Chapter 218: Day 217

Day 217,

Last night’s nightmare was not as bad as the previous.  Merely severely uncomfortable and nerve-wrackingly frustrating rather than agonizingly painful and mind-breakingly terrifying.  The body of my dream self (I swear one day that won’t sound ridiculous to me) was still in bad shape and the usual compulsion toward movement was still present, but there was no malevolent other to be felt and the embrace of the artifact blanket persisted through the whole night.  I was able to pace myself enough that my fractured and malunioned frame never reached much worse than a dull, fully-body ache.  There was the constant sense of wanting to go faster (tied to the urge to movement I suppose), hence the frustration, but I managed to at least sort of balance that with not pushing myself to the point of injury again.

Strangely, for some reason I recall making a conscious (if that word even applies there) decision to actively try to go deeper.  I think I might have been following the logic of “if that place won’t let me go up, then at least I might find answers going down.”  Reasonable enough at first, but upon waking the possibility of that being what that place, or some thing that inhabits it wants and is trying to drive me toward a grisly fate I’d otherwise avoid seems apparent.

Increasingly I find myself thinking of these wanderings of the Catacomb Depths not merely as a dream but as an actual place that I am sending a part of myself to.  I would have scoffed at the notion at one time, and still find a rational part of my mind objecting to the idea, but - as I so often seem to tell myself - with everything else I’ve experienced and heard of, is it really that unbelievable?  And besides, if it is a real place (for some certain value of “real”) then that means it has rules, however esoteric or malleable.  And if there are rules they can be learned and used to my advantage.

Hopefully.

But I’ve gone on too long now.  I’m going to need to hurry to get ready and meet James and family if I want to ride with them into town this morning.  I’ll also need to remember to remind Maiko that I won’t be back this evening.  She’s probably figured that out already, but it seems polite to actually say it.

 

Exciting news: The boat is ready.

I had figured I’d be writing about the ride into town, Cass asking how I was doing, reassuring her I was much better this time, talking to James about the boat trip, him telling Cass to stop lording it over her siblings, looking forward to actually being useful in unloading at the market again, and starting on another round of detailed examination of the cathedral chant transcriptions, but BOAT.

It was a bit past noon, Cass and I had just finished our break for lunch and gotten back into the aforementioned transcription examinations when one of the fishermen I’d talked to the other week came in to give us the good news.  I’ll admit, I wound up embarrassing myself a little bit by not recognizing him right away and asking what I could help him find in the archive like any other visitor.  He laughed it off and said that he’d already found it (me).

When he offered to take us to show their handiwork, Cass volunteered to go track down Lin and Vernon so they could see it too since they both had an interest in joining in on the expedition.  Thus, she went running off one way while I locked up the archive and followed my guide down to the docks.

Along the way he apologized that it took so long, explaining that they’d realized shortly after talking to me last time that they were short on materials for plugging leaks and had to wait until the next market day (a week ago) to obtain it.  After that, they’d actually finished two days ago, but I’d already left for the evening by that time and then yesterday we had the mists.  I accepted the apology although I assured him that the minor delay was no big deal.  Like I’d said before, this trip might be for my health, but it’s not like I’m dying without it.

Even if I was winded by the time we reached the pier where they had the boat tied.

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

There was a small crowd of fishers when we got there.  The repairs had been a group effort and everyone was eager to see their work pay off.  To my surprise, Marva was there too.  She’d not been in the original group I’d talked to, but word gets around and she wasn’t going to pass up the chance to help out her little sister-in-law.

By the time said little sister-in law arrived with Lin and Vernon in tow I still hadn’t actually gotten in the boat.  Too much time spent thanking everyone and excitedly gushing over it from the side of the dock.  

It seems Marva’s involvement was a surprise to Cass as well, but not an unwelcome one.  Marva’s always treated her as a little more mature than Cass’s blood-siblings tend to and never really engaged in filial teasing.  I daresay Cass gets along better with her than any of her actual sisters.

But, back to the boat! Lin and I were the first ones on as the two that would be officially and necessarily going on the expedition.  Cass came next, indignantly declining offers to be lowered down (it was at low tide, so there was a bit of a drop) in favor of climbing down herself.  Unfortunately, after that, it became clear that Vernon wasn’t going to fit and still leave room for supplies.  We still got him in for this initial test run though.  It was cramped and hard to maneuver with all of us in there, but we had fun with it, and if nothing else it was a stress test for buoyancy and stability as we rowed (or is it paddled?) out past the end of the docks and out onto the (relatively) open water for a short bit before turning around and coming back.

After tying up the boat and another round of excitedly thanking everyone for their hard work, the four of us headed back to the archive to further plan.

The overall result of said planning session  is as follows:

• Vernon will not be coming with us.  As much as we’d all like to have him along, we just couldn’t come up with a good explanation about how we’d accommodate him without bringing up Maiko and her boat.
• We’ll spend the next few days getting together any last-minute supplies we haven’t already stockpiled for the trip.  We’ve all been putting aside a little bit already and we’re still planning on foraging as we go to supplement our supplies so we should be mostly good to go in short order.
• Tomorrow Lin will be taking Cass and I out on the water for more practice with the boat.  We’re not going to have her do all the paddling (rowing?) afterall.
• Tomorrow evening I’ll fill in Maiko
• The day after that, I’ll make that long-procrastinated outskirts trip to visit Tristan and get his account of his meeting with Iole.  Going to skip the visit to the glassmaker for now.
• The day after that, Cass and I will head into the Village, meet Lin down at the docks, take the boat and head out.  Vernon will try to be there to see us off at least.
• Once we have the boat, we’ll stop at Maiko’s cove to meet up with her, transfer Cass and some of the supplies to her boat, and then head out for real.
• We’re trusting in Maiko for the actual route.  Last we talked it over with her, she predicted four or five days to get to the island with the healing spring, depending on our pace, stopping on an island each night.
• We’ll stay on that island with the spring for a couple of days and then move on to Iole’s island.  Maiko estimates about a day or two for that.  The island with the spring is actually the further of the two, but my arguments for seeing Iole first were shot down in favor of the others wanting me back in good health.  Even Maiko had said as much back when she, Lin, and I talked about it last at the house.
• We’ll stay on Iole’s island until the next mist night at least.  We’ll probably be close to one by the time we get there and surely she won’t deny us shelter (another case for going to her island second).  Worst case scenario though, we spend the night on the boats.
• Once we’re done on Iole’s island (however long that ends up being), we’ll head back to this main island, stop briefly at the cove to switch Cass back over to our boat, and head back to the Village.  Fond as I am of the idea of us all meeting back at the house afterward to celebrate, I didn’t voice that suggestion.  I imagine Lin’s and Cass’s families will be wanting to be with them.

After that planning session, Lin and Vernon went home and I joined Cass at Norman and Marva’s for dinner.  As one might expect, there was a fair bit of congratulating and well-wishing.  And filling James in on our preparations and itinerary (leaving out the parts about Maiko and Iole) to assure him I wasn’t taking his daughter out to drown at sea or shipwreck and starve.  Not that there was much concern of that happening, but still.

And now I’m back in the archive staying up too late once again, tired as I am.  Excitement balancing out the drowsiness I suppose.  Also, I saw the floating island passing by on my way back to the library after dinner, so that was neat.  I’d lost track of that thing’s schedule and hadn’t seen it in a while, having stayed indoors all rainy season.  It’s a sight, all silhouetted by the stars like that.

One more thing though before I head to bed.  Before I started writing, I got to thinking about Maiko and yesterday’s conversation and in a moment of curiosity and nostalgia I pulled the first volume of my journal and took a look back at what I wrote the first time she told me about her mother.  The part that caught my eye though and is bugging me now was a bit after that exchange.  I offered to give her one of the crystals that I’d been using to light the house and said that I didn’t mind her having it because I could use the cracked one from the trip to the cavern as a replacement, but somehow she ended up with the cracked one herself.  How did that discrepancy happen?  Flipping through the journal, I never found anywhere that I described actually giving her either crystal, just that the next time the crystal I gave her is mentioned is when she was showing me the contents of her pouch during our little heart to heart on the edge of Priscilla’s island.

I trust the accuracy of what I wrote down.  I have to, for my own sanity.  It’s the parts that I don’t write down that find myself questioning my memory.  Because I don’t really remember either way in this case.  Maybe I offered her the whole one and she took the cracked one anyway?  Maybe she switched them later for some reason?

This is going to bother me until I ask her about it, isn’t it?

Or until I find something else to distract me and I forget about this too.

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