Chapter 233: Day 232

Day 232,

My dream self is healed.  Mostly anyway.  There’s still a few lingering remnants - a finger not quite straight, a stiff shoulder, a lurching gait if I run too fast - but compared to the body horror of before it’s a joy that almost overcomes the inherent unease of that chthonic labyrinth.  

But only almost.  Free of the pain of the body I was able to more fully take in my surroundings.  I’d gone deeper during the last few nightmares and it was darker now.  The sourceless ambient light was dimmer and in some places would flicker, flamelike.  The architecture, where it exists, has changed in style.  Less gothic and more… organic?  Still clearly carved stone, but there’s not a hard corner to be found.  When the light flickers it’s easy to imagine the walls are moving, breathing even, but rest a hand on them and they’re as dead as any other stone.  

And it was all stone.  No more passageways burrowed through dirt and held open by wooden beams.  I’m in the bedrock of that place now.  

But look at me now, in my waking hours and spending my break time from writing all day to do more writing.

Speaking of which, best get back to the transcription ere Iole wants her book back for her evening “reading.”

 

And that’s the first day down of transcribing Iole’s book.  This is going to take a while.  Not only is it thicker than expected, but trying to accurately copy unfamiliar characters in an unfamiliar language takes a lot longer than making a copy of text in a language you’re fluent in (or pseudo-fluent in my case?).  Unfortunately “outsider auto translation” allowing me to read it turned out to be a bust.  Padding out the time it takes us to copy each page are the compounded factors of having two people transcribing at once plus error checking each page as we go.  On the one hand, it would be faster just to make a single copy while we’re here, but on the other hand I really want a backup just in case one of the boats gets tipped over or hit by a big wave or something on our way back.  Also, as awkward as it is for both of us to try to hunch over the book and write at the same time I think it helps when we swap copies to error check one another’s work instead of just going over our own.

At least I packed extra copying materials so we should have enough pages.  We’ll just wind up splitting our copies into two volumes each.  We’re skipping the illustrations for now, although we’ll be leaving blank spaces in our copies for where they should be.  Still need to figure out a good way to replicate them.

I really hope we don’t wind up worrying everyone back home in the Village by being gone so long.

 

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