Morning all. I hope you had a fabulous weekend. Mine was quiet because we finally got some rain, which we very much needed. And I kind of needed the quiet. But I am recharged and ready to go. So timers set for fifteen minutes and let’s wake up the brains from their weekend slumber.
Not sure why Calvin is investigating the family, but I kind of want to find out.
Monday, April 27th: The process was slow.
The process was slow. The truth had been buried so long that finding it was like rescuing an ancient tree covered with invasive vines. You had to pluck one of the invasive lies from where it clung to the trunk, travel down to the roots and completely uproot every last rootlet, pulling it slowly from the soil and untangling it from the other healthy plants growing at the base of the tree. If even one little bit was left beneath the soil it would grow again.
Extracting it was fiddly business but it wasn’t complete. Once free of the ground the vine had to be carefully unwrapped from the bole and branches. Care and delicacy was required. Many things grew from the invasive lie.
Calvin was finding that the lies wrapped around the truth of the matter had taken on a life of their own. There were people rooted in those lies, invested in keeping them anchored into place. If he wasn’t careful and quiet in his search and discovery, there were those who would come back behind him and replant the lies, encouraging them to grow for their own sake if nothing else.
Even if it was killing the tree.
‘Or in this case the family.’
Calvin leaned back against the chair. The springs squealed earning him the gimlet stare of the archivist. He tried not to frown. ‘If they don’t want their chairs squealing they should have replaced them before their age reached triple digits,’ he thought. ‘Or at least added some oil to the springs.’
He was certain this chair and all the ones designated for researchers to use was rolled into place when the archives were first opened and hadn’t been altered since.
‘Surely once every hundred years or so they could have replaced them,’ he thought. He rubbed his eyes. He doubted the chairs were a priority. He had been spending lots of time in the archives recently, but he saw few others moving through the space. There was the guardian of the gate who stayed at the front desk, checked his credentials and grudgingly allowed him entry. He always reminded Calvin of the rules. Calvin scrupulously obeyed, knowing that one false move would see him banished.
There were other staff members. He saw them periodically. They moved through the space like ghosts and if they were conducting research it was somewhere out of sight. Only his studies needed to be viewed.
He looked back down to his notes. He was studying the Elory family. They were the oldest in the county, probably in the region and they seemed to have a hand in everything. ‘Or at least their ancestors did,’ he thought.
The Elory name was on everything. Buildings, statues, laws. There were several streets each named for different members of the Elory family. They were the older streets though. Newer ones didn’t seem to feel the need to add references to the family.
And that too was becoming common. The Elorys were once involved in everything. They had control of a lot of things. They were respected and listened to. Plans were run past them before any actions were taken.
They liked to believe that was still the case. They behaved as though that were still the case. ‘So do many in town,’ he thought. He let his eyes run over the books and the notes he made. He wondered if the respect was given out of habit or if people still believed the Elorys ran everything. Belief was a strong thing and didn’t always react well to being contradicted by reality.
Ten til Midnight 