to her eye, then clicked the button.

The hawk shrieked and flared its wings.

Sonya gasped and jerked back, her boots sliding in the mud. She hit the ground, and the camera bounced on her chest, though she managed to grab it before it struck the ground. She clutched it to her breastbone, feeling her heart race. "That was close...."

"Sonya?" Sahar called. "Can you bring the camera back?"

"I'll be right there," Sonya replied, breathless. The cold seeped into the denim of her jeans, and she grimaced as she got to her feet and felt the muck cling to her legs. "Gross."

"Sonya!"

"Coming!"

She looked up toward the branch. The hawk had disappeared.