837. White day, 6
(Mathilde)
I was far weaker, and not yet strong enough to work again.
With barely more care for me, I was brought into an empty room of the mayor’s home.
A mayor regularly elected, but without will nor real power.
The changes had become rituals without more utility than ceremonies meant for the memory of the dead.
The mayor then was a man like the others, and nothing else.
I was allowed to rest for a few more days, before being put to work by the couple living there as a slave.
Taking all the household duties for the ageing couple that didn’t care anymore.
I wouldn’t see again my brother for a long time.
However I found something unexpected.
In the small library of the old house, a small furniture and a document caught my eye.
Only I had read it as it would appear. This population wasn’t manufacturing paper, nearly didn’t write anything anymore, and read less and less since the cataclysm.
Us children had been the only ones, thanks to the education given by our captors. It had been at a time when the mood was less noxious toward us.
Nearly unable to feel grateful for the good parts of our past, I didn’t get how the society where I lived was evolving. Then I thought that because of our isolation, it was no longer an evolution with improvement, but decadence and decay instead. The minds of the adults must have been rotting, and that was why their attitudes toward me, my brother and our friend, they had done nothing but deteriorate over time.
And now, I had this odd document between my hands. It had been a moment when I could read a little without being noticed and scolded for that.
I read everything I could find, when I could find the necessary time and discretion to do so.
What I had found on that day, it was hastily taken notes on the blank pages at the end of a book probably. The author had not found better paper at the time, but he had these books.
Rare notes trying to make sense of the white day... From a habitant of the village before then. The only one even, before the other survivors from all over the land gathered here, and before the geological isolation.
Realising this, I read with upmost care the few pages, and then the hidden side notes that followed.
~
The man speaking had remained alone for weeks after the fateful day, without anyone else in the village to keep it together. He hadn’t realised exactly what happened, since not many visitors came anyway. His job had been to take care of the place with a few more people whom all died then.
Facing the unnatural cause of death from them, he didn’t found any logical explanation, nor what to do. All communications had ceased. He was alone. All he could do was bury them all and wait for help to come.
And then one day, he felt again like he was dying. He felt his heart rhythm accelerating for a moment, while a peculiar cloud in the sky was crossing it.
And something fell from it. He didn’t quite see it, but he heard it. A loud landing noise, with a tremor in the ground that caused a rift to appear.
Soon after, people began to appear, as if following that odd omen that had passed.
He began learning of what had happened to the rest of the world, and blended with the people looking for a good place to start over here.
Weeks came to pass, with as many people gathering here from all over the area. All of them had lost everything on the same fateful day, but they had to leave their lost houses as well to travel.
For whatever reason they all would later rationalize, they all had begun gathering around this village especially.
Following a trail, or instinctively looking for a shelter, they had felt pulled or called around there, unconsciously.
The man continued to welcome everyone, but with a weird rising anxiety. They were all happy to find again other people like themselves. But he was getting more and more worried, drawing links between the events, and eventually theorising that the thing that had fallen was drawing people to this place like a magnet.
And slightly worse than that, it was making them a little oddly excited, like insects in a soft frenzy...
So he searched, concerned for what was happening that no one could notice or describe.
He descended into the chasm still narrow and not too deep back then.
And as he had feared, he unearthed something there. He discovered an artefact from that odd cloud.
His worries for the future of this gathering and its purpose grew even more.
~
I unfolded up the next page, curious about the thing he had found. The handwriting picked up the tale at a later date however. It was a diary of the events he lived at the time, and it was a peculiar thing to do for me. What was the purpose of this? Maybe just to stay sane a little longer I first thought, thinking about every other adult I knew.
The man had found an abnormal weapon. The kind of weapon that made no sense.
And he scribbled his deductions of how all was linked, how everything made sense now.
In growingly paranoid tones, he wrote about how he understood these connections.
The end of the world he heard speak of every day, what he had lived here more modestly, and then this weapon.
The attraction it had... Some people had wanted to follow the cloud, he heard it. Many of them had stopped around here for various reasons.
What the man had noticed were the similarities of principle. Everyone had lived through a personal tragedy, different from one another, and ended up here, for another reason. But at this scale of occurrence, chance was becoming a statistic.
He had been puzzled by the simultaneous attraction of so many people around that place precisely, without that much of a clear reason. And if it was generally accepted that the cataclysm probably had only one unique cause behind its multitude of effects over the land and people; no one but him seemed to realise the similarity between that, and this new gathering of people in Moldovgrad.
The cataclysm had dug cliffs and canyons here and there across the land. And maybe weapons had been thrown in them, or been formed in the end of these new and sudden depths.
He couldn’t conclude on that fearful theory; but he was fearing the worst.
The worst being, that all these gathering people were sliding together in a metaphorical sinkhole without realising. That collapse may be virtual, but with real influences and effects.
And at least he knew, that in the bottom of a hole behind town, he had found a weapon. And he feared in some ways, that it implied what the future would become. The real end.
A last weapon, to kill those who had survived the end.
~
I was becoming anxious. I had never heard nor read anything before coming close to that kind of text. A first hand testimony of a survivor about what had happened after, instead of a lament of what had been before. Over the few years between the end of the world and our birth.
The man didn’t mention the fate of women, which he possibly didn’t know of. He wrote about his ideas, fears, and what he saw that others didn’t. And kept eluding around the weapon he found.
I unfolded the last sheet. The writing was more agitated, and the discourse became incoherent.
The man spoke of things he couldn’t understand and some words were unreadable scribbles at this point.
The weapon was a sword meant to cut down a source.
A source of something inexistent, unreal. The weapon was speaking to him, looking to reach and destroy the Tamźródlo. He didn’t trust it, and hearing it made him more and more paranoid.
But it was too late already. The fissure had become canyons, and the region had been isolated.
The weapon had invited the man to use it to free them a path out... He had obviously not accepted, feeling it was the blatant trap of a demon to kill all the survivors...
All he spoke about was growing evil then, from the heart of men, from that weapon, from the end, from everything. Everything was becoming dark and hopeless, panic and isolation bred each other ominously.
And he realised someone would eventually hear the sword speak, and use it. To destroy everything...
The weapon was made of the same monstrosity that had ravaged the world, that was his conclusion.
He had to destroy it, or to hide for ever...
He hadn’t doubted that much of the sword’s power, but far more of its intention however.
And he didn’t find for himself the means to destroy it, it appeared. So he looked to hide it where no one would find it. Where?
I found a list of hiding places scratched off. I examined them carefully.
The chasm and canyon itself was the most interesting one, especially since its impressive spread. But he had not been trusty of it. He expected the people to fill it, dig, and look deeper in them. How wrong had he been I thought.
Unless he could hide it in the main bridge fill that would come to exit the plateau, the man had not put faith in the chasm. Maybe it held even more ominous secrets buried in mud. Either way, that had not been chosen.
I had no place on the list that had not been scratched off. He obviously had not kept the answer written there plainly. But all of these notes are giving me ideas.
I memorised the list of places, and burnt the dangerous pages.
~
