Morning all. I hope you are having a good week. As always a Monday holiday makes the week seem top fly by and I feel like I am behind on something or other. Still I am sure I’ll catch up at some point. So lets start the day off with a morning writing prompt and see where that takes the day.
Off with a reluctant adventure is apparently where this takes us. Personally I used to love the quests for lost cities when I was a kid. It could be fun to write one.
Wednesday, September 4th: Follow the ancient trail.
“Follow the ancient trail,” he said. For extra emphasis he lifted a finger and pointed in the direction of the forest. We were too far from it’s edge for the pointing to be anything other than a dramatic gesture. In fact from here all we could see was the distant tree line all of the greenery merging into one line along the horizon.
I nodded and smiled. Others seemed impressed by this wisdom. Personally I thought it was a pointless comment. ‘Of course we are going to follow the ancient trail to get to the ancient city,’ I thought. That was the most obvious path. We hadn’t come here fr the more obvious, we came for the obscure. The small details only someone who had spent a life time in study might know.
As for me, my studies had always been linguistics based. I had a weakness for old maps however and the combination of the two was what led me to be a part of this group. They were for lack of a better term, adventurers. Or at least they wanted to be. They found an old map and heard ancient legends. They had hiked before and one of them owned a machete. As far as I cold tell that was their entire collection of skills.
They thought this would be a fun adventure. Given the old map had several bits of text, some of which I could read, the rest I wanted to study, I was brought in. Personally I would have been happier to just study the map in a nice environmentally controlled library or study somewhere, but it was thought my expertise might come in handy in the field.
I still don’t know what possessed me to agree.
But agree I did and now I was part of the group, sort of. The others made it clear that while they might want to use my skills, I was not one of them. John even made a pint to pull me aside and let me know that anything they found would be recorded under their names. They would get the credit for the find and I would at best be a foot note.
As I was already regretting agreeing to come along and really didn’t want my name associated with them or this expedition, I simply nodded and smiled. I was here in case the old man they were consulting presented a document or additional resource that needed translating. Thus far, my skills weren’t needed. He guided the group over to a series of portraits and began talking about the others who quested for the ancient city site before us. From what I could hear the talk was simply a rehash of the same legends that we heard previously. There weren’t any real variations.
I grew bored and let my attention wander, taking my gaze with it. The room was crammed full of interesting things but taken as a whole it was a jumble that tended to baffle the eye. I knew why the others liked it. It resembled all of the ancient stores in movies where the adventurer finds a hidden clue. To me it looked like a stage set and I wondered how many would be adventurers came here before and how many strange and mystical items he sold them.
As I was wondering how many adventurers it would take to make this a viable business, I saw a framed document peeking out from behind a stuffed wild cat and a dusty looking taxidermized hawk. The writing called to me and when the old man finished his tale and our group broke up to wander, I made my way towards it.
Ten til Midnight 