Morning all. I hope your writing is going well. If you are on track then you know that today we passed the 10K mark. Keep going we are a fifth of the way there!
Day 6
Chapter 3
Ames continued about his day. He taught his classes, he graded papers. Because he was now starting the preparation for the dig, he let his students know that they could earn an extra ten points on their final papers if they turned them in early. He posted the early deadline, hoping he would be able to clear at least some of his grading out early so he could focus on the dig.
He let the graduate students know that they could apply to be on the team. He kept it as a general announcement. If he needed a more targeted approach in order to get the students he wanted he would ask them more directly. For now he just placed the applications in reach knowing they all needed the experience. When he made the announcement Ames saw one particular grad student perk up more than the others.
‘Fanac Lamart,’ Ames saw. He tried not to frown. Lamart was a favorite of Bacol’s. His focus was also on the early empire and he knew Bacol thought of him as a protégé. While Ames didn’t mind that so much he suspected Lamart would sign up for his dig simply so he could report back to Bacol.
‘If that’s all he does instead of sabotaging anything then it will be fine,’ Ames told himself. ‘The site is clearly pre-Empire so there is little he can do.’
Ames found it hard to focus on what Bacol and his potential spy might do. The image of the sygil on Folson’s wrist kept dancing through his head. It was far more worrisome.
He tried to put it out of his mind but once he left the university the thoughts returned with a vengeance. Ames left the university and started his walk him, thoughts swirling darkly. He tried to tell himself that it wasn;t what he thought. That he was mistaken. None of the comforting thoughts he tried to tell himself worked.
‘But what does it mean?’ he thought.
“Hey watch yourself,” he heard someone call out sharply. Ames blinked and looked around. He took a step back a he realized he was about to step off into a deep hole, newly dug into the earth. Ames took a second step back as one of the construction workers ran over.
“Sorry about that, the college kids keep stealing out danger signs and moving our cones around,” the construction worker said. He was huffing from his jog across the site. He put a selection of cones around the hole. “We have someone coming with a heavier barricade.”
“Hopefully the students won’t steal that as well,” Ames said recovering from his near miss.
“I really hope not. We are going to be driving in pilons and laying foundations and new concrete for sidewalks for the next year. We have to find something that works.”
“Good luck,” Ames replied.
He skirted the affected area, made certain he was not stepping out into traffic and navigated his way to a clear path on the other side before continuing home. Not for the first time he wondered if he could get a map and a schedule of the proposed construction.
Once away from the university and the construction surrounding it, Ames felt he was safe enough to let his mind wander again. The marking was still his top priority. When he arrived back at his apartment building he picked up his mail and went upstairs.
“Evening Dr. Stosia,” he neighbor called.
Ames looked over and smiled at Mrs. Winstar. While everyone else worked regular nine to five schedules, she worked more or less the same hours he did and he ran into her more often. He had no idea what it was she did. He knew she didn’t work for the university but never enquired further.
They were friendly neighbors, not friends.
“Evening Mrs. Winstar,” Ames called. “How are you this evening?”
“Not bad, I avoided a run in with Mr. Franjo downstairs so I should have a pleasant evening. As a warning, he is on some sort of tear again.”
“He’s not on about the light again is he?” Ames asked, pausing on his doorstep. Their downstairs neighbor complained that the light on the front entrance to their building wasn’t bright enough for safety and then when management replaced it a week ago he claimed it was now too bright.
“I believe the topic was window boxes,” she told him. She shrugged. “I’m not sure if he is for or against but I am sure we will all know soon enough.”
“Thanks for the heads up,” Ames told her. She nodded and turned towards her door, their small talk exhausted.
Ames turned back to his own door and let himself in. he locked it behind himself as was his custom and swung his arm forward to toss his bag on the couch. At the last second he remembered he still had the replica drinking cup inside and gripped the swinging bags handle tightly instead of releasing. He walked over to the couch instead and set the bag down gently. He extracted the drinking cup and walked it over to the shelf.
Ames replaced the replica on the shelf and saw a smaller item pushed to the back of the shelf. It was a smaller ceremonial cup. More like a ceramic shot glass than a cup. There were markings showing that it once had a lid. The lid however was long gone.
Ames couldn’t resist picking it up. Unlike the replica, this was a real artifact. He found it at one of his first dig sites. He lifted it from the shelf. The small cup hummed faintly against his fingertips. It was a soft, subtle hum. It was stronger when he lifted it from the ground. He expected it would fade away in time, but it still had that soft hum.
He was a grad student on that dig site and the archaeologist running it was more interested in pretty co-eds and the local liquor than what Ames was doing. Even though he knew he shouldn’t Ames couldn’t resist pocketing the piece. He hadn’t even really meant to. He just found his hand moving automatically. It wasn’t planned and when he tried to put it in with the other artifacts something inside him refused to let it go.
He still wasn’t certain why.
He knew it was older than anything else they were uncovering. The markings were different. He knew his professor would declare it a primitive holdover. Despite studying Pre-empire cultures Dr. Larcos tended to have a dismissive attitude towards most of them, believing that the Empire brought Civilization to the planet.
It was still crusted with dirt when Ames pocketed it and it remained so for the duration of the dig, hidden in a sock inside his bag of increasingly filthy and stinky laundry. Although he tried to forget about it, Almes found his dreams featuring the small cup in a ceremony. The dream repeated the entire time he was a part of the dig. The priest conducting the ceremony kept imploring him to drink before the magic faded.
Ames left the cup where it was until he returned home. He cleaned it and only after the dirt was cleared off from the cup both inside and out did he realize that the markings he saw in the dream perfectly matched the reality of the small cup. He made notations of the cup in his private records.
The dreams returned but the humming started to fade a little. He could still feel it but it was now an echo of what it once was. The dreams faded with the hum and he had the distinct feeling that it wasn’t so much that he was forgetting the dreams but that the magic had faded enough that drinking it would not produce the results the dream wanted.
Even though Ames didn’t believe in magic or the power of dreams, the conviction stayed with him. Surprisingly no one else noticed the hum. “Even Garana who did believe in the symbolism of dreams.”
The markings on the cup were so different from any of the other artifacts, both real and replica, she hadn’t associated it with them and thought it was some sort of childhood holdover. Ames smiled as he turned the cup around, letting his fingers study the design more than his eyes. Garana thought the cup was some sort of childhood art project.
‘But then she was always trying to find something I kept from my past,’ Ames thought. He set the cup back on the shelf and as always, pushed it to the very back of the shelf so it resided in shadows. He couldn’t explain why he felt the need to push it back out of sight any more than he could explain why he felt the need to take it.
He also couldn’t explain why he felt the need to wash his hands after handling it.
Ames went to the bathroom and found himself scrubbing his hands down with water and antibacterial soap before he consciously thought about it. He looked up and blinked at himself in the mirror as he lathered up his hands.
‘What was I thinking about?” he wondered, for a moment unable to piece together his own thoughts.
“Garana,” he said after a moment. “She sent a letter.” Ames finished washing his hands and dried them on a towel. Wanting to be comfortable when he found out what his ex wanted to tell him, Ames changed out of his work clothes and then went to his bag in the living room.
