The dirt crumbled under his fingertips, each movement slow and steady and cautious. The steadier he worked, the less likely that the fragile ancient artifact he was digging up would shatter and crumble like the dirt.

Pix had been digging for hours, the hot sun pounding onto his back and onto the surrounding area, but he was used to it. He had to be, being an archeologist in one of the hottest biomes, aside from the mesa desert.

He was so close to finally unearthing the artifact that had been causing all the weird readings on his tracker.

His tracker, a simple machine he had been gifted by Fwhip of Gobland, originally created to detect rare minerals and ores but was refunctioned to instead find artifacts and objects with magical auras hidden from the world. It had been glitching for weeks, and Pix had thought it was malfunctioning until he decoded the glitches and realized they were trying to lead him to an artifact, one that had to be extremely powerful to affect his tracker so greatly.

The hunt had led him to this obscure corner of the savanna, an area he had ruled off for artifacts due to the magical permafrost embedded deep into the earth and stone, something he had theorized was a remainder from some extremely powerful spell that had been done at least several centuries ago, if not millennia. Pix hadn't even considered the idea that anything could have been preserved in the ice.

A crimson, pulsing glow caught his eye, and he abandoned a miniscule amount of his self-control to dig just a little faster, unearthing the artifact at a snail's pace.

Finally, he could grab it in his hand and gently pull it out of the stone it had been embedded in, eyes roving over the glowing red crystal with intense curiosity.

After taking it back to the Ancient Capital and studying it extensively, he finally labeled it as redundant, just a magically powerful crystal. It had some strong magical residue on it, yes, but no actual current magic. Perhaps some wizard had used it as a part of their staff ages before, or it had been used as an energy source, or as a prison for a magical being, or anything really.

So, once his curiosity was satiated, he placed it in his museum, behind a simple glass wall and a plaque listing all the known information about the newest addition.

Once, it had been something great. But an eternity later, empty and simmering with the leftover magic of its spellbound prison and the rage of the demon that had once been trapped within, it simply glowed, attracting the eyes of anyone who passed by.

Scott of Chromia, sneaking into the museum for one of many pillages, couldn't understand why he got so violently nauseous every time he even so much as glanced at Pix's newest shiny. Normally, a reaction like that would make him determined to find out why and end it, but this one felt so unnaturally attuned to his very being, something he knew deep within his bones the truth of, that he couldn't get near it.

Pix wondered, of course, why the one particular crystal had never been thieved by the cute ruler of Chromia when all the others had been stolen and returned multiple times over at that point, but he simply dismissed it as Scott not liking that particular crystal for whatever reason.

He could feel the tug as well, the feeling that it was important, something that had once been great and terrible and connected to him, somehow, although a lot weaker than it was connected to Scott.

But like Scott, he simply ignored the feelings as silly daydreams and got back to work. Those artifacts wouldn't return themselves, after all. Time to go bargain with the wily, adorable Scott.