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I yawned loudly and blinked away the sleep. My fatigue wasn’t the book’s fault. The account wasn’t uninteresting. A description of the smuggling routes taken by traders in ancient artifacts.

With so much chaos in the Middle East, all kinds of opportunities had arisen.

Ancient tablets buried or hidden for years were finding their way out of the region.

Some were removed from illicit digs. Others were liberated from the storerooms of museums and passed from hand to hand before coming up for bids in auction houses in New York or Paris or London.

All kinds of new treasures reached new owners. All kinds of predictions and prophecies and stories, long hidden, were exposed.

Too late.

Those tales were roads that led nowhere. The end was coming. The last moment had been written in clay and sealed for millennia. Now I’d uncovered it. Nothing else mattered.

I slid the book away.

The whiskey in my tumbler caught the light of the desk lamp. A warm, amber glow that had probably helped make me sleepy. The single malt and the late hour. I picked up the glass and stood by my apartment window.

City blocks stretched out beneath me. Thousands of tiny twinkles. Orange streetlights, white apartment lights, the red dots of departing taxis and the cars of late-night revelers. Soon, all would be extinguished.

The tablet wasn’t explicit about how it would happen. Maybe an asteroid. A tidal wave. A sudden bolt from the heavens destroying everything or perhaps just everyone it struck. Ancient texts were never very precise. They left plenty to the imagination.

I’d checked and double-checked my date and time calculations, and there was no doubt. However the Day of Changing arrived, it would come. Tomorrow.

I took a deep breath.

Only a few of us would remain. We would inherit the world.

The tablet said so, and this tablet was right.

There was something about the way the prophecy was written, the strength of the author’s certainty.

I was sure that if I’d published it, if I’d made my translation available to everyone in my field, they’d have dismissed the piece immediately.

A fake, they’d have called it. An obvious forgery.

Too different from anything found before. They’d have laughed in my face.

So small-minded. They assumed that what they’d already seen was all there was. That the tablets still waiting in archives and warehouses and buried under the ground would only repeat what they already knew. They couldn’t conceive of anything different.

And they were content with that belief.

I wasn’t.

They deserved everything they’d get. Whether they bled to death, burned away, or disappeared in a sudden flash flood, they deserved it. All of them.

Sipping my drink, I let the alcohol scorch my throat.

Part of me was relieved the end was so close.

My path was so much larger than the traditional path of a teacher.

I wouldn’t have to churn out the same articles, the same lectures, to simply keep the engine running until I was truly ready to retire and disappear like so many others.

My discovery precluded all that day-to-day minutiae.

My phone pinged.

I finished my drink and returned to my desk. An email from the editor of a journal in England. The revisions of an article I’d submitted were late.

Just another idiot.

Of course they were late. I’d written that article before I’d found the second half of the tablet. The piece seemed so pointless now.

If only the rest of my world was more open to miracles. I’d have given them a translation and an article that would’ve sent their jaws dropping to the floor. They’d have understood for the first time just how much power those ancient words could still hold.

And they’d have feared me. And admired me. As they should have all along.