Chapter 27: Day 27

Day 27,

Pat and Vernon stopped by to check on me today, albeit not at the same time.  Both of them had actually stopped by yesterday to see how I was doing after my second mist night.  They’d initially been concerned when I wasn’t at the library, but enough people had seen me on my way in yesterday morning that fears that I’d been taken by the shades were soon allayed.

But back to chronological order.  Pat showed up first this morning, somewhat surprised to see me already at the library since it was slightly earlier than I usually get in from my house at the outskirts.  I told him I was doing well.  That I’d stayed at home during the mist day, saw one of the giant figures he’d mentioned, and was otherwise safe and sound that night save for the nature sprite’s pranks.  I filled him in on my trip to Siren overlook yesterday and thanked him for the suggestion as post-nightmare relief.

He seemed genuinely relieved that I was alright and apologized once again for his negligence to warn me in advance with the first mist night.  I told him not to worry about it further.

I started to ask the elder about Maiko – what she is, does he know of others like her, etc.  – but for some reason stopped myself and changed my question to asking him for his story about the edge of the world that he previously said would have to wait for another time.  This time he obliged.

When Pat was young and some people still remembered his full name he was close friends with an outsider.  There were several in the Village at the time, but this one was particularly keen on exploring the Village and the surrounding islands.  This was the same friend that brought Pat along to explore the old castle.  They went on a lot of “expeditions” – as the outsider friend called it – like that.  It’s a shame none of them were the sort to write things down.  Over time, Pat joined his friend less and less, growing older and starting a family of his own while the friend’s wanderlust and drive for exploration always took precedence over any such relationships.  

One day, decades after they first met and having not been seen for months, the friend showed up at Pat’s door claiming to have seen all there was to see of these islands and pleading with Pat to join in on one last big adventure.  Pat was hesitant at first, having a wife and child to think of those days (now both long gone to the Catacombs) but eventually gave in.  Together, along with a number of other friends and interested villagers, they built a great boat, large enough to hold supplies of food and fresh water to sustain its crew for weeks, or even months with careful rationing.  The construction effort itself took longer than the eventual first voyage.

After a week of travel straight south (or as straight as they could manage with none of them having made a voyage of this scale before) they stopped encountering islands and the sea became too deep for them to properly measure or anchor.  Over the next several days they saw less and less sea life until eventually the ocean appeared to be barren.  And then, strangely, the sea itself became less blue.  I’m having trouble picturing that last part myself but it’s the description Pat kept insisting on.  And as the sea lost its color it began to grow shallow again as well.  Two weeks out and it was shallow enough that they could see an empty white sandy floor beneath the clear waters.  Two days later they could easily dive down to the bottom and touch it.  

Just shy of the three week mark the great boat ran aground.  While the rest of the crew worked to get the vessel unstuck Pat and his outsider friend took a smaller rowboat and pushed ahead.  Within an hour they were on foot wading through ankle-deep water.  The bottom here was now solid white stone (or something like it) rather than sand.  Half an hour from that and they were on dry land.  A perfectly flat, perfectly white land as far as the eye could see in any direction.  Even looking back behind them, the placid clear sea was only discernible by the way the sun glinted differently off its liquid surface and Cloud Tower had been reduced to a barely perceptible hairline fracture in the horizon.  And on the landward horizon the sky itself seemed to desaturate to a merely bluer shade of white.

Thoroughly unnerved by this alien landscape, Pat urged, and eventually practically dragged, his friend to turn around and return to the boat.  The outsider however seemed more fascinated, enraptured even, by this apparent edge of the world.  But eventually return to the boat the two of them did.  By that time the craft had been cleanly pushed back to deeper water, and as soon as they rejoined, Pat gave the order to return home.  Pat and not the outsider captain and expedition leader who was still in a vague daze staring out into the empty.

They were low on supplies by the time they reached the outermost islands and getting more food and freshwater I’m told was an adventure in and of itself, what with some of those outer islands being home to more dangerous, or simply strange, flora and fauna.  But at all times they had the unmissable landmark of Cloud Tower to guide them back, and not quite two months after setting out they returned to the Village for the most part no worse for the wear beyond homesickness and in one crewmember’s case literal sickness from eating an unfamiliar fruit on an unfamiliar island, but even that soon passed.

Of course, three more voyages were made, one in each of the cardinal directions.  The journeys to the west and east went much the same as the first.  But to the north…  To the north they found the decayed city.

Again after about a week, maybe slightly sooner this time they passed the last island, but three days later they spotted land, not a white blankness but a dark blur peeking up over the horizon, stretching its width.  Another three days and they reached that new land.

That darkness seen from afar was a vast crowd of buildings, ranging in height from several stories to several dozen.  They were cold, grey things of stone and metal and glass, grown brown from rust and green from overgrowth.  Many were collapsed, had their sides sloughed away, or simply toppled over to rest on the shoulders of their neighbors.  Closer to the water some slipped into the sea, further crowding the crumbling docks already choked with holey metal wrecks.

It was at one of these docks that the increasingly wary crew pulled in their boat, although when they did, none, save the outsider, wanted to disembark.  While most by now had gone ashore at the eastern and western empties, none of them, save perhaps the outsider, had seen anything like this.  And while in those white spaces you could plainly see there was nothing, here there was plenty of room for something to hide.  And while frighteningly alien in its own right, near perfect blank space just simply lacks the sense of ominous foreboding possessed by a place where people clearly once were but now aren’t.

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But still, they pushed through their fear and pressed on, resolved to at least scout the surrounding area.  Several days of searching revealed no signs of current habitation by people or animals, not even bodies, bones, or insects.  What they did find were a great many statues and – to quote Pat – “constructs”.  I couldn’t get a clear description out of Pat about any of these other than that the constructs were “inactive” and both they and the statues struck him and the other villagers as “warped and perverted.”  He was about as unwilling to speak further of them as he was of the Catacomb Depths.  Still, the entire crew, outsider included, complained of a constant sense of being watched the entire time they were there.

Of course, the outsider wanted to keep pushing north.  However, going on foot through the rotting labyrinth of a city would surely take longer than rowing a boat through placid waters and their supplies likely wouldn’t last long enough for them to all make the trip there and back.

So a plan was devised.  They would return to the nearest outlying island to set up an outpost.  That outpost would be used to supply a basecamp at the edge of the city that the boat would ferry provisions to.  Meanwhile, two of the crewmembers would take one of the smaller rowboats and make their own way back to the Village to tell their friends and families what they found and that the rest of the crew would be away for longer than expected.

A few hiccups aside, the plan worked, albeit slowly, and the outsider grew more impatient to keep pushing forward with each passing day.  It was a growing need that worried Pat to see in his old friend.

Eventually, after having spent time on smaller forays into the surroundings nearest to the base camp, Pat, the outsider, and one other villager left the rest of the crew behind to head north.

It was an eerie trek, and a dangerous one.  Floors threatened to give way beneath them, higher levels were wont to collapse through lower ones, sharp glass and rusted metal bars hid beneath the overgrowth, and they were often forced to climb over uneven footing that had obviously once been at a different orientation.  And yet, similarities to that initial southern voyage persisted here too, marking their progress.  The vines and moss became grey and brittle, then white, then absent.  The sharper edges of rubble became smoothed down.  The buildings became shorter.  And most unnervingly of all, structures, statues, and constructs alike appeared to have melted into one another.  Eventually the other villager refused to go any further and ultimately went back on his own.  He didn’t make it back, nor did Pat ever run into him (or his remains) on his return trip.

By the time Pat and the outsider reached the northern empty, the city behind them was less a city and more a series of low white hills made from the same material as the endless flat before them.  

Here, Pat hoped that his old friend would at last be satisfied, their “last big adventure” finally concluded.  But they had found an artifact along the way in that city (for the city had them to, as do the outer islands on occasion).  This artifact appeared to allow the outsider to go without food and water.  The perfect lure to convince one obsessed with seeing everything to try and cross the edge of the world.

He begged and pleaded, but the last Pat ever saw of his companion was a tiny black silhouette vanishing over a white horizon.

With the provisions saved by the artifact, Pat was able to make it back to the base camp alone.

After returning home, the great boat made one final voyage.  It was laden with any items plundered from the decay city ruins or bits of white collected from the empty, taken out past the outer island by a skeleton crew who set it adrift at sea and returned in a smaller vessel.

It was while I sat in stunned silence trying to comprehend this tale I’d just been told that Vernon dropped in to take me shoe shopping as promised.

Pat greeted this new arrival with a return to his usual joviality, made a joke about the two of us spending the day together that I’m not entirely sure how to process, and made his leave before I could ask any more questions.

And by now it’s getting too late and I’m too tired to detail the rest of the day, especially since tomorrow’s market day again and thus the first day of Cass helping out at the library.  So I’ll try to quickly summarize:

• Vernon had already heard about my incident yesterday from the town guards whom he keeps a professional as well as social relationship with.
• Old Theo is apparently one of the guardsmen.
• I had a couple of requests to take care of that had piled up, so Vernon accompanied me on those before we went to the cobbler.
• Everyone we ran into while out and about town seemed to know and like Vernon.
• At one point I thought he might be flirting with me, but he seems to talk to near everyone like that and most seem to treat it as a sort of poetically inclined, flowery talking charm.
• I can’t properly describe how simultaneously weird and luxurious socks and shoes (well, boots) feel after weeks of either barefoot or sandals.
• I think the old me was more prone to shoes than boots, but boots seem the more practical choice if I’m going to be hiking out into the wilderness after natural wonders and strange phenomena.  
• Yes, I’m well aware of the parallels between what I’m starting to get into and the outsider from Pat’s story.

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