Day 2,236

Light doesn't really move out here. Something about the vastness and stillness of the lake draws it in, keeps it from breaking past the surface of the water and protects us from seeing what's down there. We should be grateful, truly we should, that we are so loved.

We don't go outside much any more. It's too hard to see and not even midsummer makes an ounce of difference compared to the depths of winter. Every year it's all the same shades of twilight and the same sharp breeze coming over the lake from whatever's on the other side of the barbed wire fence that our ancestors set up to protect ourselves.

They left us pages and pages of letters explaining it all but they were taken when someone breached the fence. Of all the small wealths we keep in our homes, our money and heirlooms - they didn't bother with any of that or any of us. All they wanted were the letters.

We'd only discovered their existence when Monday's storm blew that tree in the town square clean over to reveal an engraved box. It was marked for us - the descendants of the great travellers, the last bastion of... something. Time and the storm had damaged a fair amount of the words but it said that all our answers inside.

The plan was to open it in a formal meeting later in the week, to give us time to prepare for the best and worst case scenarios line other surviving clusters or a dying world where we're the last pitiful scraps of life left to scrape by til its final breath.

I don't know how word got out but clearly we aren't as alone as we'd previously reckoned and somewhere out beyond the safety of the barbed wire and landmines is someone with all of our hard earned answers. Answers we mean to take back at any cost.

The land here likes to keep pieces of whatever's dumb enough to meet it with bare skin and the stranger goes barefoot. Must be a truly mad thing to touch such hungry earth with so much flesh but we won't make the same mistake. We have a few diving suits left after our attempts at fishing the lake lead to nothing but death.

Either way, we will be far more prepared than our elusive stranger.

We will leave our safety and pursue our truth.

Gods willing we'll find it or die trying.