Chapter 116: Day 115

Day 115,

Gave the kids a tour of the archive today.  There really is something special about watching someone’s eyes light up and go wide as they see it for the first time.  Or even just the first time in a while in the case of the older kids.  Spent a little while explaining what I normally do when I’m not teaching them and then spent a longer while explaining how to find any book they might want in here.  I might have bored them a bit with the minutiae of the filing system before Cass elbowed me in the side.  What can I say?  That was my first real big project since I arrived in this place and something that might actually be a lasting (if minor) contribution to the Village.  I can be at least a little proud of it, right?

Had another couple kids getting homesick this morning.  Was part of the reason for the archive tour, to take their minds off it.  It got me thinking, and after the children left for the day I asked Cass how she was doing staying at Norman and Marva’s.  She must have connected the dots, because she gave me an “Are you serious right now?” sort of look and told me she wasn’t a toddler who was going to start crying because she hadn’t seen her mom and dad in a couple of days.  Said that I should know her better than that by now; afterall she’d been just fine on the floating island expedition.  I seem to recall some quiet homesickness towards the end of that trip, but I held my tongue.  Instead I apologized for that question coming out wrong and offending her, but added that the core inquiry still stands.  As my apprentice and valued assistant, it’s only natural that I ask after her wellbeing following a change in circumstance and routine.

She gave an eye-rolling sigh that made me fear the prospect of her teenage years and told me, yes, she’s fine.  It’s an improvement, even, from being cooped up in the farmhouse with the rest of her older siblings through the rainy season making the fields unworkable.

Good enough for me.

Oh, and I forgot to mention it yesterday, but yes, I did have the usual Catacomb Depths nightmares on the mist night.  More of the same; wandering aimlessly through the claustrophobically dark narrow tunnels and graves, the fear of never being able to find my way out having its edge taken off somewhat by the blanket I’d wrapped myself in before sleeping.  For a while there had seemed to be a progression of sorts, but now it seems to have stalled.  Enough of a clear progression and change that I’d been starting to wonder if I actually was going somewhere, or at least my mind was, in my mist night somnolence, but now I’m starting to question that.  I mean, there’s obviously something more to them than regular dreams considering their regularity, timing, shared nature, and uncanny clarity and lucidity.  But what exactly the nature of that “something more” is, I’m finding myself less sure of as time goes on rather than more.

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