...I stood at the bottom of a perfectly circular crater, a pickaxe gripped in my left hand, bathed in the blinding fury of the bulldozer's brightest floodlights. The yellow-orange-crimson glow of the depths seared my eyes even through the visor's filter. The molten edges of rock had cooled in a heartbeat, yet I swore they still breathed heat—warming my feet through the very soles of my boots.
Between two fingers I held a golden nugget, no larger than a two-inch nut, perhaps a shade more. It, too, scorched through my glove with its incandescent yellow brilliance.
The floodlights dimmed a fraction, and from within, I could finally grasp the true scale of the crater. Forty meters across—the length of the bulldozer consumed by the explosion. Five meters deep. And beneath my feet, a meter-deep pool of pure, molten gold lapped in shimmering yellow waves. Its edges were crowned with frothy asbestos curls—oxides of silicon and magnesium, like the foaming mane of some primordial beast.
