Tempus ut Servaretum.

Elena looked at the guests with warmth and joy. A close-knit and friendly family is one of the most wonderful things that can be in a person's life. And her family was no exception.

Before meeting with David, she did not think about her own family, she had enough love and care of her father. But when this man appeared in her life, she wanted to fill with his presence everything that was possible.

Home, work, daily pursuits - in every aspect of her life there was a piece of David, and the crown of all this was their child, Sean. She still sometimes wondered how a single person could make her life so fulfilled and happy just by being there.

Perhaps this is the great power of love? To make a person happy just simply due to the fact that someone dear to him exists in this world?

Elena looked at her husband and son, David smeared jam on Sean's nose, and he frowned with displeasure at his father because the latter got into his breakfast. The woman could not hold back a slight laugh, which immediately attracted the attention of her husband.

David, noticing her smile, smiled back and sent her an air kiss. But if he had his will, he would have preferred to grab her and squeeze her in his arms as tightly as if it would allow them to become Siamese twins and never detach from one another.

The smile of this woman was for him the most hypnotic weapon to which he was ready to surrender at the first chance and become her eternal servant if only to admire the happiness and joy in her eyes.

Elena noticed a small tube case that he had hidden behind his back, and remembered that it was the thing Nick had given him. "By the way, dear, have you not shown me what it is?"

David's face was filled with confusion; he had already forgotten about the scroll, "Ahh, are you talking about this?" The man picked up the tube case and reluctantly handed it to his wife. Knowing her perseverance and curiosity, he could not hide it forever but hoped that he would manage to hide it somewhere in his office. But it was too late.

Elena opened the case and pulled out a folded piece of parchment from the inside, something unknown appeared in her gaze. David closely watched the expression on his wife's face, in the hope that she would take this scroll as an ordinary ancient piece of paper.

At one time, he did everything possible to erase from her memory all traces of this dangerous knowledge, and the last thing he wanted now was for her to worry about this as well. They already needed to figure out what to do with Rick's appearance, track Marcus and understand what he wanted.

Recently, David began to feel incomprehensible anxiety that something was about to happen, and this something was unlikely to be a pleasant event. But even if there were sometimes gloomy thoughts in his head, he did not allow them to take hold of his consciousness. He knew what was most valuable to him and focused all his attention on his family.

Elena looked at obscure characters on parchment, frowning. From the outside, it seemed that she was trying to understand the blurry text, the outlines of the letters were familiar, but the meaning remained incomprehensible. "What is this?" she asked Nick.

"Oh, I'll tell you this now!" The young man quickly swallowed a piece of pancake, took a sip of tea and continued with an anticipation of a vivid reaction, "The story which I'm gonna tell you is super cool!"

Nick straightened his back, looked around at the table, smirked and began his story, "In short, as usual, I was stuck with my parents during excavations in the area of ancient Mesopotamia. Day after day, the same thing, heat, sand, brushes, brushes, blah blah blah... and then bam! I find this damn thing!" Nick pointed a finger at the scroll in Elena's hands.

"I think, well, holy cow, it's perfectly preserved! I put this parchment to the rest of the findings and go quietly to my tent. I wanted to sleep like crazy because before that I had chatted with my girlfriend on Skype all night," he remarked busily. But the details of his personal life did not seem to interest anyone.

"Khem, in general, I am going to bed, and then, who do you think I'm dreaming about?" Nick looked at the audience with a question.

"So who?" Daniel asked idly, so as cut this whole story to the chase.

"Ta-dah! David!" A young man triumphantly pointed at his cousin, "So I am thinking, that's all is bullshit or what?! It's not that we had such a close relationship with him, we haven't seen each other for six years and at best said hello to each other through our mothers, who like to chatterbox on the phone."

Daniel nodded approvingly in reply, his mother really could spend hours chatting with uncle Jack's wife, so he knew exactly what Nick was talking about.

"Me?!" David looked at Nick in bewilderment.

"That's right, you. For four days in a row, you came to me in a dream and kept saying, 'Give me the scroll, give me the scroll.' It was really creepy, man," Nick shook his head and looked at his cousin as if he really did that.

"Oh, I didn't know that you were capable of such a thing, little brother... Auch," Daniel smirked and immediately was kicked under the table by David.

"One more comment and you will fly out of here through the door," David muttered in response to a remark from his older brother. Then he turned to Nick, "And so you decided to give me a piece of an ancient parchment, which is hell knows how many thousands of years old?!"

"Hah, if only!" Nick exclaimed, "But this did not end there. We had to take this scroll to the British Museum for research, but my parents had to stay in Nigeria on business. I could no longer endure this torment, and ran away to here with the scroll," the young man explained and put another portion of food in his mouth.

"So you want to say that because of some strange dreams, you stole an ancient artifact and brought it in a regular backpack in one heap with your headphones, Playboy number and other junk?" Daniel asked with genuine surprise.

"How did you get through the customs, I don't understand?!" David was no less shocked.

Nick stopped fiddling with the food on his plate and looked at the brothers as if they had said something really stupid. Common, well, seriously, how did they come up with such a question?

The young man grinned and added with insidiousness, "Do you think you are the only ones who use the diplomatic corridor for personal gain? I also have a passport with privileges, like everyone else in our family, so all questions have to be directed to the customs, not to me."

Nick took a sip of tea and looked at everyone with a serious expression, "But, to pull all jokes aside, I don't know what the hell is that, but the whole last week in my dream some beautiful woman came to me and asked me to bring this scroll to you.

So I fulfilled the request of this beauty, and I hope that I can now sleep soundly. And then I was already afraid that I would inadvertently call my girlfriend by a stranger's name," the young man sighed.

"Hah, maybe you picked up some kind of curse and now the ancient Egyptian lady is bothering you?" Daniel said acrimoniously.

"Nope, she wasn't ancient, man, she was a modern girl. And quite a nice looking one, I tell you. She even has a name! God, let LinLin not hear my words now," Nick put his palms together and prayed that his girlfriend was not around now, otherwise he would have been dead like Egyptian mummies, for this one comment.

"And what is her name, of this girl?" David asked, from the cousin's words an unpleasant tension appeared in his chest.

Nick put the last piece of pancake in his mouth, leaned back in his chair, and, chewing, replied,

"Amelia."

There was silence at the table. Everyone looked at the young man, eyes wide, while he slowly finished his breakfast.

Corey and Daniel looked at each other, and the man nodded, as a sign that they understood each other's thoughts.

"So, kids, how about playing with me in the yard? I have something interesting for you!" The woman clapped her hands and turned to Ashley and Sean.

"But, mom, I wanted to hear more about the ancient lady from the dream!" the girl was indignant.

"Uncle Nick will tell you this story again later, and now let's get up quickly and follow me! We need to spend the energy that you just stocked up with!" Encouraging the children, Corey took them with her to play in the yard so that they would not listen to the conversations of adults. The less they knew, the safer it was for them.

Everyone waited until the children left the room. Armand was the first to speak.

"So, you are saying that the girl in your dream was called Amelia?" he asked.

"Exactly," Nick confirmed his words.

"Ah, what did she look like?" Elena's question sounded in a slightly uncertain voice.

"Hmm, well, her hair was about the same shade as yours, and her eyes too...," the young man scratched his chin and looked more closely at the woman, "You know, I would even say that you are very similar to her."

"This is my mother," Elena answered quietly. Each mention of Amelia caused a choked feeling of sadness in the girl's chest. She still did not know much about her, and how to find out anything about her, she also did not know.

"Cough, cough, well, what do you know!" Nick even choked on tea, which at that moment he was careless to start drinking, "Listen, this, of course, is really crazy, but now I understand why you are such a hot little thing," the young man winked.

Armand looked at the young man in disbelief, something in this Nick guy seemed to him a bit odd, like there was something that could not make him fit the whole picture, but what exactly that something was - he could not understand.

"You don't look particularly surprised. It's almost like such unusual things are normal for you?" he asked Nick.

The young man looked at Armand, his usual gaiety gave way to a little annoyance, which he tried to hide. He put his hand on the back of the chair and tilted his head to the side, a malicious smile was clearly visible on his lips,

"Mr. Taubert may not be aware of this, but since my early childhood I have been lugging around with my parents to different places, I have visited so many archaeological sites and seen so many strange things and heard so many terrible stories that this kind of coincidence does not surprise me. I have developed my own belief system, and if I see that such dreams haunt me, I prefer to listen and do as requested. Out of harm's way."

A slight tension hung in the air. And why did everyone at that moment think that these two somehow dislike each other?

Elena looked again at the scroll in her hands. The letters on the surface of the parchment began to play with one another and began to take on a sharper outline, gradually becoming words.

"If you want to return the past, give up on the future. If you want to change the future, say goodbye to the present," the girl read out.

Everyone stared at her blankly, Nick was the first to react.

"Come on?! Do you know Sumerian?!" the young man exclaimed, his eyes were filled with shock and admiration.

"Su-Sumerian?" Elena asked. What kind of Sumerian was it when she distinctly saw the Latin alphabet in the text? The girl looked at the scroll and froze, before her eyes, there were lines of sticks and triangles - the most classic ancient cuneiform.

"Wh-what? H-how i-is this possible?" Elena did not believe her eyes. It is not that she never studied Sumerian, she never even encountered ancient languages, so much the more the ones that have been extinct many thousands of years ago!

"You are saying that it's Sumerian? But didn't they write on clay tablets at that time?" David asked Nick, the scroll in front of their eyes was clearly from parchment.

"This is the whole trick, brother!" Nick slapped David on the shoulder, encouraging his cousin's horizons, "My parents and I were surprised too! Sumerian civilization is considered the very first on Earth and existed during more than three thousand years BC. The same scroll dates from the first millennium AD, but by that time the Sumerian language had not existed for a long time," Nick explained.

"So how did you learn it?" the young man turned to Elena, "There are not many specialists in the world who know this language."

Elena looked at David in bewilderment, not knowing how to answer this question. She herself would like to know how she was able to read this ancient text.

"Elena," Armand's voice suddenly sounded.

The man looked at her, then at Nick, then again at her. Elena understood this as a sign of whether he could continue the conversation with an outsider. Although Nick was not aware of many of their personal affairs, for some reason, the girl thought that she could trust him.

"Yes, go on," she nodded to Armand.

"Epic of Gilgamesh," the man began his story, "The Epic of Gilgamesh is considered one of the most ancient works of art, based on several Sumerian legends. According to one legend, King Gilgamesh sought immortality and found the only person who found it.

This man was King Ziusudra, the last of the great kings of antiquity who ruled before the Great Flood, and the only one who survived after it. The gods awarded him immortality and his descendants with special powers."

Armand looked around at everyone at the table.

"Time passed, and epochs replaced one another, centuries flowed into millennia. Generations succeeded each other, gradually forgetting their origins," he paused and looked at Elena,

"With the exception of one single family, whose descendants have preserved the memory of centuries and the purpose of the foundations of the universe. Their task was to observe the passage of time as a sign of payment for immortality once granted to their ancestor."

Elena swallowed a lump, stepping up to her throat. The girl began to understand what Armand was hinting at.

"The name of this family is Teser," said the man, and the girl felt her heart pounding furiously in her chest when she heard this word.

Armand closed his eyes and took a deep breath. He understood what that woman had in mind when she said that he would feel the right moment to tell about it.

"Your mom's full name is Amelia Lucia Teser. From the Latin "TEmpus ut SERvaretum" - the guardian of time."