“Aye, lass. ’Tis naught more than a bit of physics your century hasn’t yet stumbled upon for themselves.” His tone was detached, as if discussing nothing of any more significance than a new bit of twenty-first century technology. “Though from what I read while in your time,” he continued, “I’d wager it won’t be much longer.” When she made no reply, he said, “Chloe, Druids have long possessed more knowledge of archeoastronomy and sacred mathematics than anyone. Did you truly believe yours was the most advanced civilization ever to have existed? That none came before? Consider the Romans and the subsequent Dark Ages. Think you Rome was the first great civilization to rise and fall? Knowledge has repeatedly been gained and lost, to be one day regained again. Druids have merely managed to hold onto their lore through the dark times.”

A plausible, albeit mind-boggling possibility, she conceded silently. It certainly explained the purpose of all those mysterious stone monuments that stumped modern man, many of them constructed as early as 3500 B.C.E. Historians couldn’t even agree on how the ancient monuments had been built. Was it conceivable that thousands of years ago a race or tribe had lived that had achieved an advanced understanding of physics, necessary to both construct those “devices” and use them?

Yes, she acknowledged, awed. It was conceivable.

He’d said “Druids,” as in he was a Druid. So, she mused wryly, the tricky man had actually told her the truth back in his Manhattan penthouse. She’d simply not believed it.

She’d studied Druids as part of her course work in the master’s program. She’d waded through the scant facts and stranger fictions. What was it Caesar had written in the first century C.E. during the Gallic War? Druids have much knowledge of the stars and their motion, of the size of the world and of the earth, of natural philosophy, and of the powers and spheres of action of the immortal gods.

Caesar himself had said it. Who was she to argue?

Pliny, Tacitus, Lucan, and many other classical writers had also written about the Druids. The Romans had persecuted the Druids for centuries (while their emperors privately availed themselves of their prophetesses), forcing them into hiding. Christianity had further forced them to adapt or disappear. Had it been because they’d feared the power the Druids possessed? Were Druids perhaps like the Templars? Hiding throughout the centuries, protecting fabulous secrets?

She was starting to feel light-headed again, dizzied by the possibility that all those myths and legends carefully scribed in Ireland thousands of years ago were true. When the truth was so fantastical—why bother hiding it? Who would ever believe it? Nobody but a girl who’d gotten herself all wrapped up in it. A girl who’d stood in an ancient circle of stones and felt a gate or portal or whatever it was, open around her.