Where Do The Soulmates Find The Hidden Relic After The Time Skip?

Some afternoons I flip through the attic just because nostalgia is heavier than dust, and that's how we rediscovered the relic. After the time skip, our old home had been patched and repainted, but Dad's trunk had a stubborn lock that I'd always meant to pick. One rainy Friday I finally did, more for the thrill than anything else, and there it was: wrapped in a bandana and slipped between stacks of yellowed comic strips.

It felt like finding a letter from a past self. My soulmate's laugh when I called was the kind that makes rooms seem smaller and private, and when they climbed the attic ladder they brushed the dust off the bandana with clumsy, reverent hands. The relic wasn't ornate — small, stone, with a carved spiral — but the way it warmed in my palm made me feel less alone than I had in a long time.

We decided not to tell anyone at first; some things are better unpolished for a while. I tucked it back into the bandana and kept it on my bedside table, a quiet nightly reminder that some mysteries are soft and personal rather than public monuments.

There's this ridiculous moment I still replay in my head: the arcade's light flickering, late-night posters peeling off the walls, and the machine that no one had used since the time skip coughing to life. We were scavenging on a dare, and it took a half-joke about 'treasure behind the high score board' for me to lean in and notice the panel screws were newer than the rest. I had to unscrew one with a bent hairpin I keep on my keychain — don't ask — and there it was, hidden behind a layer of old ticket stubs and sticky quarters.

The relic looked like it had been waiting for someone who still liked the sound of pinball. It was wrapped in a scrap of a concert T-shirt with a faded symbol we'd both traced as kids. I texted a blurry photo, and my soulmate arrived in ten minutes, breathless and smelling like cold pizza and fondness. We argued about the ethics of taking it, then decided the building owed us anyway.

We didn't know much about artifacts or histories, but we knew how to patch things together. We opened it up between rounds and passed it back and forth like it was a secret video game code. Later, over neon and soda, we planned to clean it, to research it, and to maybe, just maybe, not tell anyone else.

Months of geiger clicks and careful brushes taught me a stubborn patience. After the time skip the city had been redesigned around a collapsed clocktower, and I spent weeks mapping subsurface anomalies because my gut told me something had been buried deep and intentionally. The urban planners had paved over history with glass and retail, but older networks — sewer conduits, a forgotten tram stub — had stayed put. I followed the pattern, draining a section of the canal that ran under the oldest bridge, and found a maintenance hatch they had missed.

Below the hatch, in a chamber softened by water and time, the relic sat in a raised niche, protected by a ring of corroded copper and a wrinkled leather tag. My hands shook when I lifted it; the readings on my little field meter spiked for a second, showing a faint residual energy that made my scalp prickle. I cataloged everything, photographed the context, and took samples of the encrusted linen. It felt clinical and sacred at once: I recorded the coordinates, small tactile notes I knew we'd laugh at later, and then walked the route up above to call my soulmate.

They arrived with a thermos and an old trench coat that smelled like rain. We compared hypotheses and whispered like smug scientists. The relic's significance wasn't obvious then, but the way they looked at it — and at me — told me we'd found something that would become the axis of a lot of late-night conversations.

The rain had stopped just as we stumbled into the hollow of the old municipal library, the place that used to smell like dust and lemon soap when we were kids. After the time skip, everything was softened — buildings had sprouted ivy, sidewalks bloomed with weeds, and a spiral of pigeons had claimed the clocktower. We split up without speaking, like two old conspirators following separate threads of the same map. I found a folded scrap of paper jammed behind a loose brick in the archive wall; it was my handwriting, childish and sure, marking an X and a tiny doodle of a bird. That small, ridiculous certainty convinced me to keep digging.

The relic was smaller than I expected, wrapped in oilcloth and tucked into the hollow of a weathered statue of the library's founder. It was as if someone had wanted it hidden in plain sight, protected by the idea of being important. When I touched it, the heat of the metal felt like a reply to a long question. My soulmate arrived just then, breathless and laughing, and we exchanged a look that contained everything the years had added and taken.

We didn't make a big speech. We sat on the flagstones, unwrapped the relic, and shared a thermos of coffee while the sunset hit the stained-glass window. Finding it felt less like a climax and more like a beginning — a quiet agreement that the thing mattered because we found it together, and because the world around us had been patient enough to let it wait until both of us were ready.