The PowWow

Special Collections looked the same. Same climate-controlled hush, same careful lighting, same archival tray with its three tablets on the long table. Voss looked the same too, mostly — except for a tightness around the eyes that showed stress was wearing on her.

She looked at us, then at the folder under my arm, then back at us.

"You came back," she said.

"We did," I said. "And we need you to hear something."

She sat. We sat across from her, the tablets between us like the last time. Jacob folded his hands and said nothing. I opened the folder.

I laid it out in order. The Riel Foundation's funding of the expedition. The London journal. The symposium. Then the deeper layer — S. Riel Holdings as the instrument, Suri-El Asset Management as the origin point, a corporate registration predating her dig by generations, predating most living institutions by decades. Rachel had run it through official channels. Curtis had documented the chain. It was clean, sourced, and thorough.

Then I gave her the case history. Not everything — enough. Nathanial Lim, who had built a personal theology of Nephilim supremacy and acted on it. Devin Cross, who had used manufactured spiritual authority to subvert people away from truth. Elias Crane, a genuine gift corrupted into an instrument of harm. Aldric Vale, a dependency-producing presence operating through a platform designed to look like ministry. Four cases. One pattern. The same hand behind each of them, funding the infrastructure, shaping the narrative, supplanting biblical canon with alternative frameworks and releasing them into the culture.

"The Riel Foundation," I said, "has a very long history of very curious funding. You are not the first. You won't be the last unless someone says something."

Voss listened. Her expression did what a good scholar's expression did — received it without immediate acceptance, held it at arm's length, turned it over.

"This is a financial trail," she said. "It doesn't invalidate the texts."

"No," I said. "It doesn't. But it asks a question about who wanted them found and why." I leaned forward slightly. "Dr. Voss — how long did it take you to write the book?"

A pause. The slight shift of someone who hadn't expected that particular turn. "I — it came together quickly. I used AI to assist with the drafting, so the—"

"Right." I set the second folder on the table. "Because you didn't write it."

She looked at the folder.

"The book was already written," I said. "Funded and prepared by agents of the Riel Foundation. Structured to receive your scholarship and give it a platform and a direction. You provided the academic credibility. They provided everything else." I held her gaze. "And somewhere inside you, Dr. Voss, these texts ring false. That's why the book came together so quickly. The conclusions were already there waiting for you."

She looked at the tablets. She didn't deny it.

Jacob, who had been still through all of it, unfolded his hands.

"Dr. Voss."

She looked at him.

"The texts claim the Nephilim were the intended inheritors of the earth."

"Yes. The central argument is —"

"If that is true," Jacob said, "then what is humanity?"

She stopped.

"Genesis states that God created man in His image." His voice was even. Unhurried. "The Bible does not say God created the Nephilim. Meaning — man was made to represent God in the natural order. If the Nephilim were His intended design, what would humanity represent?"

Voss was very still.

"That makes humanity a mistake," Jacob said.

The room held that.

"God does not make mistakes." The same quiet voice. The same even delivery. "If the text's conclusion requires humanity to be incidental to the design — requires the image-bearers of God to be a stepping stone — then the text is not describing the God of Genesis. It is describing something else and calling it by His name." A pause. "Thou shalt have no other gods before me."

Voss looked at the tablets on the table.

The way a person looks at something they have spent two years building when someone has just shown them the load-bearing wall that failed to support the load.

She was quiet for a long moment. Then she spread her hands flat on the table.

"What do you want me to do?"

"Tell the truth about the book," I said. "Retract the added theories — the interpretation, the framing, the conclusions that didn't come from the texts but were handed to you with them. You came into archeology because you love history and the story it tells." I nodded toward the tablets. "Don't let the Riel Foundation change the story from what you know it to be."

She straightened. One last reach. "But if the carbon dating comes back positive — if the age of the tablets is confirmed — what then?"

Jacob's shoulders moved. The tectonic shrug. "The Book of Enoch is not canon for a reason. Make sure these tablets are treated the same."

She absorbed that. Then she nodded — the nod of a woman putting something down that she had been carrying at some cost.

"I'll do what you're asking," she said. Then, quieter: "Can you forgive me? For what I've contributed to this."

I smiled. "It's not our forgiveness you need." I stood, picking up the folder. "Luckily, your Lord and Savior is a very forgiving sort. Get with Him on that."

Something moved in her face. Not offense — relief. The particular relief of someone who has just been pointed toward the right door.

We left her in Special Collections with the tablets and the archival tray and the careful lighting and the weight of a decision that was now hers to make. I thought she'd make it. The scholar who had required evidence to shift a conclusion had just been given the evidence.

The load-bearing wall may have failed, but it could be rebuilt.

She'd seen it.