He moved closer. His eyes adjusted, narrowing slightly, the careful attention of someone who has already learned once in this cavern that the difference between noticing and not noticing carries real consequences. The markings resolved themselves gradually under this closer scrutiny — shallow lines, worn channels in the rock, a pattern that had survived the erosion of ages by being carved deeply enough that even time's most patient work hadn't reached the bottom of it.
He looked at the medallion.
Then back at the wall.
The pattern on the medallion's surface — which he had examined before without finding any particular significance in its design beyond its obvious age and quality — matched. Not approximately. Not in the general way that similar artistic traditions sometimes produced similar motifs. The correspondence was exact, the lines on the wall a direct mirror of the lines on the medallion, as if one had been made specifically to find the other.
