Soldiers of Ancient Seas, Part 2: Fools Rush In

 Sometimes the observer is themselves observed, and such was the case with Oliver Row.

     Ah, yes, the one and only Oliver Row.

     In the grand scheme of things, not much of a legendary figure.  There were certainly circles where he was, even when he was a she.  A multitude of lives.  All shared along a similar quest, a destiny yet unwritten, vague, ambiguous, but somehow always lurking about.

     Oliver Row belonged to that tradition history on the planet Earth ascribes to such fictional luminaries as Van Helsing, who in the pages of a book helped take down a vampire, and in that lineage Oliver had been in pursuit of legends all his lives.  He, too, had once helped take down a vampire, and encountered many other monsters besides, some of them mere humans, although in my humble estimation…Is there really such a distinction?  Is it really necessary?  Humans are such a mess.  Though I suppose, it’s a trait shared on many worlds by many so-called intelligent lifeforms…To be fair.

     Oliver Row, as the traditions would have it, was a shared sobriquet, and many individuals had given up their given name to work under it, and in this particular story, the Oliver Row in question had done so quite happily, driven to distraction on this occasion in the pursuit of the mysterious “Agent,” whom Oliver had discovered in association with something called the House of Stars, which if he hadn’t taken quite so long in finding, would have led to me, one and the same “Agent,” in much shorter fashion. 

     First he was going to have to find Sia, but that, too, was going to have to wait, as was any real understanding of what any of his lives meant.

     Along the way to destiny, life tends to be mundane.  Actually, even destiny is mundane as it’s happening; it only matters in hindsight, usually in terms of regret and only sometimes in glory.  Sorry to be so melodramatic about it.  I’ve been following the careers of Oliver Row for too long not to be a little nauseated by all of it, the way Oliver himself wonders at this very moment what’s keeping our dear Sia.

    Since neither of them will know of my existence very soon, allow me to introduce myself: The woman Oliver knows only as the “Agent” is in fact named Night, or so I’ve equally chosen to be known.  You’ll find out more as they do, and that will do for now, thank you.

     For now, revel in the mediocrities of Oliver Row!

     Oliver, whose namesake died a hundred years ago, and whose detailed accounts of all activities fills a series of notebooks that really only Oliver Row ever cares about, protected in briefcases, satchels, whatever is currently at hand to protect them from the elements and doubles visually for anyone at hand as probably the implements of the trade, the doodads and gadgets used against monsters, weapons.  Ha.  If only.  Just a bunch of words, nonsense, whatever makes such a life worth living.  Same as anyone else.  Very much like Sia, really.  Oliver Row: nothing much more than another hapless would-be published author.  Memoir waiting to be accepted.  Movie rights available!

     When the original and only legal Oliver Row passed away slumped in an alley, there had been a homeless youth made aware from the sensationalized accounts accepted as fiction by the world at large who happened to come across the body and collected works.  This is how the legend really started, in just such humble circumstances.  The youth spent years trying to make sense of it, and tracking down new challenges, until he realized Oliver had belonged to an organization known as House Argos, the history of which the original and neophyte was in total ignorance, Argos being the dog who was the lone individual capable of recognizing Odysseus when he returned in secret to Ithica.  Suffice to say, but House Argos is an ancient society dedicated mostly to keeping alive the dim flame of learning.  It is, in Earth parlance, a bunch of nerds, nothing more.

     Such is the background of Oliver Row as he exists today.  To claim the title, all one has to do is become aware of the existence of the tradition, and merely be deemed adequate by the current one to replace them.  A fluke of circumstances, really.  The files had been digitized over the years, even published in limited editions never circulated due to popular disinterest, under a variety of colorful titles, increasingly easy in modern times but with scarcely different results. 

     The current Oliver Row inherited the title from a woman, who relinquished the title.  In fact, in recent years the role has changed hands with alarming frequency.  Interpret that with any amount of cynicism you deem appropriate.  This Oliver was once known as Marty, but that was a lifetime ago, or so the months can sometimes suggest. 

     He came across the existence of the “Agent” by chance, on the internet, where all modern life on Earth plays out, and the House of Stars, although he had no idea, as no one could on such a planet at such a developmental level, no matter how alarmingly important such knowledge happens to be, as so much fodder for mindless conspiracy theories.  Oliver Row, by any name or face, though, never lets good knowledge go to waste, and immediately suspected it was worth following up. 

     Which is to say, he became obsessed.

     It just so happened that a young woman named Sia had developed the same mania, and her name, or her aliases, though nothing so petty caused much difficulty for Oliver Row, quickly caught his attention, too, and that was how they began their tumble down the rabbithole…

Soldiers of Ancient Seas, Part 1: "Finest Kind"

It’s hard to remember her, in the greater context of her life, as the girl who was so utterly lost in the world, flailing about to try and find her place in it.  That’s really how all such lives are, in my experience anyway.  But that was Sia as the events of this particular story begin.

     Sia was at that time a young adult, which in those times had become something of an albatross, neither prepared to take on the big challenges expected to get ahead nor capable of asserting herself in a world dominated by her elders.  She’d moved away from home and begun the series of petty employments that was to keep her in her tenuous independent existence, and yet she would never have described herself as happily settled, nor content in the life, which was why she began exploring the parts of her past she was most curious about, her ancestry, and what she supposed she would discover about herself along the way.

     Being chronically short of funds, her recourse was free search engines and all the pitfalls therein, the utter vagaries of the results, the inability to refine them so that she might know instantly whether she was absolutely correct in the findings or had been led gloriously astray.  She plugged in the names she knew, the grandparents on both sides, and found her great-grandparents and further beyond that, and she guided herself along these waters with a name she’d heard her mother use, Duende, hoping that she might come across it, although she had no idea how except through dumb luck, and in tracing the origins of the name itself, hoped to bridge the gap between what she might find and the desperation of her yearning.

     Now, Sia was on the whole a resourceful person, and wasn’t overly shy in the pursuit, so when she wanted to consult a relative, her uncle, she did, and that was how she confirmed her mother’s tale, that there was a Duende, that somewhere in the crossroads of her French and Scandinavian pasts she might discover the name for herself.  She cross-referenced Viking raids, settlements, and what she had learned in the genealogies, and that was where she discovered the gap.  Right where she expected to find Duende.  Whoever they were.

     Which is to say, Sia found herself stymied.

     Which is to say, Sia grew frustrated.

     It’s all well and good to have a goal and a general understanding of one’s frustration with the cosmos, quite another to find that there’s not going to be much more satisfaction in this pursuit than in the rest of one’s life, and that was about the sum total of Sia’s existence at this early stage.  This happens to be a story where there are much wider discoveries waiting around the corner, but at the start it looks very much like anything else in the humdrum world, and Sia herself mind-numbingly ordinary, if even that, and very much aware of it, but also that she could imagine greater things than that, and the curse of knowing it.

     To top it all off, she was also quite isolated.  No one much to talk to about all this, except maybe her mother, but, and Sia very much adored her mother, this was never going to be a conversation that they could share.  She yearned more than anything for someone with whom such things were possible.

     Instead, in the meantime, she stared at a screen and hoped it might spontaneously give her the answers she sought.  No such search engine was powerful enough to deliver such magic.  She appreciated the age in which she lived, in which she could search the vast sum of human knowledge as captured by the internet, or could stroll to a bookshelf and discover anything not found therein, and how humiliatingly limited it still was, and how all of that was somehow prone to mismanagement, mostly by the everyday custodians known as mankind.  Basically, to be concise, all that knowledge reduced to petty insults expressed with a poor grasp of the language (any of them).

     She developed poor posture, not really because of all this, or the metaphorical burden of her existence, but through sheer existential angst, and possibly also from all the reading, both on her phone and in books.  She found herself worrying, when she thought about it, what kind of image she presented.  Her hair was straggly, not so much styled as caught in desperate snatches.  She was always brushing it out of her eyes, a slightly gold color that had been mistakenly described as brown throughout her life, or possibly they’d brightened.  Anyway, she was always trying to relax.  She took frequent naps, mostly to rest her eyes.  She wore thick glasses when she didn’t have her contacts in, which was whenever she didn’t need her contacts.  She tried not to avoid the contacts too much.  She worried constantly about her eyes, and basically everything else.  That’s mainly why she spent so much time investigating her ancestry, and why she needed to find something important there.

     It’s funny that we really don’t know what lies ahead.  It’s got to be strange living a nonlinear life, when you know everything all at once.  I guess I’ll have to look into it.  Always kind of busy, though.

     Sia plowed ahead with what she tried valiantly to not consider a disappointing life.  She tended to use the library when she was online.  She didn’t yet have unlimited internet on her phone, so she used, and trusted in, the library’s wifi, and also the ability to browse the books, the newspapers, the magazines, everything that had made as tidy an order of her life as she’d ever managed.

     The problem was that she couldn’t spend her life reading.  The rest of it still had to happen, and the rest was invariably disappointing, and Sia was absolutely aware she was chasing what was probably some fictional version of a past that didn’t have anymore practical applications than adding to her own knowledge, which she had so far utterly fail to convince the world at large as having any real meaning.

     Still, there had to be something there.  “Duende.”  It had always sounded important.  She just had no idea how, except for vague family legend, something in the remote and incredibly dim past.  If history didn’t record it, there wasn’t much meaning to it.  Right?

     She sat back, stretched her neck, pretended it was irrevocably wrecked already, closed her eyes, and imagined.

     Which was how she did her best work.