Fired clay
Hand-carved cracked along one edge and still whole. It has already survived one wall coming down.
A face carved into fired clay. Same hat same tired eyes on every layer they dig up. The hat came before the joke.
Notes taken on site — before anyone had a name for what they found.
Layer 4. We didn’t find a coin. We found a face.
Two reliefs cut from the same red clay pulled from the same collapsed wall eleven days apart. Same knit hat same tired eyes same crack running along the left cheek — as if it had been waiting there the whole time.
No name was carved beside him. No god in the archive matched the description. Whoever made him left no instructions — just the face and the hat over and over one layer at a time.
We stopped digging when we realized the layer below was the same picture again.
Not armor not luck. Three things that hold steady from one dig to the next.
Hand-carved cracked along one edge and still whole. It has already survived one wall coming down.
A calm faintly amused look. The face doesn’t change between the dry season and the wet one.
Every test comes back inconclusive. Could be a thousand years old. Could be from last Tuesday. Both readings are treated as correct.
Three horizons. No promised depth — just the route we’re digging.
Grab a torch. There’s more of him buried somewhere and the only way to find out is together.