I've been devouring his works for months now - the journals of the last archivist. He'd started when he was just a lad, barely older than my youngest, and lived by the county archives til the end of his days almost three hundred years ago.
So much has changed since then and so little remains the same and in all of his beautiful handwritten entries I've read I can't seem to find half the rooms he's referenced. By his accounts the archives should were the lower levels of the old police station but for as long as I've known the archives only have the ground floor.
There should also be a nearby cave with a waterfall where the archivist would set up his easel and draw the things that floated down from the underground river that ran from Cairnliesh down through us and past Lochmara. I liked to think he was a creative young man when I stumbled upon some of his older works but the more he drew the more I understood what our town was sitting upon.
The cave beneath the archives was vast and the water below it is vaster still - spanning most of the country at a level so deep I dare say we're more akin to the foam head on a fresh pint than a stable landmass. All it would take is a big enough tremble and we'd go sliding back into the depths again.
Yes, again. The country's been there before and when it rose up we were brought along for the ride. Mostly human with enough of the ocean in us to cause a little chaos from time-to-time. Not that the rest of the world has any idea, not that most of us know anymore.
But the archivist knew. He found carvings deep in the waters beneath the cave beneath some of the oldest books in the country and he figured it all out. He found when we'd first come up and where from and when we'll all go back down again.
He would have shared his story I'm sure, moreso for the humans among us who'd no doubt suffer a slow death as the ocean filled our lungs and crushed theirs. I think our ancestors found him first and saw fit to reintroduce him to our former home.
The one we'll all finally meet before the decade's end, according to his final words.
So much has changed since then and so little remains the same and in all of his beautiful handwritten entries I've read I can't seem to find half the rooms he's referenced. By his accounts the archives should were the lower levels of the old police station but for as long as I've known the archives only have the ground floor.
There should also be a nearby cave with a waterfall where the archivist would set up his easel and draw the things that floated down from the underground river that ran from Cairnliesh down through us and past Lochmara. I liked to think he was a creative young man when I stumbled upon some of his older works but the more he drew the more I understood what our town was sitting upon.
The cave beneath the archives was vast and the water below it is vaster still - spanning most of the country at a level so deep I dare say we're more akin to the foam head on a fresh pint than a stable landmass. All it would take is a big enough tremble and we'd go sliding back into the depths again.
Yes, again. The country's been there before and when it rose up we were brought along for the ride. Mostly human with enough of the ocean in us to cause a little chaos from time-to-time. Not that the rest of the world has any idea, not that most of us know anymore.
But the archivist knew. He found carvings deep in the waters beneath the cave beneath some of the oldest books in the country and he figured it all out. He found when we'd first come up and where from and when we'll all go back down again.
He would have shared his story I'm sure, moreso for the humans among us who'd no doubt suffer a slow death as the ocean filled our lungs and crushed theirs. I think our ancestors found him first and saw fit to reintroduce him to our former home.
The one we'll all finally meet before the decade's end, according to his final words.
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