She had never looked inside, assuming the cabinet held supplies, but it had been catching her eye all week.
She knelt down and opened the door to find an industrial safe bolted to the ground. The cabinet was just a decorative cover. It was steel-gauge with two electronic keypad locks. She tried using the gallery security codes, not sure if they would work.
To her surprise, they did, and her excitement skyrocketed. She opened the door to find only one object inside, a thick leather-bound book wrapped in linen. Goose bumps ran down her arms.
She brought the heavy book to the examining table and unwrapped the fabric to unveil a glorious codex.
“Oh my God,” she whispered. The hairs on her arms rose and the silence in the room magnified. Even the air turned electric. The years this artifact had weathered seemed to radiate from it, hovering like a band of energy.
In her years of appraising she had come to understand that, sometimes, collectors kept secrets. She had just found Marcel’s.
She hurried to the bathroom to wash her hands so she could touch the parchment without damaging the pages. She returned, now completely in the zone, and opened the cover with hands like a surgeon’s.
When she saw the writing, her body had a visceral reaction. The penmanship was exquisite, a treasure in and of itself. The carbon-black ink remained rich and unfaded, and the script stood out from the parchment with a strength untarnished by the years.
Engraved on the first parchment leaf were four words in flowing ancient Greek script. She began to translate:
My Chronicles Through Time
The symbols resembled works of art. What was this exquisite work, and why wasn’t it in the collection’s registry?
Semele turned over the first leaf and gasped.
A piece of stationery was wedged between the leaves. Slowly, she removed the paper, wondering who on earth could have been so careless.
Her heart stopped when she read the note:
Semele,
Tell no one what you find written in these pages.
Translate the words and you will understand.
You can trust no one now.
Marcel
Semele felt as if she’d been touched by a ghost. She reread the note over and over in disbelief. Marcel Bossard had written to her—which was impossible. The man had died before his estate ever contacted her firm.
How had he known her name?
To my reader: I can see what time you live in, and I feel your eyes upon me.We are from different eras, you and I, and by the time you are reading these words, my ancient world will have long been buried. I am one you call a seer—someone who can divine the future and divine it well.
The power of intuition will have ebbed in your time, so you may not believe this story, or worse, think it a fable. But I assure you, my tale is true. I will begin by telling you about my life before, when I was a girl in Alexandria, Egypt.
In my youth, I did not know I had the sight. Only at certain times did the faintest glimpses of what was to come strike me like glimmers of light. Suddenly, I could see when the rains would fall, whether my brother would marry, if my father would buy me thewesekhcollar from the market. This kind of simple knowledge would present itself, but for the most part, I thought nothing of these inklings.
Only once did a dark premonition creep into my mind. My mother was eight months with child when one night she asked me to comb her hair after her bath. I was smoothing her long tresses when the feeling gripped me. I knew I would never touch her hair again.
The next morning I heard her moans, and my brothers ran to get the old women we called the birth goddesses to help bring our new sibling into the world. For hours we huddled outside the room, listening to our mother fight for both their lives. The long silence that came afterward told me she and the baby had not won.
Perhaps if my mother had survived, she could have taught me about my gift and eased me into understanding, for I often wondered if she too had possessed the sight. Instead, she left me orphaned with searching thoughts and a precocious nature that my father encouraged. For I was a librarian’s daughter—his daughter—and not from just any library, but the Library of Alexandria, the largest in the known world.
The great library and connecting Musaeum were Alexandria’s pride, and had been since the city’s birth hundreds of years ago. Just as our lighthouse, the tallest lighthouse ever built, could signal any ship at sea, so too was the library a beacon of light, offering its wisdom to every seeking mind.
My family’s position at the library extended back to Alexandria’s first days. Alexander the Great founded the city but died shortly afterward, and his trusted general, Ptolemy Lagides, had claimed Egypt as his own. It was his advisor, Demetrius Phalereus, who hatched the plan to build the library and make Alexandria the Navel of the World.
When word reached Athens that a magnificent temple to the Muses—the Musaeum—was being constructed and would serve as a prominent university, Aristotle’s students began the pilgrimage from the Lyceum. One of those scholars was my ancestor. Since then, every male in my family has taken his place at the library with high honor. Even I, a young girl, enjoyed the privilege of my father’s station. Librarians were close to royalty in stature, so no one dared to question me when I roamed the grounds.
