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(31) Crackpot Eldritch Theories

"I'll explain when your friends get here," says Ember without lifting her head.

I take the same seat I did when I first came to this office. The deja vu makes me twitch. The desk this time is just as cluttered as it was that night, and Ember is making no attempts to clear it. Nor is it resource planning on the papers anymore. The map of Cape Morgan peeks out from underneath, but on top of it are notebooks and loose sheets and pencils and newspaper clippings and newspapers with holes in them and at least one napkin decorated with strings of symbols that look suspiciously Kjóll. Old Kjóll. The language of the Eyjarskeggi people who took their boats and vanished from their polar islands two millennia ago for reasons we still don't understand.

A tingle runs up my spine. Islands. Old Kjóll is another ocean-adjacent language.

The back door screams. A moment later, Ditzy strides into the room with flail cocked and a look like she's ready to gut anyone who's laid a finger on me. There's no need, but it warms me inside anyway. Patrick and Calico J creep in after her. The only seat left is the couch along the back wall, so all three take it, two of them fidgeting. Ditzy lets her flail's spiked ball settle on the floor with a manifest clink.

Only then does Ember lift her head. She begins to shuffle through the desk-top mess, pulling out newspaper clippings in particular. She examines each in turn. The stack in her hand has grown to half an inch when she finally selects one larger than the rest and hands it to me. The others gather round.

Antarctic Eyjarskeggi Discovery Has Historians Baffled

"This is not a hoax," says lead archaeologist.

You know something's going to be good when it needs to qualify itself as not-a-hoax before the first paragraph has even started. And by "good," I mean, "This is probably the last thing I want to be involved with, but if it saves the world, I might not have a choice."

The article beneath the heading reads like the plot of a tomb-raider movie. Receding ice in Antarctica reveals evidence of human habitation. Human habitation should not be there. Investigators investigate, call the timeline ridiculous, but the ruins don't care, and go right on existing. Pragmatics call it a hoax. Conspiracy theorists call it aliens. And then, of course, someone reads a word they really aren't supposed to, and a curse befalls the world.

They found a whole Eyjarskeggi village on the wrong side of the globe, three centuries after those people vanished from their homeland. It had houses and middens and all the trappings of human habitation, estimated to have been there for the better part of two decades. Yet here too, the people simply disappeared. The village seemed to have been abandoned in the middle of an average day. Pots on fires, plates on tables, small coins left in a pot by the door. There were no bones anywhere.

Besides subsistence living, the only clue to the village's purpose was a ten-foot-wide, perfectly round stone plinth carved from the bedrock in the middle of it. On that plinth was a word in the same script. It's the point in the article where I'd expect a picture of the thing, but there isn't one. Just a line saying all photos were withheld from publication by authorities after the whole investigative team abruptly went silent.

I check the date of the discovery. It was fifteen years—to the day—before Red Thursday.

Fifteen years. If this has something to do with the Redding, the timeline baffles me. It's too long... or is it? We've already found Redding in canned food. It must have been in there at the time of canning, then lain dormant until it manifested when the Redding made its move. Redding came up through the basement of this very house, but the house has no connection to the municipal water system—only a well. That means the stuff reached it through the groundwater. That can also take years.