Story 5 - Distant Knowledge

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Welcome. Cassandra’s Tales and Truths is an anthology series that utilizes the wisdom of the Delphic Maxims. In this episode, the fifth episode, Cassandra spins a tale of uncertainty. Temporary uncertainty. It always is temporary after all. That is the nature of the beast. And while there’s many ways to stabilize or guard ourselves, perspective can always help. Think about it. If you’re walking on a balance beam, everyone’s got an opinion on where your eyes need to go. It all depends who you ask, but there’s always some underlying logic therein. It worked for them, after all.

And Cassandra has an opinion of her own.

So, apprentice, look to the future.

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The whistle of Darwyn’s own breath cut through the moonless night and through whatever bit of confidence lingered in him. The foreboding nature of the sound made for the perfect blade. His breath wasn’t supposed to sound like that. He knew it, and it never had before. In fact, when he was a child, the ease of his breath gifted him an edge in athletics. It allowed him to push onward while his peers were left gasping for air in the dust, and the fullness of his lungs lifted his shoulders to the heavens. Back then, Darwyn had worn the resulting confidence with great ease. It was not merely his skin--prone to rips and tears--but a part of him that was rooted in his very bones, part and parcel with who he was. 

Of course, so much of that had merely been a matter of perception. In hindsight, Darwyn wasn’t particularly gifted, whether in athletics or buoyancy; he only believed that he was, but it was a belief that he was able to maintain for quite some time, unchallenged. Back then, when life was simple and true competition scarce, Darwyn could stand on top of the town’s small hill, also known as the entire world as he knew it, and pretend that this was his rightful place. 

Now, his childhood fantasies had long since turned to dust, and the realization of how fragile they truly were haunted him. Those were the ghosts he dwelt with in this small camp. To call it ‘makeshift’ would have been overly generous. Darwyn had gone through the motions of making a camp out of nothing but whatever he could have fit in his small pack, particularly those clumsy motions that define the beginner’s struggle. Even that which was defined by awkwardness, though, was a space he was not large enough to fill. He just couldn’t manage it. Or much of anything at all.

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To say the least, that was troubling not merely because he was alone in an unfamiliar wilderness, reliant on himself alone for his survival. But beyond that moment, he still had to prove himself. He was on a journey to a tower so old as to become nameless, and this was meant as testament to his wit, to his cleverness and resilience, and to his devotion to the grand library and all its many precepts. 

All the same, there were some matters that did not need to be thought about in that instant. Right then, there was a tent over his head and a cushion beneath it. That was the important thing, Master Bartolo would have said to him. Being the practical man that he was, Master Bartolo had said as much numerous times before, back in the workshop beneath the piles of archives that needed to be entered into records and judgmental eyes of ancient or not-so-ancient portraits. Those paint strokes that made each iris and pupil would snag themselves onto those words and strip what kindness had lingered in them. Not that Master Bartolo had been able to muster much for this young apprentice. Or not the sort of assurance that Darwyn had been able to hear. 

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The young man squeezed his eyes shut, trying to push these thoughts from his head. Without them, he stood a chance at sleeping, and he needed his rest for the coming days. But despite his efforts, the thoughts lingered in his mind, anchored in place by his overwhelming sense of doubt and fear, the bonds sealed by memories of his own failings. This trip had not been as cursed as it could have been, he should have reminded himself. Regardless of the true scope of whatever destruction he might have caused, the journey was about to reach its end. Before Darwyn had laid his head down for another restless night, he had seen the top of the tower peeking out through the clouds nested on top of the tree line. It had been equally beautiful and foreboding in that moment that he took to gaze upon his reckoning. His doom.

No, not my reckoning, he corrected. Or it should not have been. This was, to most, a simple task: the threshold over which he had to step to greet the rest of his life. 

The life of an archivist was meant to be a relatively simple one, despite its importance. Knowledge was valued, but its vessels, the books, were largely sedentary. Only a few books in the grand library were worth any sort of protection. And even then, what protection needed to be offered? Those books could never be stolen, could they? Yes, the wisdom in them was rare, but it was wisdom freely shared with whoever asked.

And Darwyn had seen for himself when he first entered the grand library, that it was, to many, to the archivists who were already there a simple life. It was predictable and unchallenging. And though at first such a thing would be synonymous with safe, those words were far more divided than one was inclined to think. For what did it mean to be safe? It meant free from danger, but would that not beg the question: what is danger? In the grand library, danger of external threats--of attacks, of accidents, of illness--were impossible fantasies. But what of other sorts of dangers? Like the danger of discovery. Or revelation.

Hours ticked by in the night. Darwyn was not sure if he slept at all. There were moments he could not account for. But was that from sleep or the monotony of laying in the dark? His hand clenched but not in the natural way. There was a memory lingering in its flesh that took precedence over natural bends and curves. Darwyn’s muscles remembered the feeling of wrapping around a foreign quill, a quill that was not his own, tracing over words that were not his own, and rewriting his destiny with it.

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

The race with the guilt was the last race Darwyn won. Back then, when he was young enough to start his life, he challenged it by pursuing a forbidden idea. It was a temporary victory, of course. There was a second heat, and in that heat, guilt took the crown. It always takes the crown. But by then, Darwyn had done what it was he meant to do, whether he should have, aside.

The answer to that question had been obvious. Hence why it could be cast aside. Darwyn knew he should not attempt to rewrite his fate; the destinies that were laid on the shoulders of young people were assigned by wisdom and compassion in a process that was fine-tuned, polished by a thousand years of implementation. The process should be trusted. The result should be trusted. And Darwyn knew that. But he knew in equal measure that it would not be an answer he liked. 

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

The first rays of sunlight peaked out over the horizon. Darwyn was awake to greet it, and his guilt--the companion that lingered with him each day no matter how far he ventured from the grand library--was there as well. But all the same, it was too early to venture out. So Darwyn sat up and reached into his bag for the small mirror kept in there. In its surface, he could see a familiar face, his face with its dull lines and sunken eyes, but it did not feel like his. The thinning hair certainly wasn’t what he remembered nor the tiredness. And he felt like a different person. 

Darwyn began to stand up. His face did not show his age, but his body did. Muscles were tight and constricted, seemingly wrapped around stakes drilled into his bones. Life as an archivist had promised to be so easy. It was one reason why he wanted it after a childhood working in the fields with his parents and brothers. He had seen the archivists with their somber expressions strolling across the market, buying their groceries without haggling or fretting much about the coins being handed over. That was a freedom Darwyn did not have, and it seemed worth being locked in the library over, particularly once friends were sent away on their own adventures, for their own apprenticeships. Better to be alone in comfort than alone in any other way, he had thought to himself.

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And so, Darwyn did it. He did what he should not do.

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And it was shockingly easy to slip into the office and find the affidavit that bore his fate. Darwyn waited in the greenery a small ways away from the old keeper’s office, crouched down and out of sight. The wait was not long. Just as the sun began to set, the old man hobbled out, clutching his walking stick with all his might and a silent groan of discomfort on his lips. Darwyn held his breath while the man strolled off despite the distance between them. It was not out of respect for the suffering of the eldery but in disbelief that things could go so easily, that he could commit a sin against the fabric of his world like it was nothing. 

There was a time for introspection there, but Darwyn did not take it. Instead, when he felt reasonably assured that he was alone, he approached the small one-room building where the town’s government was seated and where all the records were kept. The door wasn’t locked. No attempt was made to impede anyone who wished to enter the space, regardless of what their intentions might have been. And the ever-important documents, those documents that defined the lives of the young, were left on the table in the corner. Much to Darwyn’s disbelief, it was all so readily in his grasp and not properly stored. The smell of ink was in the air, which provided an explanation of sorts. But all the same, it would have hardly taken more than a moment or two for the ink to dry, and then the affidavits could have been tucked away where Darwyn would not have been able to find them. But their abandonment was for other reasons, inevitable reasons. Inevitable and understandable, in many ways. The old man who handled them was impatient mentally but his own body more so. His muscles and bones needed more rest than anyone else’s, and they demanded as much from him. It was time he thought he could afford to take. After all, this work was sacred: above reproach and challenge. There would be no invader, no wayward soul attempting to rewrite his fate. It simply did not happen there. 

Which was why the discrepancy went unnoticed the following day, as declarations were read aloud and handed to their recipients. While it was true that the one Darwyn was given that morning did not match the one the old keeper had left behind, no one noticed. The old keeper did not notice. Just as Darwyn did not think to check if there was another assigned to the library for their apprenticeship. 

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As it turns out, there was not. There were no final hurdles to jump over. What’s done was done. Darwyn had sealed his fate. Not that he understood what it meant.

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It was still too early to set out when Darwyn packed up his camp and began walking to the tower in the distance. His bags felt heavier now, but it was really the weight he kept on his shoulders: the invisible companion now whispering in his ear, “This was not meant for you.” 

And Darwyn knew it was right. This quest was not meant for him. The larger life that this quest was meant to define was not meant for him either. He had claimed it for himself, and for the first few months of his apprenticeship, he would remind himself that no one was meant to be a library apprentice, at least not in his batch. Perhaps whatever poor soul had been destined for this life had died young and tragically in some mishap or another, leaving behind the vacancy. There was plenty of death around him, he knew its cold touch better than he knew his brothers. But what did that really mean? 

Darwin had plenty of time to spin these tales for himself as he entered the forest. It was an uncomfortable line of thought, true, but at the same time, it was the lesser evil. The alternative was to focus on the path before him, which was rapidly dwindling from lack of use. The nameless tower did not draw in visitors, and it was hard to imagine this direction offering any other benefit or purpose. And so, nature had been free to reclaim the dirt path. Just as he was now free to reclaim the book. Should he be able to do it.

It all led back to that thought, and in the interim, the path ended. The end wasn’t abrupt. But it still came: pale dirt fading into nothingness with every step forward.

(Music fades out and new music fades in)

Darwyn was caught off guard. It wasn’t the first time in his life Darwyn didn’t know what came next or where else to go. Vaguely, he knew the movements that needed to come next. He looked around, only to find the trees looked nearly identical. Small details defined individual trunks and branches, but to the uncaring eye, those things meant little. Like the books sitting peacefully and silently on library shelves. They were practically identical when Darwyn was lost in the grand library simply because they couldn’t tell him where he was or which way he needed to go.

Where was the simplicity he promised himself, he would ask Record keeping was simple only on good days. And in terms of answering any number of the requests that were coming in, they were far from the basic questions he was expecting, and to answer them, he had to strain his mind to twist in new ways and look at the world from new angles. There was a soreness that came from that type of exertion Darwyn had not known before his apprenticeship, and it was not one he saw anywhere else, beneath the faces of his master and the other archivists of the library.  Otherwise known as the people who did not tamper with their assignment, who were rightfully placed where their skills were best aligned. 

There are consequences to our actions. Which is a simple statement and the subject of the first search Darwyn had to conduct in the grand library under his master’s eye. It was a search for a certain theologian’s work; a traveller had come in search of it, in search of a lost piece that he earnestly believed had landed in their library. The travelling scholar had hoped the tome had been saved by an archivist on the very sort of mission Darwyn was now on. And it was. But given its rarity, it could not be loaned out, only copied by hand: Darwyn’s hand. And so a treatise on human arrogance seeped into his hand as easily as the changed assignment had. Using a quill that was not his.

Humanity does not always know what is best for it, the theologian argued. Humans try to find it. Sometimes they succeed. And sometimes they fail. It is only in hindsight that the result is revealed. Along with the true answer.

But what is hindsight, Darwyn wondered. How far does one need to stand? 

In this matter, Darwyn’s great matter, the answer was not so important. He was, in many ways, stranded in his hubris just as he was stranded in the woods. There was no going back, no undoing his commitment and no alternative to take up instead. There was this life or nothing for him. And how perilous a game it was, that he should start to see the value of nothing, of abandoning his home and all that was there, all that was waiting for him. Simply because he could. Those were all ill-gotten gains, anyway, pursued in his lust for more. 

For enough, Darwyn corrected himself. It was true that he hadn’t known hunger since his apprenticeship began. But that is what happens when one becomes an apprentice and leaves behind their overcrowded family home. Things could have gone differently, he thought again, and in that different state of affairs, Darwyn still would have been fine. He would not know hunger, but he would know competence.

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Not knowing what else to do, Darwyn kept walking forward. Or what he thought was forward. But the trees were telling him this wasn’t so. The details that set them apart from each other were making themselves known, catching his eye and beckoning him to draw closer, to see for himself even if it meant losing what he thought the path was. It was a cruel suggestion, but perhaps the damage was done. He had no way of knowing, and with that, Darwyn stood still for a second, feeling the all familiar rise of panic in his throat. Turning back was not even an option anymore, and that was the most distressing part.

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“Young friend,” he heard a voice call. 

He turned to the voice and saw an old woman with a crooked back, clutching a walking stick made from what looked like a tree’s spine. But trees do not have spines of their own, he knew, so where this assistance came from was a mystery of its own. What she was thinking was another. Her face, worn by age and years of hard work, could no longer hold a message in its expressions; she was hard to read and--as a result--hard to approach. 

So Darwyn stood back. “Can you help me?” he called out. “I’m afraid I lost the trail.”

There wasn’t a trail to lose deep in the forest, he realized. Or that was where he thought he was. The canopy overhead was thick enough that he could not easily track the sun across the sky to know how long he had been walking, but his legs had the dull ache of a couple hour’s worth of walking, though it feels much the same as the ache that comes from travelling for several weeks. And he had certainly done that.

He looked back at her, and that was when he noticed her eyes. Both protruded a bit, but the left one especially so. In fact, it looked an inch or two larger than the other. But whether or not the estimate was right, there was a marked difference in size and color. The right one looked like an ordinary eye, dark but clear. The one on the left had its coloring inverted--a near snow-white iris and pupil amidst a sea of a brown so dark as to almost be black.

He was stunned silent, and all the woman could muster was a bit of a scoff. She knew what Darwyn was taken by. Realizing he was caught, he did not know if he needed to apologize for it or how he could do so. 

“You think you’re clever then,” she crowed.

“No,” he replied. 

“Then how did you get here?” she asked.

“I’m lost,” he stammered. 

“I bet you are.” He heard the tapping of her stick. She smirked. “Your vision isn’t so great, now is it?”

Her remark didn’t not make a great deal of sense. It was as if she was… playing a joke on him, on the fact of his gaze, and the like. But even still, there would have to be a punchline there. He could not find one. 

He heard the tapping of her walking stick again and looked down. She was on the path. 

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Darwyn’s jaw grew slack, and as he started to ask any of the many questions in his head, they all rushed out at once, leaving him speechless. 

“You weren’t looking,” she told him.

“But I was,” he protested. 

“At the wrong place,” she corrected with ease, as if she knew that was what he was going to say. 

Defeated, his shoulders fell. He would need to do better than this. 

The old woman clucked her tongue. “You might as well come this way then. Walk with me a bit.”

He did not want to. He was embarrassed. If not outright mortified at his mistake. And he did not know who this woman was. Asking for her name was deceptively simple but beyond him, and the more pressing one was how it was she ended up out there. Then again, she could have lived nearby. It really wasn’t his business. His business was retrieving a book, and walking that path was part of it.

Darwyn tried to muffle a sigh and began walking towards her, but by then, the old woman had already started, walking with an unexpected quickness given her twisted frame. With a bit of effort, it only took a few steps for him to catch up with her. And when he did, without looking at him, she promptly said to him, “It’s not so bad, you know?”

Darwyn looked up towards where the sky had to be, beyond the thick branches and leaves. Did she mean the weather, he wondered. Or the fact the path was gone. Neither was so bad. Both situations could have been worse. At least he had been rescued, although he should really think about how it was she managed to do as much. Walking without these answers wasn’t so bad either. It wasn’t like this woman was a threat to him.

“What you did,” she then said, and his opinion of her potential changed. “To be an archivist.”

He stopped and began to stammer again, but the woman in her old age would have none of it. 

(New music fades in)

“I see more than you think. An eye like this,” she gestured upwards, “has a new perspective.”

“What can you see,” he asked.

“What you let yourself see. What you focus on. Your mistakes. But they aren’t so bad.”

Mouth ajar, Darwyn could not speak, and at that, the old woman smiled. The muscles of her face took their position uneasily. It had simply been too long, but they managed it in time. He looked into her discolored eye again and only through this small bit of acknowledgment did he feel small pricks on his skin, much like one does not feel their shirt until they give themselves permission to do so. 

“Who are you?” he asked.

“Who are you?” she asked back. “A young man who went after what he wanted. Only to get caught up on his failings. Mistakes in the present and perceived ones in the past. Never mind that you are an apprentice, and it is your job to learn. And how can you learn but through mistakes?”

“Should I not just know?” he dared to reply. That was what he had assumed was required of him. 

“My dear, when you were born you only knew how to breathe and how to cry. Scream, in fact. That’s all we come into this world with. The rest comes bit by bit.”

Darwyn’s mind was blank. Her words made sense, but the urge to brush them aside remained.

“You are not born the person you want to be. What is the point in that? What would the point of life be?”

“I don’t know.”

“Because there’s nothing to know. Plenty to dream but nothing to know.”

Darwyn carefully considered her words. Life is motion. Life is story. Life is narrative. He had written out those words too, but when he did so, a year or two before, they had not taken hold. 

As if she read his thoughts, the old woman added. “Life is less about the mistakes of the past and more about the things to come. In that, some mistakes, yes. Some celebrations. But you will be better. As will everything about you.”

“How can you be so sure?” Darwyn whispered.

“Because you will want it. And you have proven that you get what it is you want. A skill many do not possess.”

He began to speak again, but he stopped himself. 

“You will be fine,” she whispered. “If you permit yourself to be fine.”

“So I’m the problem,” he asked more loudly. But it was not really a question. It was a way of holding onto the views he had used to define himself. It was a way to fight change. As unwise as it was to do so.

“No, you are the solution.”

He had heard that before. Master Bartolo had said it to him once. There were follow up questions then and now, but before Darwyn could ask one, he turned and the woman was gone. The path remained below him, and so he could keep walking. What else was there for him to do? 

(Beep. New music starts)

Cassandra’s Tales and Truths is a production of Miscellany Media Studios. It is written, edited, produced, and performed by MJ Bailey with music from the Sounds like an Earful music supply. Transcripts can be found at oracleofdusk.online. That’s one word. Oracleofdusk.online. Thanks!