Chapter 42: Day 41

Day 41,

Morning thought: One of the takeaways from my encounter with the nature sprite at Siren Overlook the time before last was that if it really wanted to hurt me, it could and there’s not much, if anything, I could do to stop it.  I’m not sure if that’s terrifying because of the capacity, or comforting because it obviously doesn’t want to.

 

There were several requests piled up when I got to the library today.  Notably, one wasn’t a request for a book or information but a notice from one of the Village’s crystal collectors about meeting to discuss the lighting replacement.

After some asking around for directions while running my other errands, I found the building the collectors work out of.  It was a smaller building than I would have expected for a stockpile of light sources for the entire Village but its windows were visibly lit even during the daytime.  When I entered, a compact, muscular woman was in the middle of assisting another villager in picking out a replacement for the lights in his home that had nearly faded out.  The woman whom I took to be one of the collectors called out that she’d be with me in a few moments and I took the time to take in my surroundings.  Inside were a multitude of boxes and barrels of crystals, sorted by color and size, and all glowing except for one corner that appeared to be reserved for those that had gone dun.  These crystals that I was already starting to take for granted, despite seeming so wondrous when I first arrived, aren’t normally painful to stare at, at least for brief periods, but with so many of them packed together like this, some of the containers were rather intense.  Still not painful per say, but I imagine they’d be a strain to look at for long at night with your eyes otherwise adjusted to the dark.  As for the dun crystals, I’m not sure if I’d written down the observation before or not but they all appear to turn the same smoky, cloudily transparent grey as they lose their light.  If there’s a way to tell what color they used to be, it’s beyond my skill to discern.

After finishing up with her other customer, the collector introduced herself as Daianna.  She recognized me as being the Archivist (whether from my pendant or seeing me around the Village, I’m not sure) and said that Martin had already talked to her and her coworkers about my request.  She went to a ledger on the counter that ran half the length of the room and started flipping through it, making a joke as she did about me not being the only one in the Village who can write things down.  After a moment she found what she was looking for and said that it looked like if I hadn’t said anything they probably would have been on schedule to come by in a week or two to run the replacement on the archive lighting anyway.  But as it was, there was no objection to bumping that schedule up.

As for my request for me and my apprentice to accompany them on their next trip to the cavern that the crystals are sourced from, there had been some discussion, but they’d agreed to let us come along so long as we were willing to help carry.  I said that I was and that I suspected my apprentice would probably try to outdo me.  And so an agreement was made and dates were set, first for them to come by the library and replace what they could from what they already had stockpiled (easier to do that while there’s still existing light to work with), and then for Cass and myself to accompany two of the collectors to the crystal cavern on the northern half of the island.  As I was leaving Daianna promised not to load me up with enough to break me on the trip and punctuated the joke with a pat on the back strong enough to make me stumble.  I suppose being ripped is to be expected from someone that hauls rocks around for a living.

Lin was at the library when I got back, waiting to return the book she’d borrowed several weeks ago and relay the relevant information about the baby she’d delivered two days ago so I could properly add it to the Village records.  I noticed with some… surprise isn’t the right word… “intrigued noting of serendipity” perhaps?...  some cousin emotion to that… that the mother was the woman I’d helped look up family records for picking a name on my first day in the archive.  Given the size of the Village, I suppose it’s not really all that much of a coincidence though.

One coincidence that did stick out to me was what Lin had mentioned the other day about it being normal for births to shortly follow funerals, and I asked her about that.  This was apparently just one of those things most people in the Village took for granted as a fact of life.  It doesn’t seem to be a hard and fast rule though, more of a general trend.  Some people call it a balancing out of spirits or some such, but most don’t think about it enough to get even that theological about it.  Lin herself admitted that it seems strange that a body getting taken to the Catacombs would somehow trigger a birth to come sooner and was personally in the camp that it’s the other way around with imminent births pushing the soon to die over the brink, even if that is at odds nearly all the other villagers linking the births specifically to the return to the Catacombs and not the deaths.  A part of me reflexively wanted to call it all superstition and coincidence, yet, I’d seen the shades myself and was being haunted by a nature sprite, so maybe there was something to it.

After that morbidly fascinating bit of conversation we made some more small talk as she found another book to check out and I inquired how she was doing.  She claimed to be doing well and expected things to be fairly slow for her for a while.

Not much else of note today.  I’ll need to talk to Cass and James about the trip to the crystal cavern when I see them tomorrow.

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