Chapter 7: Day 7

Day 7,

After last night’s encounter I was too tired to make a morning entry today, despite sleeping in longer than normal.  In hindsight that may have turned out for the best.

Between reaching the dirt side road and getting back on the main cobblestone way I heard a clatter of wagon wheels and a greeting from behind.  Looking over my shoulder I was met by the farmer and his children who had given me a ride on my first day in the very wagon that was now trundling up behind me.

I returned the greeting and was offered a ride into town.  I accepted and found a place amid the sacks and crates of fresh produce.  Despite last night’s inadequate sleep I was more lucid now than during my prior ride and was able to better carry on a conversation with my nearest neighbors, as well as get a closer look at the strange animal pulling the vehicle.  Of the latter, it was a shaggy beast, similar in shape and posture to a capybara yet with proportionally thicker limbs and scaled up to the size of an ox.

Of the former, I learned that the farmer’s name was James and that once a week or so some combination of him, his wife, and several of their kids would go into the Village for the market and a visit with the oldest of their twelve progeny.  Today his youngest, Cassandra, was riding alongside me, and it was she who pointed out how tired I looked.

With a mix of trepidation and embarrassment I recounted my encounter with the entity from last night, by this point already questioning if I had simply dreamt the whole thing.  Any hope that it hadn’t been real was quickly dashed first by Cassandra’s excited declaration that I’d met a “nature sprite” and pressing me for details, and again upon her realizing I didn’t know what she was talking about and subsequently launching into an explanation with the smug satisfaction that only a child showing off that they know more than an adult can have.

According to her, nature sprites make a habit of picking out one individual and playing pranks, usually frightening ones on them, all while making sure nobody else ever sees them.  Before she could get into too much more detail “Cass’s” siblings admonished her to “stop scaring the outsider” and their father (from whom they’d all obviously inherited the same honey blonde hair and penchant for overalls) reassured me that as much as sprites like mine like scaring people they’re mostly harmless and usually get bored and move on eventually.

Whatever topic our conversation moved on to after that soon got derailed as I got distracted by yet another one of this place’s commonplace wonders.  As we rode down the cobblestones coming up on the Village a shadow passed over us, too dark to be a mere cloud.  We all looked up to find a rock many times larger than my house lazily drifting through the air some thirty feet or more above the canopy of trees.  I say “rock” but “island” really did it better justice, for there were even trees and other flora peeking out over its edges and birds alighting on it.  Indeed, I’d seen mention of “free floating islands drifting on unseen currents” among the unusual phenomena in the archives, but at the time I’d assumed it meant floating on the surface of the ocean.

And for once I wasn’t alone in my awe.  It seems that despite being well known, seeing one of these islands this close was far enough from an everyday occurrence to get everyone else to stop and stare as it passed by.  Even Cassandra’s near-perpetual smug grin slipped into one of genuine delight for a moment.  Of course it came right back when she noticed my own jaw was hanging open.  Before she could get too far into her “haven’t you ever seen a floating island before?” lecture I (in an admitted moment of peevishness) asked her if she knows so much then what can she tell me about the old cathedral up the hill.

This gave her pause for a moment before admitting that she didn’t know much except that she’d heard it was haunted, blaming her ignorance on “someone” telling her parents every time she tried to go check it out (accompanied by an obvious glare at her present older siblings who only laughed it off).  James merely said that it was old and crumbling and therefore not a safe place for kids to be playing.

By this point we’d reached the Village proper.  As we came to a stop I offered to stay and help unload the wagon as payment for the ride.  As I left James invited me to join them for dinner tonight at his oldest son’s house in town.  And to spend the night as so I wouldn’t have to make the trip back home in the dark afterward.

I took him up on that offer and will be leaving to join them (and probably get lost on the way) once I finish this entry.  Comparatively, my day at the library was fairly plain.  More skimming through books in the archive as rapidly as I could while still getting the gist of their contents and placing them into preliminary piles for a new sorting system.  And then reassuring the handful of visitors that came in today that the mess their new Archivist was making was definitely intentional and was definitely going to make finding things easier in the future.  One of them I wound up asking about how best to go about finding Elder Pat.  I’ll look him up tomorrow to ask more about the last couple of nights’ uneasy peculiarities.

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I’ve been here a week now.  Where exactly am I?  Who am I?  Was I?  Why aren’t I trying harder to find answers to that?  Who am I even writing this all for?  Myself?  The next archivist?  The next outsider to come along?  Some hypothetical future descendant?  Pat?

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