The Last Riddle

The sphinx had been watching us for three thousand years. Now it watched me crack open an orange, juice spattering onto the limestone at its feet. Cairo sunrise bled across the horizon, the same burnt orange as the fruit in my hands.

"You're leaving, aren't you?" Etienne's voice carried from behind me. He always knew before I spoke. We'd been excavating this site for six months, sleeping in the same tent, eating the same dust, breathing the same impossible history. And now, the dig was ending, and so were we.

I wiped my sticky palm on my trousers. "My flight's at noon."

He approached slowly, the way he approached artifacts — with reverence, with hesitation. "The locals say this sphinx asks a question of anyone who loves. Answer wrong, and you lose them forever."

The myth was nonsense. Etienne knew it. I knew it. But his voice caught anyway.

"What's the question?" I asked.

He took my hand, his palm warm against mine, orange juice still sticky on my fingers. "What would you sacrifice?"

The ancient stone stared silently. Beyond it, the real Sphinx guarded the horizon, a lion against a burning sky. In that moment, I understood the riddle wasn't about grand sacrifices or dramatic gestures. It was about the small choices — whether to board that plane, whether to say those three words, whether to believe something fragile could survive.

I dropped the orange peel into the sand. "Nothing," I said. "I wouldn't sacrifice anything. Because that's the point — you don't have to."

Etienne's grip tightened. In the distance, a prayer call began. The sphinx kept its secrets, but perhaps that was never its purpose. Some things aren't mysteries to be solved. They're choices to be made, again and again, until the choosing becomes the devotion itself.

I missed my flight.