Chapter 241: Day 240

Day 240,

Just spent the morning digging up Iole’s box with Cass and then reburrying it.  As I’d suspected, although the dimensions were different, it was the same sort of metal box that Priscilla had been preserving documents in.  Shiny brushed metal utterly untouched by rust.  Even the dirt seemed to fall right off with nary a smudge once we unearthed it.  

That said, as exciting as it was to find that suspicion confirmed and another link made between these ruins, the cathedral (same/similar metal lining the insides of the sarcophagi), and Cloud Tower (same/similar metal for the woodshop machines that came from there), we didn’t actually open the box.  We planned to, of course.  Deliberated over it for several minutes after we dug it up.  But when it came to it, we just couldn’t bring ourselves to go rooting through Iole’s personal belongings like that, even if she’d distanced herself from them.  Afterall, she did preserve them rather than discard them altogether.

Maybe we’ll come back five or ten years from now and open it once she’s passed returned to the Catacombs.

Going to be leaving in a little bit to go see what Lin and Maiko have been occupying themselves with on the other end of the island for the past few days.

 

Lin and Maiko were eager to show us what they’d found once we caught up with them.  Well, Maiko was eager.  Lin was… something similar, but less positive.  Anxious perhaps?

Once we found them they told us that with the walk taking half the day like it does, they figured that they’d just stay out there until Cass and I inevitably showed up and then give us a tour of the highlights over a couple hours.  I’m not sure how I feel about my course of action just being assumed like that, but once we got going I appreciated not having to do the investigating myself this time.  The whole area just south along the coast of the Overlook was even more overgrown than the “library,” but there were signs of former construction buried beneath.

Many signs once you knew what to look for and how.  Knee-high corners of mortared stone sticking out from between tree roots.  More scattered blocks beneath the undergrowth in a rough line going out from that corner and tracing what might have once been a building’s foundation.  A space of slightly denser growth and then the pattern repeated again.  A shard of glass dug up from the soil.  A thick branch high above that, constricted by a dark metal band that may have once been a window frame.  Noticeable lanes where the overgrowth was thinner and the trees younger.

Lin and Maiko didn’t say it until I did, but they’d come to the same conclusion a day ago that I found myself at now.

There was another Village here once.

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Once I got over my own shock, excitement and babbling over possibilities and implications and raised questions, the reason for Maiko and Lin’s differing reactions became clear.

In Maiko’s case, this was the most excited I’d ever seen her.  As she was guiding us along, pointing out the past few day’s observations she was actually grinning, smirking even at times with the anticipation of revealing a great surprise.  And as I put the pieces together she even joined me in a rapid back and forth of what all this could mean.

She took it as proof that there really had been other people living here once besides the Village we all knew.  Possibly her people.  She was finally, finally on the right track.  Now she just needed to figure out where they went from here.  

She really might not be alone.

It was the look on Lin’s and Cass’s faces behind her that made me trail off mid-sentence from talk of planning future return visits and further searching for former inhabitants or, more likely, their descendants.

None of us voiced it, but once I stopped and took a few seconds to think about it, it was obvious.  The unspoken question that cast a shadow over our walk back to Iole’s hut and the evening’s dinner.  The implication that Maiko seemed oblivious to in her renewed hope.

The Village has been around forever and seems to be eternal.  But there was once another Village, and now there isn’t.

Could the same thing, whatever it was, happen again, this time to ours?

 

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