Tsillu burbled softly as he was wont to do, strutting slowly over his site. Ropes and cords of various colors hung from the tops of little wooden stakes driven carefully into the ground at various points. In one clawed hand blackened by race and repeated exposure to ink and coal, he held both what seemed to be a large artist's brush and a stick of charcoal, precariously balancing both tools in a way that both would have been usable at any given time. In his other, he held a massive, yet thin book of plain paper held in a thick, hard binding that functioned as a mobile desk. Above, several ever-burning torches lit his site, jammed into cracks and crevices in the pyramid's wall. The focus of his past several day was an unassuming two-and-three-quarter meter square. If it weren't for the colored ribbons marking out a dense grid pattern on the ground, it would have looked like any other stretch of ground in this tomb. That might have been why it was left. It was an unassuming pyramid to begin with, out in the middle of nowhere. Not many had been desperate or well-equipped enough for strike out this far. Or, rather, the well equipped ones were not that desperate to spend days hiking across the desert to get to a single tomb of a time-lost pharaoh.

But the diviners had told him this would be the place... then they had made some prophetic speech about adversity and the harshness of the desert. Tsillu had to bite back a scoff. The elves of Ansalok knew little of harshness. At least this kind, he added to his train of thought.

Tsillu was a local. Perhaps that was why he was so fond of the shadows and darkness that he so often cloaked himself in. It was one of the few ways to cut the blinding sunlight and silver-gold sands of The Expanse. "Thrun'valak." Tsillu let the native name of the desert slip from his beak, grateful that the back sixth or so of his mouth had evolved to allow the pronunciation of his home's name. Still, his keratinous beak got in the way of enough, such as close examination of artifacts, he mused as he bent down at the waist, tail feathers high in the air, and turned his head to the side, sketching a particular facet of one of the three hundred and forty-two squares that made up his site. He had blown each fifteen centimeter by fifteen centimeter square up to cover a sixty-centimeter square paper, each fine detail like a mark on a cartographer's map.

History would thank him. He swapped tools and brushed a bit of dirt out of the way, blowing lightly on the patch. The very corner of something worn, yet obviously sentient-made and meant to withstand the centuries appeared from under the pinkish-grey dirt. Tsillu's heart skipped a beat. He let out a soft, half-relieved, half-disbelieving exhale, eyes glittering in the torchlight.