His pen hovered over the blank paper, trembling slightly. The complex words, the brilliant concepts that would define his career and influence the discipline for decades, suddenly seemed empty as shells of dead insects. They were elegant traces, like Aritana's, trying to dominate a chaos that infinitely transcended them. The headdress under glass was a fossil, not of a culture, but of a fleeting moment of encounter that carried within itself the germ of destruction.