An area of table had been cleared of clutter, and on it stood three strange objects. Identical to each other apart from some minor details but unlike anything else Tak had ever seen. They seemed to be made of some kind of greenish metal. Originally smooth and rounded but now badly corroded so that only the merest hint of the beauty and elegance of their construction remained. One of them had some kind of markings along one side, which appeared to be writing in some long forgotten language, and all three objects had smaller characters of the same language inscribed on various knobs and protrusions that Tak sensed had once had some kind of purpose, although what it could have been he couldn't imagine. The main features of all three objects, however, were the grey, glass windows that filled most of their upper surfaces, making them look like oddly shaped and over elaborate picture frames.

     With a glance at Gannlow to make sure it was okay, he picked one of them up, feeling the weight of it. Its good, solid construction. He ran his fingers lightly across its bumpy, raised features.

     "Press here," the rak suggested, indicating the spot on one of the other objects.

     Tak did so, feeling one of the strangely flattened bumps sinking slightly into the main body of the object under the pressure of his fingertip. Immediately, the window lit up and Tak found himself staring in astonishment at the head and shoulders of an attractive woman dressed in a style of clothing he'd never seen before. She was speaking, to him apparently, but her voice couldn't be heard and she didn't seem to notice or care that Tak made no reply.

     "Some kind of scrying mirror?" he asked.

     "No," replied the rak. "There is no magic in these objects."

     "No magic?" cried Tak in surprise. "That's impossible. Look at that. What's causing that image if not magic?"

     "I don't know," admitted Gannlow. "Some secret of the demigods that has long been lost. That is one of the things I want you to find out for me."

     "The demigods!" snorted Tak scornfully. "Surely you don't believe..."

     He suddenly remembered what he was talking to and cut himself off hurriedly. "I mean..." he stammered awkwardly. "There aren't many people who give that old legend much credence."

     "Neither did I, until I came across these objects in an Ommolian bazaar. The legend states that the semi-divine ancestors of humanity could work miracles without the aid of magic, however, and that describes these objects perfectly. I now believe that the legend of the demigods is the truth, that they had powers long lost to mankind, and that the secrets of those powers lie tied up in these ancient artifacts. I want those powers, and you are going to help me get them."

     "How?" asked Tak. "I mean, what did you have in mind?"

     Gannlow gestured with a claw at the image of the woman, still speaking silently to no-one. "She is clearly not speaking to us," he pointed out. "I believe that this object is some kind of diary, within which she recorded her thoughts and actions for her own later reference. I expect most of it refers to ordinary, day to day activities of interest only to herself. This one, however..."

     He indicated one of the other objects. "This one was used by a man of some position and authority. It shows not only his face, but images from his own time. Scenes of the city in which he lived and marvelous devices that were so familiar to him that he never makes specific reference to them.

     "I believe that I have, so far, been able to access only a small portion of their full contents. They are very old, as you can see, and no longer work as once they could. I believe that clues to the demigods' powers lie somewhere in those portions that I have not been able to access, despite twenty years of effort. I recruited Chilgrone in the hope that he would have insights that I lacked, that he would succeed where I failed, but he did not and now I want you to try. A year or two will be enough to see if you have any hope of success. If you have got nowhere after that time, I think we can safely assume that you never will and you will leave with your reward and my grateful thanks. I will then look for another wizard to try again."

     "Fair enough," said Tak, who found himself fascinated by the object and couldn't wait to begin playing with it. "It might help if we knew what she was saying. Have you ever heard her voice?"

     "No. It may be that her voice has been lost forever, like ink in an old book that has faded beyond legibility. I have noticed, however, that every time the object is activated she speaks the same words. She starts from the same place, saying the same things every time."

     "Like an old diary that always opens at the same page," mused Tak. The woman's image abruptly vanished, to reappear a moment later, but she was now dressed differently and the room behind her was lit differently, as if the yellow sun had moved some distance across the sky. "Another page," he muttered to himself. "But suppose she wanted to return to the first page?"

     "You simply deactivate it and activate it again," replied the rak, "but I take your point. There must be a way to move through the entries, to find the one you want, but both Chilgrone and I have so far failed to find it. In that chest under the table over there you will find all the notes written by us over the years. All the experiments we've tried. Please familiarise yourself with them, or you will waste time repeating things that don't work. I will now leave you to make a start."

     He left the room, and Tak stared back down at the silently speaking woman in his hands, wondering who she was and in what strange, forgotten land she'd lived.

☆☆☆

     "The legend of the demigods?" said Lirenna, her perfect brow creased with puzzlement. "I don't think I've ever heard of it."

     "Nor me," agreed Thomas, "until it surfaced in these acquired memories of mine. Not surprising really, though. I mean, how many of our myths and legends are still going to be around three thousand years from now?"

     The demi shae nodded. "So what is this legend exactly? How does it go?"

     "Well, basically it says that, long, long ago, the ancestors of humanity were nothing more than dumb beasts, living in caves and making tools from bones and flints. Then, one day, a race of gods came down from the stars and interbred with them. They created a race of golden beings with amazing powers who built a mighty civilisation in which wonders that would amaze and astound us were taken for granted. The legend speaks of cities of steel with towers of glass half a mile tall, of carriages that could move by themselves faster than a galloping horse and even fly through the air faster than the mightiest dragon.

     "One day, though, they dared to fly out into the stars, wanting to seek out and rejoin the gods that had created them. Derro, an evil god, grew jealous of them, though, and sent an army of fire demons to lay waste to the world. The legend speaks of a global conflagration. Every part of the world destroyed by raging fire. The civilisation of the demigods was destroyed, and the only survivors were those few who'd been able to hide deep underground and who had supplies of food and clean water to enable them to endure the years of freezing darkness that followed.

     "When they finally crawled out to see what the world had become, they were horrified to discover that they'd lost their powers and had become the humanity we know today. Weak and ignorant. Almost helpless in a hostile and violent world. Interestingly, the legend also states that other groups had survived by turning to cannibalism and other horrific practices, and that over generations of inbreeding and degeneration they became the evil humanoid races. Shologs, goblins, buglins and so on, as well as other nasty breeds of humanoids that have since become extinct. That agrees with the opinions of several notable modern sages, including Boswell of Bluevale and Kromus of the High Downs..."

     Lirenna was no longer listening, though, and Thomas stopped when he saw the thoughtful look on her face. "What is it?" he asked.

     "The shae folk also have an ancient legend concerning a golden age that was ended by a global disaster," she said. "Fire is mentioned, followed by an age of darkness and freezing cold in which all those who ventured out onto the surface died. It also states that the fell men are descended from the shae folk. That they emerged as a separate race at that time and that they decided they preferred life underground to being on the surface. Do you suppose there actually was some kind of world wide disaster, and that both these legends are memories of that event?"

     "I think we need to bear in mind that legends can change out of all recognition with generations of telling and retelling," pointed out Thomas. "Also, Elmias told me once that most of the civilisations he'd visited on other planes of existence had legends of an end of a fabled golden age, or an expulsion from paradise. That sort of thing. It seems to be a recurring mythological theme in all the races of humanity. Probably, the similarity between the human and shayen legends is just coincidence. Nothing to get excited about. It is an intriguing thought, though, isn't it?"

     "Yes," agreed Lirenna, looking out the window to see the time by the sky. They still had plenty of time. "So, what happened next? Did Tak discover the secret of the strange artifacts?"

     "He had some limited success," replied Thomas, "and he learned a great deal about the people who'd made them, but he never discovered the secrets of the demigods' power, if there ever was such a secret. The artifacts fascinated him, though. So much that, for a time, he completely forgot the real reason he'd come back to the heartlands..."

☆☆☆

     Which, it turned out, was no bad thing, for Tak later found out that Gannlow was watching him very closely, by means of hidden mirrors and peepholes that wouldn't trigger Tak's magic sense as a crystal ball might have. The rak would have been alerted at once had he made the slightest move towards the forbidden door. As it was, though, Gannlow saw only the younger wizard poring intently over the assembled notes and records, and occasionally trying something out on the artifacts themselves. Exactly what he should have been doing, and as the weeks turned to months the rak eventually came to believe that Tak was truly all that he seemed. That he had no hidden motive for being there.

     He relaxed his vigilance a little, therefore, having many other things to occupy his time, although he continued to peer in on him from time to time, just in case. For his part, Tak didn't doubt that the rak had him under observation somehow, but the three artifacts fascinated him to such an extent that he rarely thought about anything else. The mystery they presented took up almost all his attention.

     When five months had passed, he'd succeeded in piecing together a fairly complete picture of the city in which the owners of the artifacts had lived, based on the background images behind the people making the recordings. The woman who'd owned the first artifact had never taken it outside her room, but the high ranking man and the woman who'd owned the third artifact had taken them with them wherever they went, apparently using them to record thoughts that had occurred to them while in the course of their daily work.

     The first thing he'd established was that they had indeed lived on Tharia. There were several entries in which one or other of Tharia's moons were visible in the sky behind the speaker, and one especially valuable entry also contained the images of two comets and the red sun, although Derro seemed to be slightly smaller than it was in modern times. It was a slightly less garish shade of red. More a dark orange than the ominous blood tone it was in his day. What this meant, he had no idea.

     The city they lived in was a walled one, and what a wall! A vast rampart of earth and stone rearing fifty feet above the ground and as broad at the base as it was high. Broken only by tunnels where roads ran through it, guarded by huge gates of a blue metal that would have needed a dozen strong men to open and close. The gates were patrolled by guards wearing armour unlike anything Tak had ever seen and they were carrying weapons that looked like clubs but with smooth holes drilled in their narrow ends and triggers beside the moulded hand grips.

     The city itself was just as the legend of the demigods described it. Miles across, with buildings of gleaming glass and steel and with vehicles that sped along the ground all by themselves and even flew through the air, lifted and propelled by nothing that he could see. Magic! Powerful magic! Except that the legend also stated that the demigods didn't use magic. Didn't even seem to know that such a force existed.

     It was a pity that Elmias Pastin, the University's director of extra-planar studies from three thousand years in Tak's future, never saw those images, as he would have been struck by the similarity to certain worlds he'd visited. Worlds where they had something called science instead of magic. Those artifacts were lost long, long before Elmias's time, but Thomas Gown remembered the tales the strange old man had told, and remarked to Lirenna on their similarity to what Tak had seen, all that time before.

     He found no clue as to the nature of the power the demigods had possessed, however, to his frustration and that of the rak as he continued to report failure after failure. Months went by, with nothing of any more importance or significance being discovered, and Tak began to fear that he would eventually be forced to admit defeat, just like Gannlow and Chilgrone before him. Also, he'd begun to remember his real reason for being there, and he was beginning to feel angry with himself that so much time had passed without his having discovered any of the secrets of the raks. Without his even having tried! Time was running short. Gannlow would show him the door in less than half a year. If he was going to act at all, it would have to be soon.

     He began to pay attention to the forbidden door, therefore, studying it carefully whenever he could while being careful to always have an experiment in progress which he could rush back to if he heard footsteps out in the corridor. By then he'd realised that the rak had non-magical ways of watching him, that his treachery might be discovered any time he left his bench, but he knew he would accomplish nothing unless he was willing to take risks. He would simply have to chance it.

     His magic sense registered the magical wards and guards defending the door, and not knowing what their range of operation might be he made sure to always keep at least four feet away, but that was close enough for him to conclude that it would be surest suicide for him to try to get in that way. Gannlow had spared no expense and no effort in his determination to bar all unauthorised access, and he was far too superior to Tak in the magical arts for any attempt to dismantle his defences to succeed.

     On the face of it, that meant Tak was beaten, that he had no hope of success. Gradually, though,  another possibility began to occur to him and he found himself looking at the stone wall separating the laboratory from the forbidden room beyond. The door was locked and trapped, yes, but he sensed no magic in the wall. The rak apparently trusted to the strength of the solid rock itself to keep out intruders.

     The underground chambers he was in had been excavated out of the solid rock under the mansion, but the wall separating the main chamber of the laboratory from the forbidden room had been added later, apparently having been brought into existence by magic. It was not made of individual bricks. It was a single sheet of stone, but he could see the seam where it met the ceiling, looking a little like the welded join between two sheets of metal. Obviously a magic spell, therefore, and if it had been made by magic it could be penetrated by magic.

     A rock shaping spell would do the trick nicely, he thought. It would turn the stone semi liquid and allow it to be moulded by his mental commands, opening a new door in it, and a second use of the spell would return the wall to its original condition before his activity was discovered. The only problem was that Tak didn't know the rock shaping spell. He didn't even know what special ingredients it required. Oh well, he sighed. He would just have to learn it, that's all. Gannlow would have it in one of his spellbooks. Any wizard who created walls of rock would inevitably learn rock shaping as well, as it expanded considerably the uses to which the first spell could be put.

     Gannlow's spellbooks were here in this very room, lined up on a high shelf. They were trapped and guarded as well, but with much simpler spells that Tak was confident he'd be able to bypass. That confused him, though. A wizard's spellbooks were his most precious possession, and yet Gannlow guarded his less well than whatever was in the forbidden room. His heart raced with excitement. The secrets of the raks! It had to be! What else would a rak guard more carefully than his own spellbooks?

     There was no way he could conceal from Gannlow that he was learning a new spell, so he would have to learn two, one of which would be of use in his examination of the three artifacts. His learning of that spell would cover his learning of the other. He spent some time pondering what kind of spell would aid him in his work, therefore, and eventually came up with a simple Mend spell. A spell normally used to put a broken pot back together, or repair a broken window.

     They'd long since worked out that most of their problems stemmed from the fact that the artifacts were badly aged and corroded. Divination and examination spells had revealed that they contained many minute components, like a lock or the mechanism of a crossbow but much more delicate and intricate. Tak thought it was possible that some of them had been damaged, the kind of damage that a mend spell might be able to fix, and his perusal of the rak's notes and journals had revealed that this possibility had not occurred to Gannlow.

     He just hoped that the rak didn't know the Mend spell, in which case he would simply cast it himself and Tak would have to think of something else. He left the laboratory, therefore, to tell Gannlow what he had in mind.