Chapter 56: Day 55,

Day 55,

To my surprise, Maiko was still here this morning.  Catacomb nightmares weren’t as bad last night.  Is that blanket an artifact?  Don’t think I’ll be going in to the Village today.

 

Maiko’s left to go… wherever it is that she goes.  I told her to drop by any time and that she doesn’t have to wait for a mist night.  We’ll see if she takes me up on that offer.

Now, where’d I leave off?  Right, commiserating about both being outsiders in our own way.

After that exchange we continued to sit on the porch and watch the mists until the sun began to go down.  We actually saw another distant giant, although this one was different from the last one I’d seen in everything but scale and sluggish pace.  This one was serpentine in form and drifted through the air.  Dozens of long, thin appendages trailed down behind it, writhing as the giant twisted its way through the sky.  Or at least, I interpreted them as trailing ribbons.  To Maiko’s eyes they were spindly legs connecting the creature to the ground.  Hard to truly say one way or the other, obscured as it was.

I asked Maiko if she knew what the mist giants were or had ever seen one up close.  She did not and had not.  She asked the same of me.  I do not and have not.

After we went back inside before the shades started appearing I began preparing dinner.  After my musing the other day about wanting to host someone I acquired ingredients so that I could actually try cooking for once.  It… wasn’t great, but at least nothing lit on fire that wasn’t supposed to.  At least my guest didn’t appear to be very particular with her preferences.  “Food is food,” she said at one point.

Over dinner I asked why she came back if the first time was just out of necessity.  She said the house was better shelter than a hut or cave.  And I was considerably less threatening than she’d imagined.  Small, weak, and probably not actually able to hurt her even if I wanted.  What about me, she asked.  Did that not give me reason to fear her?

It did not.  I live alone out here and if she really wanted to do anything to me, she would have had plenty of chances by now.  As she said, it’s not likely I could stop her, so if she meant harm she would have done something already.  And if I was wrong?  If I was wrong it was too late now, so why fret?

The rest of the meal passed in silence.  In retrospect that perhaps wasn’t the best question for me to ask.

As I gathered up the cleared dishes I announced that I was going to start heating water for the bath if Maiko was interested.  As I said before, this struck her as a novelty she was willing to try.  Not bathing itself, but the idea of a tub full of heated water.

So, while she did that I finished with the dishes and made yesterday’s journal entry.  Once she emerged and I cut off my writing, I was relieved to see that she’d wrapped a towel around herself.  Given her habitual state of undress (and true, this was a tropical climate and I’d frequently seen villagers going about their day in nearly as little, but I still wasn’t really used to that either) I had feared she might forgo even that.  Once again I offered clothes and once again she declined.

When I asked how she liked the bath, she said it reminded her of a set of springs she’d found on one of the nearby islands.  Not as good, but still pleasant.  When I said that sounded like something I’d be interested in trying out myself sometime, she got withdrawn again, so I changed the topic to sleeping arrangements.  This time around she accepted the couch rather than huddling in the corner of my room waiting for me to fall asleep first, which I was grateful for on multiple fronts.  After setting out a pillow and blankets for her (I kept the nice one for myself this time though, wanting what comfort I could get after last time’s nightmares) I went to attend to my own ablutions.

Returning some minutes later, now wearing the chiton I’d designated as a sleeping garment ever since the funeral, I asked Maiko if there was anything else she wanted/needed or any other pre-bedtime habits.  She told me that normally she went to sleep almost as soon as it was dark out, so long as she had a safe and relatively comfortable place to do so.  Extending the day with crystals like this like I seemed to do regularly was new to her.  Sure, you could do the same with a fire to a degree, but you had to deal with smoke and finding anything dry enough during the rainy seasons is a challenge.

I said that made sense to me, pointed out where the cover for the nearest crystal stand was, and told her she could take one of the lights from the house with her if she wanted.  I had a spare in the form of the cracked and misshapen crystal I’d attempted to collect myself before Daianna had declared me incompetent and taken her tools back.  Sure, the light was uneven and the crack cast a shadow and the color didn’t quite match the rest in the house, but I figured having those flaws in place was worth letting Maiko have a light source of her own to take with her.

After that, I retired to bed myself and tried to get to sleep knowing the sort of dreams I’d likely have to deal with.

Surprisingly, while the visions of the Catacomb Depths came once again in all their horrid lucidity and I once again had the constant sensation of another presence down there with me, that other felt comforting rather than menacing.  Loving even.  I felt watched over rather than watched.  What’s more, the endless narrow tunnels finally came out into an open space, although it was as intimidating in its vastness as the tunnels were claustrophobic.  

I emerged from my tunnel onto the end of a great bridge.  Looking across I saw my path lead into the doorless entry to the gothic façade of a towering structure hewn from a cave wall.  No, not a wall, but a corner, or perhaps even a column, for off to my left rather than solid wall I could make out yet more bridges extending at angles near perpendicular to mine.  Looking back behind me I could now see that I had emerged from a structure similar to yet unique from the one across from me.  The sourceless ambient light was absent in this place except for what spilled from the tunnel mouths, leaving the center points of the bridges (for most of the opening were onto bridges) more suggestion than certainty for all but the brightest lights.  Looking up and down I saw no ceiling nor floor, only more of the crisscrossing web of bridges at all angles extending into the dark as far as my eyes could make out.  Seeing all of these tunnel mouths together, I was able to make out subtle differences in the hues of their light.  Those emerging from a given structure seemed to all be shades of a general color (for example, greens behind me and yellow-oranges before me) although they varied in brightness and intensity.

Around the time dawn’s light finally woke me, I had crossed the bridge and was navigating those crypt-lined tunnels with purpose, believing I could find a way up.

When I awoke I still had that all too familiar sense of dread – newfound purpose or not, it’s impossible not to feel insignificant before that display of the reach of the Depths – this time around it was a muted background noise that I could tune out if I tried hard enough.  Again, I suspect that blanket is responsible.

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That suspicion was partially reinforced when I left my room and found Maiko still sleeping, albeit fitfully and with her blankets long since thrown to the floor.  Quietly as I could I retrieved the good blanket and laid it over her.  She calmed almost immediately.  Trying not to wake her in the process, I set about preparing breakfast for the two of us and making the hasty journal entry from this morning.

She still had the blanket pulled around her shoulders when she walked into the kitchen in a post-waking haze.

I pulled out a seat for her and passed her a set plate before returning to my own seat.  I’m not sure if her delay in eating until I took a bite myself implied that she was more alert than she looked and still wary of me, or still drowsy enough to need prompting.  Either way, she seemed to perk up after a few bites and would go on to finish her breakfast before I did mine.  Meanwhile, as I ate I complained of and described some of the nightmares I’d had every mist night before going on to ask if she ever had the same.  I’m ashamed to admit to some blatant conversational manipulation here as I suspected the answer before even asking the question and was primarily seeking to confirm a theory.

Maiko, as had become the pattern of our dialogues, paused for long enough I was unsure she’d reply before stating that she gets them sometimes on mist nights.  Sometimes really bad, sometimes not so bad.  The one when she first met me was not so bad, and there wasn’t one last time, so she hoped it’d be like that again spending the night here again, but last night was another bad one.

I told her that the villagers told me that lots of people get those same nightmares, but that they’re worse and more frequent for outsiders.  And that from what I’ve gathered, that place we see is where the shades come from.  Or take people.  Or something like that.

My turn to pause for minutes.

I mentioned that if the nightmares bothered her enough Siren Overlook can help ease them, if she’s familiar with that place.  But if she’s still trying to avoid villagers, she should probably be careful going there, especially since it’s easy to fall asleep on accident.

Another pause.

She thanked me and said she’d keep that in mind.

Silence as we cleaned up the aftermath of breakfast.

She asked if I’d be going back to the Village today.  I said I hadn’t been planning on it.  I had chores to take care of here.  Cleaning, laundry, and the like.

I asked her plans for the day.

A sharper pause.  The start of a vocalization before returning to silence.

Hunting, she said.

I didn’t push and ask for what.

As she left I went out with her and waved her off, saying to come back any time.  As she stepped into the treeline, was that an aborted start at waving back, or just pushing a frond out of the way?

The rest of my day was spent on the aforementioned chores and then writing this journal entry that’s gone on long.

I’m almost a little surprised the nature sprite didn’t try anything after Maiko left.  It usually does something on mist nights, whether I’m here at the time or not, and I was here all day to m/\/\/\__________/

Okay, this thing can definitely read, at least sometimes does so over my shoulder, and has a twisted sense of comedic timing, because it just grabbed my shoulder as I was writing that.  If you’re still reading, I hope you got a good laugh out of that, because I’m now officially done for the night.

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