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rock’s center pulsed and started to glow. Malledy looked up to the heavens. Suddenly a fierce lightning bolt ripped the cobalt sky in two. Long after the lightning faded, Malledy’s eyes still registered its intensity. Angling the rock in his hand, he boomed the words again. The iridescent silver lightning slashed across the sky like a knife and struck a large bonsai tree twenty yards away from the group, instantly incinerating it. The air filled with the stench of sulfur and burned wood.
    “The client,” Otto said, taking the rock from Malledy, “will be pleased. What did you learn from this talisman?”
    “That rock,” Malledy replied, “means there are real forces in the world—different Gods—and a piece of their power can be acquired.” What he didn’t say was that for a few moments, while he’d been speaking in Greek and felt the rock react to his words and summon a deadly lightning bolt, he’d experienced something he’d never felt before. To the Archivists, he was a mere child—a helpless orphan whose fate rested in their hands. But when Zeus’ lightning blazed across the sky, Malledy had been transformed… he’d been mightier than all of them.
    “Malledy, do you understand that the acquisition of artifacts is everything? We live to pursue knowledge. We live to acquire talisman. Nothing—no man, no woman, no child, no God—stands in our way.”
    “Yes, I understand,” Malledy said, trying to keep his voice from shaking because Juliette had told him that no matter what happened, he should show no fear.
    “Even if I’m removed?” he’d asked his mentor.
    Juliette had looked away. “Even then.”
    Otto looked around the gathering of scholars. None spoke. “Then it is decided. Malledy is one of us.”
    And so he was. The decision to become an Archivist hadn’t been his own, but it was all he had, as there was no family history, parents’ footsteps to follow, or other options available. So Malledy relentlessly chased a future devoted solely to research and acquisitions.
    When a client decided to pursue seeds from a magical pomegranate, Malledy, by then eleven-years-old with a particular fascination with Greek mythology, was the Archivist for the job. He knew from studying ancient myths that Hades, God of the Underworld, had stolen the lovely Persephone from a meadow while she’d been picking flowers, and raced by chariot down to his dark kingdom with her. Despite Persephone’s protests, Hades had forced her to marry him. But there was a twist to the story. If Persephone didn’t eat anything in the Underworld, then she’d be permitted to return to earth. Sadly, Persephone did eat some seeds from a pomegranate and once tasted, the seeds made it impossible for her to ever return to earth, ensuring that she would remain Hade’s wife for eternity.
    Zeus supposedly took pity on Persephone and broke the power of the spell on the pomegranate. This allowed Persephone to leave the Underworld. However, in order to be fair to Hades, Zeus ruled that Persephone had to eat a seed from the magical pomegranate once each year. This act would instantly return her to the Underworld and Hades for a period of six months. When it was time to leave, Persephone had only to eat another seed to return to the living realm.
    If there was a legend that the magical pomegranate once existed, Malledy had reasoned, there was a chance it still did. Why a client might want those magical seeds was not Malledy’s concern. His sole focus was to track them down and acquire them.
    After months of research, travel to distant lands accompanied by Juliette, and frustrating clues that yielded no results, Malledy finally uncovered a diary of a toothless eighty-nine-year-old woman living in Crete that ultimately led him to the treasure. He found the magical seeds in a blue silk sack lying forgotten in the corner of a basement on an olive plantation.
    It was Otto, by then suffering from terminal cancer, who withdrew one of the seeds