Chapter 217: Day 216

Day 216,

The mists are out this morning.  Hopefully tonight won’t be as bad as last time.  With any luck, that will just have been because of the funeral.  It makes me wonder though, would I have a similar nightmare if someone living were to be taken by the shades?

At least Cass won’t be there to see whatever my state is tomorrow morning.  Maiko will be, but somehow I’m less worried about traumatizing her.

 

Once Maiko and I had our fill of watching the mists for giants we started going over what she recalls of boat construction.  I have to say, there’s more fire involved than I expected.  Which is to say, I wasn’t expecting fire to be involved at all, but it made sense once she explained it as a way to hollow out the tree trunk.

All along I took more detailed notes of the process in my other notebook, so I’m not going to bother writing it all down here a second time.  As we talked through it though, Maiko started expressing doubts about the practicality of the project.  For starters, finding a suitable tree would require heading to the northern half of the island and I wasn’t really the woodsy type.  Stings a bit but I can’t argue there.  Then there’s the matter of both cutting it down if we can’t find one already fallen and transporting the log.  Maiko claims that her mother was even stronger than she is now and had better tools, proper metal ones that were lost with her when she disappeared.  We could try doing the shaping and burning there and then moving the finished boat to the north coast, but given that I’m arguably a sort of magnet for sprites and the Wandering God that might not be a great idea either.

Things to mull over and figure out at a later date I suppose.  It’s clear though that this isn’t going to be something I can do on my own.  I hate to admit it after my earlier “asking her to show me how and not build it for me,” but even if we were to pull in Lin, Vernon, and Cass, I suspect we’ll be relying on Maiko for much of the heavy lifting, figurative and literal.  If her stunt with the cart back when we were trying to get on the floating island was anything to go by, she's stronger than the rest of us put together.  Makes me wonder how she didn’t just break the door down back when we first met.  Maybe she was holding back?

I did ask more about Maiko’s mother and her tools.  She said that she never was sure where her mother got them, stolen from the Village or somewhere else.  But they had been living on a different island at the time they made her current boat.  They’d had another boat before then but it had been damaged badly enough in a storm that her mother decided to make a new one.  Or, that’s how she remembers it anyway.  This boat’s nearly as old as she is.

After that explanation and tangent we slipped into another one of those lulls that we’re prone to where it’s ambiguous if the conversation is over or not.

Several minutes later she added that she never had been able to figure out why they always kept coming back to this island though, given how much her mother warned her to stay away from the Village and its inhabitants.  They were staying here when her mother disappeared a few years back though, so that’s why Maiko had kept coming back.  She’d go to other islands every now and then to look for signs of others, but never too far, just in case her mother showed back up here again.

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

I didn’t know what to say to that.  I wanted to say something along the lines of being glad that she stuck around so I - and the others - got to meet her and be friends, but that just didn’t feel right.  Like I was taking her sorrow and making it about what was good for me.  So, sitting there in indecision I wound up saying nothing at all.

It was hours later as we were cleaning up dinner that she resumed the conversational thread without apparent prompting.  As she does.  Said that she felt foolish for waiting around so long for her mother to show back up when she obviously wasn’t going to.

This time I did speak up, if only to get out that I didn’t think she was being foolish and shouldn’t beat herself up over it.  Finding the words to elaborate on that took me somewhat longer.  First thing that I managed to come up with was that, lacking other information or clues to what happened to her or where she might have gone, regularly returning to the place she was last seen and other places she frequented were reasonable courses of action.  Just because a reunion was improbable, that didn’t make her a fool for holding onto hope of being reunited with a loved one.  And besides, if Maiko had never come back, then she wouldn’t have gotten to meet Lin.  Not part of the plan, but hard to say that’s a bad outcome.

Silence, followed by a simple “Thank you.”

I let her know she was welcome.  That I can’t do much, but if I can help friends when they’re hurting or being too hard on themselves, I try.

We didn’t say much else before mutually heading to bed for the night, but that’s normal for us.

And if I’ve stayed up overlong after that writing this entry, then it’s probably because I’m procrastinating on going to sleep and facing the Catacomb Depths.

Still, I need to do that sooner or later.  Better all in one night that I can repress and put out of mind for the next couple of weeks than dealing with the random flashes.

It probably won’t be as bad as last time.

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