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Even later after midnight! I'm very tired!
This is the fill for Day 15: Ancient History.
Continuing the immortality plotline from the "Immortal" and "Writer" fills, though this is a bit of a jump down the timeline.
(While this is loosely, loosely based on parts of my experience on an archaeology dig as an undergrad, I took lots of liberties on how one would be organized and such. It's an alternate universe; it can work how I want.)
Arrival on the island felt… momentous in a way that she’d fully expected, yet hadn’t been able to prepare for. It had been such a long time. Impossibly long. She’d never thought she’d be back at all.
Nothing was the same. That was a given. Nothing was as different as it could have been.
There was no village. There were no familiar trails to find where the village had been. But no new cities had been built on top of it. The trees all looked the same, just in new places. Flowers she never thought she’d see again bloomed in the undergrowth. The air felt right. It smelled like home. If someone had asked her to name those things, or even to try and remember them, she would have told them she couldn’t, that it had been too long. Now the familiarity was like a kick to the chest.
“I find it very strange,” the man said, in a tone that made it clear he meant something other than ‘strange’, “that you would waste so many resources pushing this extremely niche, fringe theory of yours.”
Kairi took a deep breath. She’d certainly been waiting long enough for this opportunity. One more jerk attempting to preemptively discredit her was no real barrier at all.
“I’m not sure what seems so niche about this, sir.” She hoped her tone of voice sufficiently conveyed that she’d also like to be using a different word. “Within the diaspora that we’ve traced back to this one small group, almost all of them have stories of an ancestral homeland over the ocean.”
“Stories,” he scoffed.
“Yes, stories. Stories that date back prior to the existence of physically recorded history. Within many cultures, oral histories have proven to be far more accurate than they were ever given credit for. Not to mention that we do have written records, albeit ones that were recorded centuries later, when written history became an option.”
“I’m aware of the handful of documents you have. Pieces that date over a span of multiple centuries, recorded on completely different materials in styles from completely different cultures. Sounds like an exercise in forgery to me. And it’s not like this proposed mystery island culture has any continuity that would make written records useful as it is. You’re talking about a dead culture, if it’s one that ever even existed, and anything written centuries after the fact provides no proof about the culture itself or the veracity of the texts. You might as well be chasing fairy tales.”
Kairi did not grit her teeth. Nor did she launch into her prepared defenses about how yes, they had plenty of proof, including through DNA testing, that this ‘proposed’ culture had been very real. Not to mention that she just knew. Though ‘trust me, I remember’ wasn’t typically a very convincing argument to make in an academic setting.
“Well,” she said instead. “I guess maybe you’ll have to wait until the dig is over. If I don’t find anything, then you’re welcome to gloat about it. And when I do find exactly what I’m looking for, I know you won’t want to apologize, but I hope it eats at you.”
She picked up her bag, and left. It wasn’t the most professional of partings for a so-called colleague, but she didn’t want to waste any further time.
Arrival on the island felt… momentous in a way that she’d fully expected, yet hadn’t been able to prepare for. It had been such a long time. Impossibly long. She’d never thought she’d be back at all.
She hoped that none of her students noticed.
The dig was being conducted primarily by a team of graduate students, as part of their required fieldwork for the program. Kairi was here to supervise and guide. Everyone understood that this was a passion project for her, and if she seemed to be acting strangely, hopefully they’d assume it was that and nothing more.
Nothing was the same. That was a given. Nothing was as different as it could have been.
There was no village. There were no familiar trails to find where the village had been. But no new cities had been built on top of it. The trees all looked the same, just in new places. Flowers she never thought she’d see again bloomed in the undergrowth. The air felt right. It smelled like home. If someone had asked her to name those things, or even to try and remember them, she would have told them she couldn’t, that it had been too long. Now the familiarity was like a kick to the chest.
She tried to remember the landmarks that would have been there before. The hills and mountains had changed shapes, but in smaller ways.
“Let’s head this way,” Kairi said, pointing into the underbrush. “It’s most likely a village would have been built at the base of the mountain; that’s where we should start the survey. But for now, we’ll do a preliminary one on the way there.
Remember, everyone: flag anything out of the ordinary. If something looks like an artifact or a structure, mark it for now, and we’ll come back to it. Better a false positive than a missed one. Fan out a few feet apart from each other while we walk. We’ll set up a home base if we find a likely looking clearing. Failing that, we’ll make ourselves one.”
Some of the students rolled their eyes at what seemed like completely unneeded reminders of how to conduct a preliminary field survey, but everyone fell into line.
And the walk began.
Kairi was fairly certain they’d found the remnants of the village. The mountains looked correct from where it was. A near-horizon line she would have claimed not to remember, that had somehow never left her heart.
Luckily enough, they found enough in the way of artifacts scattered around—smoothed stones, broken pottery, a few individual beads—that she could justify her decision for it to be the first dig site without having to resort to “just a feeling” or making up some obscure historical reference.
They had to clear some land in order to set up a campsite, but that was easily accomplished. As was setting up tents and everything else they needed for the site. The group did a little more surveying of the village site, though that was the extent of what they did for the day. The first night would be spent easing into the camaraderie that would carry them through the rest of the dig. Days and nights would get harder the longer they spent out there, but it would be worth it in the end.
They made campfire foods and drank. They looked at the stars, in a more vibrant band above than most of them had ever seen before, spared any light pollution for hundreds of miles in every direction.
“So if this village is real,” one of the students asked. “Then do you think their gods are real, too?”
Kairi stilled for a moment, but didn’t let herself freeze. “What do you mean?”
“Well, most of the text fragments mention their gods, right? As protectors even after they lost the islands. So, do you think that’s real too?”
“I think the histories have some truth to them,” Kairi allowed. “Or at least truth in terms of what they believed. What do you think?”
The young man who’d originally spoken just shrugged. “I just want to know if there’ll be evidence of those gods, or whatever their original belief might have looked like. It doesn’t quite map to other ancient religions.”
“That’s true,” Kairi agreed.
One of the young women spoke up. “There was that one paper that proposed that it was infighting between the gods—or at least their priesthoods—that was the cause of the destruction of the islands. That the land god and the sky god fought over the sea goddess, and destroyed the island in the process.”
Talk about a niche, fringe theory… “I think most of the histories we do have a sense of were fairly clear that the destruction was due to external conquest.”
“It just seems like if you really did have multiple gods living in one little village, there’d be conflict. And conflict between gods would have to be extreme.”
“Is that inevitable?” Kairi asked. “Would two of them have to fight over the other? Couldn’t it be just as true that all three loved each other? Were in love? If you were an immortal among mortals, wouldn’t you want companionship from the only others like you?”
She wasn’t sure why she said it, as soon as she had. A little too revealing of her, honestly.
A few of the students seemed to at least consider the suggestion.
“I guess we’ll see what we find when we start the dig itself,” she said, before anyone could respond. “I’m off to bed for the night. Have a good night, and keep in mind just how early the morning is going to feel, all right?”
It was a small group, and they were students, so progress was relatively slow. That was fine. As Kairi had thought before even arriving, she’d been waiting long enough, and there was no reason to hurry now.
They found the evidence she knew they would, regarding the conquest of the islands. Weaponry of distinctly foreign styles in the ruins of homes burned to the ground, now left as only charred space in the ground and destroyed hearths.
She wasn’t sure if it was a comfort or not that there was no evidence their conquerors had ever managed to establish their own settlement on the island, unless it was somewhere far from the village. They would dig elsewhere on the island, and maybe she’d discover otherwise, but for now it looked like they’d destroyed everything and then left.
Today was a partial day at the site; they were getting a resupply shipment in. By boat was the only real option for anything. In a life or death emergency, they had a satellite phone and would be able to airlift someone out, but for the basic resupplies, it was by sea. Not the most efficient, but it was the least disruptive to the area, and that had been weighed as the more important consideration for the time being.
A few crew members helped to unload crates and bags, and then the students dragged them to the campsite. The boat took off shortly after.
Kairi was doing a last sweep of the beach area, making sure nothing had been dropped or fallen, when someone walked up behind her. She was ready to answer a student question, when instead, the person rushed forward and pulled her into a hug from behind.
She’d been half-ready to treat it like an assault, but instead immediately relaxed into the hug. “Sora?”
“Surprise!” Sora answered. “And bigger surprise.”
A second set of footsteps, followed by a second set of arms wrapping both of them in a hug.
“Riku?” that one came out incredulous. It had been… decades.
“Hey, Kairi.”
They let her go, and she turned to face them. They hadn’t changed. They looked the same as they always had.
“Riku and I ran into each other by mistake,” Sora explained. “I remembered that a couple years ago you’d told me about finding the islands, and that you were planning to lead an excavation here once you got the funding together. I had no idea you’d already left for it!”
“So you just thought you’d drop by?”
“Bribery can get you everywhere,” Riku said. “It’s good to see you.”
“It’s definitely been way too long,” she agreed.
Embarrassingly, tears stung her eyes. She flung herself forward to hug them again. It had been far too long. A few years since she’d seen Sora. Decades since she’d seen Riku. More than a century, she was pretty sure, since she’d seen them both together.
“It feels weird to be back here,” Sora said.
Kairi nodded. “I thought I’d forgotten so much. Then it all started coming back as soon as we arrived.”
“When Sora told me you’d set yourself up as an archeology professor, I was surprised. I shouldn’t have been, though.”
“It’s practically cheating.” She laughed, wiping tears from her cheeks. “It’s just frustrating when you know everyone is wrong about something you were there to see.”
“I can only imagine.” Riku smiled.
She took his hand, and Sora took his other hand, and she led them back toward camp. On the way, she explained how they’d started an excavation of the village. She planned to try and find all three of their temples next, but that would wait until they’d made a bit more progress where they were.
The students stared when she brought Riku and Sora back to camp with her.
“Who’ve you got with you, Miss Kairi?” one of them finally asked.
“Ah! These are some of my colleagues!” she said. “Not from our school, obviously. We’d collaborated on some research in the past, and they wanted very badly to get to see the site. We just hadn’t known it was going to work out, so they… decided to surprise me.”
That was enough for the students to shrug it off. Kairi had offered the students the rest of the day off, since they’d been at the dig like a full-time job, and they split off into small social groups, or went off alone for some solitude.
That suited her just fine. She dragged Riku and Sora back toward her tent. They had way too much to catch up on.
