Chapter 16: Day 16

Day 16,

I was woken up this morning by Cass knocking on my door.  Apparently on mist night she’d had the sudden sense that I was in danger but been unable to do anything about it.  Even more curiously, following that she found out that if she concentrated on me while wearing the bronze bracelet we’d found in the cathedral basement she’d get a rough sense of where I was and how to get to me.  She’d been wanting to come check on me since then, but this morning was the first time she could get away from her parents.  They were less than thrilled about their youngest child running off to go explore crumbling old buildings and according to her they dismissed the sense of my being in danger as childish imagination and not wanting to admit she was scared of mist night and the shades.  This latter part particularly seemed to have touched a nerve with her.

That all said she was relieved to hear I was okay and back to her usual smug self over being the first one to figure out what the bracelets do once I confirmed my locations at various times over the past couple of days.

At any rate, yesterday’s all-day rain had pushed the usual trip to the Village market back to today, so Cass had gotten permission (or at least “permission”) to run ahead and check on me and meet back up with her family when they came this way.  I thanked her again for her concern and then invited her to help herself to my kitchen while I got properly dressed.  To my pleasant surprise she had breakfast laid out for me when I returned a few minutes later (as much as my usual bread, jam, and water can be laid out anyway, but it’s the thought that counts).  I thanked her while also saying she didn’t need to do that, but she simply shrugged and said she’d already eaten.  I coaxed her into accepting some for herself and we made small talk over breakfast.  As she filled me in on her week I got the impression that she’s in that stage of childhood of wanting to be seen as cool and mature and trying to prove it by eagerly taking on every responsibility she can and then letting everyone know how well she’s handling it.

Before long we departed and waited at the road for whichever members of Cass’s family were making the market trip today.  It ended up being James driving again and two of Cass’s siblings I hadn’t met yet and whose names I’m embarrassed to say escape me at the moment, especially as I was once again offered a ride.  I thanked them for the offer and for sending Cass to check up on me.  I mentioned that I had in fact had a close encounter with some shades, but was fine now.

Once we got to the Village and everyone was unloading the wagon I pulled James aside and made my formal apology for my role in Cassandra running off last week and then taking her to the cathedral with me.  Hoping to smooth over any residual anger he might be harboring toward Cass for sneaking out, I went on a bit about how helpful and capable she was in helping me with my effort to properly document historic locations and natural phenomena that lacked full study in the archives.  And effort that I had partially made up then and there, but I guess I’m committed now.  I also confessed that I’d promised to take her with me on my next archival expedition (once I’d figured out where to), but if he or his wife were against it I’d be willing to break the news to Cass myself.

James took all this in and silently considered for long enough to make me uncomfortable.  Eventually he spoke, accepting the apology and saying that he didn’t have an issue with Cassandra following me on further expeditions so long as I promised to keep her away from anything dangerous and told him and his wife where and when we were going beforehand.  He went on to confide that he’d been getting the impression for some time that his youngest had been less than fully satisfied with farm work and he’d been considering making arrangements for at least a part time apprenticeship to some occupation or another in the Village.  Now seemed like as good a time as any to make an offer if I was interested.  I was caught off guard by this and said I’d need to think on it and get back to him about the particulars of such an arrangement, especially whether Cassandra herself would even be interested.

That conversation over with, I bid him good day and went on to the library.  I found Pat waiting for me.  It seems that Vernon had given the old man a talking to about not warning me properly about the shades and he’d come to apologize.  Rather more tersely than is my norm I asked him if there were any other potentially life threatening dangers that he’d forgotten to mention.  As I went about the business of opening up the archives for the day and checking if any requests had been left, the elder gave his reply.  He said that beyond wild animals (some outlying islands are worse about those than others), getting lost in the old castle or the wilderness or Cloud Tower’s interior (so there is an entrance afterall), or going so far out from the Village that there’s nothing to sustain life, no.  Nature sprites are mischievous but mostly harmless, the Wandering God isn’t hostile to humans unless they for some reason attack it unprovoked (allegedly and outsider tried this long ago and was turned into a tree), the giant figures I may see in the mists during the daytime have never been known to interact with anyone, and the automatons in Cloud Tower barely even seem to notice that humans exist.

Those last two were some casually-dropped revelations that, to put it lightly, I felt required more explanation.  Of the figures in the mist, he couldn’t say much.  Sometimes people see giant figures moving in the distance during mist days, but no one he knows of has ever gotten close enough to determine if they’re real or just some sort of illusion made by the mists.  Of the “automatons” of Cloud Tower, well, apparently this place has robots, or perhaps something more like golems.  Most of them don’t even resemble a humanoid shape, and they tend to ignore humans other than to go around them as they go about their inscrutable business; that is, when they move at all.  While they don’t appear to be dangerous, they’re alien enough that combined with the fact that no one has ever reached the top of the tower and returned but more than a few (always outsiders and people following them) have disappeared in the attempt, the villagers – Pat included – are cautious toward anything to do with the tower.

I pressed for more about the edge of the world, but Pat said that was a story that would take some time to tell and that it could wait for another time.  It takes weeks by boat to get that far out so I wasn’t likely to run into it by accident.

Before he left, he asked me if I’d had nightmares following mist night.  I admitted that I had.  He asked if they were of being stuck in a subterranean tomb.  Not liking where this was going, I confirmed that was the case.  He sighed and told me that it wasn’t uncommon for people to have visions of the Catacomb Depths when sleeping on a mist night, and that outsiders were particularly prone to it for whatever reason.  He reassured me that they are in fact just dreams, however vivid.  He went on to recommend that if I’m still feeling bothered by them, or anything else really, I should consider checking out Siren Overlook, a cliff not too far from the Village if I take the other road out of town than I usually do.  They say that the song that can be heard there relaxes the mind and helps the body wind down.  Seeing the concern flash across my face he hastily added that it’s nothing like the sirens in some outsider stories about songs driving men to crash boats or jump off cliffs.

With that, we acknowledged that we both still had things to do today and went our separate ways.  Or rather, he departed and I stayed at the library.

Not much else of note for the rest of the day.  I’m back in my house as I write this before bed.  I still need to come to a decision on that apprenticeship idea.  It feels weird to have an apprentice when I hardly know what I’m doing myself.  Oh wow, just had the mental image of Cass as future Archivist smugly basking in how she has the whole library memorized and knows more than everyone about everything.  Maybe it would suit her better than I initially thought.  Whether that’s a good thing’s another matter.

Still, this Siren Overlook sounds like it could be a nice, safe, but still interesting place for the next expedition.

You are reading story The Archivist’s Journal at novel35.com

You can find story with these keywords: The Archivist’s Journal, Read The Archivist’s Journal, The Archivist’s Journal novel, The Archivist’s Journal book, The Archivist’s Journal story, The Archivist’s Journal full, The Archivist’s Journal Latest Chapter