# Axiom

## Generated by Codox

# The-great-game 0.1.1-SNAPSHOT

# Axiom

It is at once natural and yet extraordinary; at once familiar and yet always uncanny. Strange, yet still a part of the landscape of my life since earliest childhood. Circular, about three and a half metres across, of unknown depth; filled with clear water which neither rises in time of flood nor falls in time of drought, which is never warm in summer yet rarely freezes in winter. And its level is always, always, always, about a metre higher than the level of the burn which flows around three sides of the rock through which it rises.

The well is liminal: a gateway between the world of air and the world of water, the world of men and the underworld, the world of sunlight and the world of darkness. It is the place where – my mother always claimed – I was conceived; and for too many people whom I have known, the gateway between life and death, through which none pass twice.

It is the Cauld Well: the Cauld Well of Scotland. The Well of Sorrows. According to folklore, a place of blessings and ancient magic. According to historians, the last site in Britain where the Celtic gods were regularly worshipped.

And it is mine.

# Tentatively Curious

Cryptography is the science of hiding things. The modern methods of hiding things are well known; they’re based on mathematical problems which are very hard to solve unless you already have a known starting point. For now, they work very well; but the problem with mathematical problems which are very hard to solve is that computers are steadily getting better and better at solving things.

Encryption is important; it is everywhere. It secures our communications, our wealth, our identity, our secrets. Many people – people with a great deal of money to spend – are very interested in the science of hiding things: in ensuring things are hidden, or else in finding things which others have hidden.

Unfortunately, the person who I wanted to find, in the spring of 2015 – who I had wanted to find since I’d lost her in the autumn of 2012 – could not be found by solving hard sums. In that spring, in fact, lots of things were hidden from me. Things which were hidden in plain sight, which were urgently important;

Like A. A. Milne’s King John, I am not a good man. Like him, I have my little ways. And very often no one speaks to me for days and days and days; although, to be fair, these past three years I hadn’t much encourage them to.

The university mostly understood that. My research – and to some degree my name – still brought in money; my papers were still well received. I no longer taught undergraduates, but I had a select group of excellent postgrads. And my colleagues accepted that I needed time to grieve.