Artifacts

1.

The artifacts have always been there, waiting for people to find them.

Nobody knows how many there are.

They're everywhere. Underground. At the top of mountains. In swamps. Under the ice at the North Pole.

Sometimes they're easy to find, even now, even a hundred years after the first one was found. Other times, they're harder. Some of them look like trees or rocks or other natural things. Some of them look like nothing you'd ever imagined. There was a family of four who lived in one without knowing it. A house that'd been passed down for generations, suddenly revealed as an Artifact.

Mostly people don't bother debating where they come from. They're too useful to fret much about their origins.

Seems like, though, we SHOULD have been asking just that.

2.

Aaron rode his bike down Pennbury Hill, listening to the tires hum on the hot blacktop. For a moment, he pretended that he was on one of the BMX bikes ridden by Scott or Bella Olson. With their rims made of metal from the rings the twins' dad had found, the bikes could do more than just cruise down the tallest hill in the subdivision. A LOT more.

Like maybe help him get up the hill in the first place. As much fun as it was barreling down Pennbury after the paper route was done, Aaron dreaded climbing up the hill, his legs straining at the pedals of his old 10-speed, sometimes having to get off and walk it if the papers were especially thick, like they always were on Thursday. Aaron only had Pennbury Hill on his route because his friend Kevin's dad had bribed the old man who determined the Lake And Hills Tribune routes to get Kevin the better of the two routes in their neighborhood, leaving Aaron, who had applied first, with the route that nobody wanted because of the hill.

As he approached the bottom of the hill he hit the brakes, then sighed when they didn't slow his old bike enough and he had to drag his feet to make the turn onto his own block without wiping out. But when he cut onto the cross street at the bottom of the hill, he slowed more, as he always did here.

It wasn't just him. Nearly everybody was enthralled, and at least a bit scared, when they saw the Trident.

Nobody had yet been able to move the Trident. Heck, they couldn't even complete the excavation, and two companies had gone bankrupt trying. The Artifact's three prongs jutted up out of solid granite, incongruous amidst the surrounding park with a baseball field, small basketball court, and a playground.

The Trident drew your attention no matter how many times you'd seen it. Aaron knew that because he'd walked or ridden or been driven by it nearly every day of his life, and he, his parents, and even his kid sister Alf all slowed down and looked, each time.

All you could see of the Trident were three large, arrow-shaped prongs sticking up out of the rock. Each stood about 10 feet tall from ground to the tip of the point, with the middle one slightly longer. Seismic readings, various types of scans, even other Artifacts couldn't get information about what the buried part looked like, but that didn't matter. When you looked at an Artifact, you knew what it was, even if, like the Trident, only a small part of the thing was visible.

That was only a small part of the power Artifacts have.