So I did what I
always do, and amused myself with the follies of others, in how Oliver Row was
actually searching for Sia herself all along.
You see, what Oliver was never going to
outright volunteer was that he and his little club had been searching for the
descendants of Duende, among whom happened to be Sia since the disappearances
occurred a millennium ago and those left behind struggled to pick up the pieces
and move on, living out meager existences in utter obscurity until one day a
girl started looking things up on the internet.
Such are the vagaries of fate. Today it seems easy to be lost in the shuffle. Since Earth’s population exploded and covered
seemingly all available landmasses, there developed a lot of panic about what
it all meant, a lot of fear that established avenues of relevance would change,
would shift, and the balance of expectations along with it, although certainly
no one was eager to admit it. Life began
to seem cheap in a whole new way, the ease of communication frightening, easy
to take for granted, easy to lose in the rush to express mindless opinions,
nothing and no one truly found except those already saying what someone else
happened to have already thought.
So it took a great deal to stand out, and
mostly because there were those who were bothering to look, such as Oliver Row,
such as House Argos behind him, because they knew what they were looking for,
and what they wanted to find.
In this instance, anything that helped
prove the existence of the Danab, anything that proved that one day, an alien
race stole a bunch of humans into space.
Humanity spends all its time worrying about alien invasions, singular
abductions, clandestine or catastrophic encounters, whether visitors will be
friendly or apocalyptic, when the history suggests a great deal of…apathy. Why bother?
The Danab would bother, when they got around to it, because they
themselves had been human.
They were the descendants of Sia’s
ancestors.
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Oliver’s group knew all or most of this, they
just didn’t know who Sia was, that she existed.
They couldn’t possibly hope for someone not only relevant to their
search, but capable of understanding it.
That’s the key right there. Find
the wrong person and the whole thing’s worthless, like finding the wrong
materials for a project. What’re you
gonna work with? You can’t catch water
in a sieve; it’ll just slip away again, and all you’ll have is the memory.
Family trees can be surprisingly tricky. Dig back far enough, they say, and everyone’s
related to everyone, and so it begins to seem a little pointless. Dig forward long enough and you have too many
results. The search is arduous, almost
impossible, and so it can seem endless.
Some people are capable of enduring such things, and that’s basically
House Argos in a nutshell, the little human organization that could.
They began at the beginning, at the
generation of which Duende was a part, and those who were left behind when the
Tikanni took their breeding stock away, the family left behind, and what became
of them, hard as it was to find such minor details in the record, hard as it
ever is to find, even in the present day, anything worth anything amidst all
the pointless noise. Family of legends,
though, tends to remember the legend, and while the legend can be distorting,
if the legend is big enough, but easy enough to ignore by the outside world,
well then you’ve got something, and no one outside this family was looking, was
even aware that there was something to find, except House Argos, and the family
was at a distinct advantage, and passed along to each generation the family
legend, and it began to transform into myth, into stories, the way these things
always work, until it was only stories being rediscovered every few generations,
the way Sia herself discovered it, in the way she was the last to still believe
there was something to it besides mere stories, the way she believed there was
something worth discovering, the way House Argos searched so desperately for
the same thing, knowing it was more than mere stories, because it had
the missing pieces of the puzzle…
Oh, it would be fascinating, and
something on an order of a great deal more intricacy than this story is
prepared to chronicle, all the steps along the way, the stories within stories,
the way all history really unfolds, the way history forgets along the way,
which if we’re very lucky some dusty museum exhibit will keep alive, the way
all history becomes dark ages, whether we’re willing to admit it or not, common
knowledge not so common as we like to think, despite whole childhoods being
dedicated to pretending otherwise…
I find it amusing. I admit it.
Of course, I had all the pieces before Sia, before Oliver Row,
and so I had the benefit of watching them struggle to catch up, and such a
vantage point has its distorting effect, I know, how every much like a god,
which is why such things are so hard to fathom by those who will never occupy such
spaces, which is to say, virtually everyone.
I pretend no pretense, here, no arrogance. I appreciate the vagaries of the
universe.
For you see, I know where all this ends,
and I am horrified, and what I want more than anything is to prevent it, but
there’s no preventing it, and I know this better than anyone, no matter what I
try to accomplish or who I tell or…
The worst thing about gods is also the
best thing, that you must witness entropy knowing it is the only thing more powerful,
more inevitable, than you are. I’m told
most are obsessed with how all things began or how they will end. I guess I’m a pessimist. I can imagine nothing worse.
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