Chapter 160: Day 159

Day 159,

I came across a curious potential connection between Devi and Iole today going through the old records.

It seems that after being a resident of the Village for about a decade Devi led a group of her fellow guards on an expedition into Cloud Tower.  I’m not sure if she made previous expeditions (I’ll need to go back and check at some point), but this one she didn’t come back from.  Nor did her companions.  An explanation for why she went in has proved frustratingly elusive.  It seems the villagers enjoy talking about Cloud Tower about as much as they do the Catacombs.

So, that’s tragic and makes unfortunate implications about my own projected longevity.  But the really interesting part comes in an entry dated a few weeks later.  At that point an unseasonably large and intense storm hit in the middle of a dry season.  Shortly following that storm, Iole was marked as missing, presumed dead.  About a month after that, there’s an entry stating the floating island that passes nearest to the Village was now appearing more frequently.  The archivist of the time never outright states that these events might be connected, but frankly it’s difficult not to imagine that Devi did something from within Cloud Tower that both caused a storm out of season and altered the speed of the floating islands’ routes.  Possibly the routes themselves.

Well, technically speaking I say “the floating islands’ routes” but there’s only record here of Pricisilla’s island going faster and my personal observations of its route seemed to align with what I could decipher of Priscilla’s notes.  For that matter, all of my personal observation of the floating islands has been just from the one and trying to extrapolate from there or assuming the others are the same.  The annoying part with this record though is that archivist didn’t list the before and after cycle times of the island circuits, which is what I had been using along with Priscilla’s calculations of circuit speed degradation rates to make my own calculation of how long ago Priscilla lived.  In other words, due to the speed change I no longer have a good way to estimate when Priscilla lived and made her observations.

A very rough timeline of what I do know:

• ???: Iole’s “ascended ones” make various structures on this island and others, such as the old castle and the cathedral ruins.
• ???: The “ascended ones” stop being around and their stuff falls into ruin.
• ???: Theo is born (might be before either of the others, assuming he was actually “born” at all)
• 200-500 years ago:
  • Pat is born.
  • A previous outsider leaves artifacts in a box in the cathedral ruins for some future explorer to find.
  • Pat joins his outsider friend on an expedition to find the edge of the world.
• Multiple intervening centuries:
  • Outsiders start becoming less common.
  • An outsider brings the woodworking machinery back from Cloud Tower (might actually go somewhere in the ??? period, but I don’t have a good way to get an answer on that now).
  • Priscilla arrives and does her thing with floating islands before disappearing.
• 70-80 years ago: Iole is born:
• 60-70 years ago: Devi arrives
• ~50 years ago: Devi enters Cloud Tower never to return, a freak storm maroons Iole, and floating islands speed up.
• ~40 years ago: Tristan finds Iole and she chooses to stay on her island alone.  (I still can’t believe no one’s been around to check on her since then.)
  • Presumably the old archivist arrives sometime around here, but I haven’t gotten that far in the records yet.
• ~1.5 years ago: The old archivist dies in his sleep in the archive.
• 159 day ago: I arrive.  (Or would Day 1 be 158 days ago?  It’s too late to be doing this much math.  I need to sleep.)

 

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