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As the sun beats down through an opening in the canopy above, there he lies. His mouth sits ajar, the ghost of a smile marked on his lips. He had been caught up in a fantasy, the promise of gold too tempting to bear, pulling him away from his desk job and into the depths of the Rocky Mountains.

His fingertips had scraped the box — which was no bigger than the first-aid kit in the trunk of his car — right before the fall. He’d been mapping this spot out for weeks and had a sense — or, at the very least, a hope — that the treasure was nearby. The deer in the distance had heard his cries of delight, their heads poking up from the shrubbery as they glanced in the direction of the noise. And then, a crunch, a crack and a yell.

Blood trickles down from his forehead and pools in a swamp of scarlet-tinged mud at the bottom of the verge. He was lucky, really. If he had fallen in winter then the ice would have found him first, and the park rangers wouldn’t have discovered his body until dewdrops broke through the melting snow at the dawn of spring.

The warming climate was exactly what killed him, though, so maybe he wasn’t so lucky. As he scrambled to get a better grasp of his treasure, his foot had slipped on the snow-soaked grass. His ankle is twisted, now, as he lies by the riverbank, and a hint of bone protrudes out of his shoe.

This isn’t a bad way to go, he had thought, before the stone had planted a rough kiss on his skull. This is what Fenn would’ve wanted, really. The man with the childish glint of wonder in his eyes, who had roped him into this in the first place, who was so concerned about his own legacy that a treasure hunt was the only way to cement himself in history. He’d combed through his memories and picked the only spot he’d felt was right to die. To lay down amongst the ferns, the babbling of the water below the last thing he’d hear before he’d drift away and take the leap into whatever came next: That was bliss.

The wind picks up and sends a ripple downstream, and there he lies, submerged in an endless sleep.