The sound of water gently lapping at a shore is the first thing Charlotte hears upon waking.
Overhead, she can see a sky full of brilliant stars. There are no sun and moon, but the night sky is enough to let her see clearly.
She’s lying on her back. Grass is beneath her. She puts her hands down, levers herself up into a sitting position, and looks around.
She sits beside a lake - or what might be a very placid sea. The beach is a mixture of rock and dirt. Here and there, she can see brooks feeding their water into the lake.
She turns to look in the other direction, to look upland and see the source of this water and what else might be here, and sees the Stag.
The Stag, she guesses, is just taller than a telephone pole’s height at its shoulders. Rather than a pair of symmetrical antlers, it has a single antler growing from the middle of its forehead, something like a unicorn’s. But that horn branches and spreads like a stag’s antlers. The branching reaches up and up, somehow, becoming fuzzy and impossible to view properly, until those branches become the stars in the sky. The Stag itself glows with the same light as the stars, making it clear that this impression is not accidental.
Charlotte rises to her feet, uncertain of what should happen next.
The Stag seems to be watching her. She cannot imagine such a being having any feeling of uncertainty. Is it waiting for something? For her?
If so, there’s no reason for her to be rude.
She approaches, and watches its enormous shaggy head droop down to keep her in its line of sight.
“I don’t know if you can understand or respond. Nevertheless, please permit me to introduce myself. My name is Charlotte Palmer. I don’t know where I am, or how I was brought here. I mean no harm. I simply wish to orient myself, and find my way back to my friends and associates.”
The Stag bobs its head slightly. Charlotte isn’t sure whether to take this as acknowledgement or simply a natural gesture. But it also turns, slow as a glacier, mindful to not trample her in the process, and begins walking upland. Charlotte follows.
She finds Harold the Fleet and Leah Snow tending crops on a patch of land.
Nearby there is a circular area with a fire-pit in the middle. Beyond it are a trio of buildings - a barn, a shed, and a modest house.
The pair see the approach of the Stag first, then look down and spot her as well. They abandon their tasks and rush toward her.
They don’t hug her - quite - but do come as close to it as Charlotte seems comfortable. Leah grins, and Harold looks relieved.
“I’m so glad you’re both okay,” Charlotte says, without even a greeting - she too feels the rush of strong emotion at seeing comrades thought lost. But her present situation prompts her to ask an immediate followup. “Where is this place?”
Leah gestures up at the celestial creature accompanying Charlotte. “The Time Stag here seems to be in charge, but we don’t know if we can communicate with him or not, even now. Aside from that… it ain’t reality, that’s for sure.”
In demonstration, she holds up her arms. Charlotte remembers seeing her cybernetic augmentations before, when she was piloting the Garuda - she was physically plugged into the vehicle. Now, there’s nothing but healthy human flesh. Or what looks to be it.
“I have no access to magic, no great speed here,” Harold adds. “Yet I feel no difference. It is the sensation of astral projection, but there is no corpus left behind and no silver cord anchoring me.”
Charlotte tilts her head. “The Time Stag? Who gave it this name?”
Leah points, and Charlotte looks along the line of perspective she creates. Across the lake, she can now see a promontory. An old stone tower rises from it.
“The Archetype,” Leah explains. “She’s got us working the ol’ farmland over here, but she should be visiting later.”
The woman gestures up at the Stag. “‘Time Stag’ makes sense though. That one uni-antler thing. Branches off into infinity, you know? Like timelines. Every choice a branch.”
“Who is the Archetype?” asks Charlotte, now full of curiosity.
“I think she’s you,” Harold says with a shrug and a wry smile.
Manny is telling the story of the Captain’s map.
“Maps be the keys to success in my day. Ye map the hazards and the opportunities ye find, and thus have ye advantage over others not familiar with the waters. Where the wind is becalmed and ships may not sail. Where the sea be too strong, or the storms be too great, and one’s sails will not survive. Where fresh water and fruit may be found. Ye have no idea how shocking this ‘GPS’ and ‘Google Earth’ be to one such as I.”
“De la Cosa sailed with Columbus and Balboa in their pillaging of the New World. His map be completed around 1500. Caudrelier and Pigafetta sailed under Magellan. They wrote their own account, which was seized by Pope Clement VIII and placed in the Vatican’s secret archives. Pigafetta had fought at the side of the Knights of Rhodes against the Barbary pirates, and knew their secrets too.”
“Henry Every, arch-pirate, granted the Cap’n a map seized from the Grand Mughal vessels - they be an empire that occupied that land today called India. That map contained many secrets, but lacked many keys to its deciphering. Secrets of sailing safely upon seas most serious, ye see.”
“The Cap’n came into possession of both these maps, and others of similar standing. His great scheme was to pretend there be only one map, and to create many false ones besides. The Cap’n was many things, and smithing and crafting of cunning things was one of his many talents. He concocted an oversized scroll case which contained these maps, true and false, and would divulge different maps depending on the arrangement of tiny mechanisms upon the case. Thus could he deceive anyone who thought to steal into his quarters and take a glimpse of the map.”
The skull utters a low cunning chuckle. “Such as myself, which is how I know of these things.”
“His genius let him see the correspondences between these maps - to decipher the connections. That this mysterious symbol be this island, that strange text be this landmark, and so forth. Thus did he learn many secrets. We are now bound for the first of these.”
The Garuda is flying along the coast of Spain. They pass by the island of Gaztelugatxe, connected to the mainland by a beautiful stone bridge and topped by an ancient church.
Manny grows excited. “There it be! There it be. It still stands. God bless it. Had I a heart, it would be warmed.”
Mini-Jason tilts the Garuda slightly, circling the site from the air, and the others look out to study it.
Manny resumes his thread of narrative. “The site we be visiting be two days–”
Jason laughs. “We’re fifteen minutes away, buddy.”
The old pirate turns, somehow managing to look surprised and pleased despite being merely a skull.
Charlotte kneels beside Leah and Harold. Her hands make the motions, assisted by the simple farming tools at hand. Dig a trench, plant a seed, cover the seed, water the soil. Move to the next piece of the plot.
“What are we planting here?” she asks.
“Dunno,” Leah says. “Universes. Timelines. Probably something super significant. Sure the hell ain’t regular crops.”
“How do you know that?” Charlotte asks curiously.
“We plant crops in the morning. They grow quickly enough to be harvested by nightfall.” Harold points toward the barn. Indeed, Charlotte can see the signs of previous harvests stacked up on pallets inside.
She turns back to Harold. “Wait. Morning? Night? How can you tell?”
“We noticed different things and put 'em together,” Leah explains. “My thing was that weather vane there.”
Charlotte looks. Atop the house, there is indeed a weather vane - a rooster hammered out of sheet metal, twisting and turning as the wind’s directions change. Beneath it are cardinal directions, similarly worked from metal. North, south, east, and west.
Leah grins. “I feel like a right fool for missing the other half.”
Harold swells with pride, and points down. In spite of the starry night filling the skies above, Charlotte realizes that the trio are casting shadows, and looks sharply up at Harold.
“The Sun rises in the east and sets in the west, yes?” he says with a smile. “In my world, magic is a potent force, able to twist mundane reality by the wizard’s will, but its luminaries walk the same paths as in your existence. I watched our shadows change and vanish.”
“Inconsistent… yet familiar,” muses Charlotte aloud. “Like the field here. This way of farming is the way it was done in my time.”
My time. The phrase somehow pushes at her thoughts, and she reflects aloud as she works.
“This was the way of it, for my people. My family, our neighbors. Our ancestors. Later, I learned that the peoples who lived in America before the white settlers had a complex and harmonious system of managing the land. They used animals, rain, even fire to sculpt the land and make it flourish. To us, farming was a form of dominance. Land was wealth. Crops were as much a product as a way to eat and live.”
“And then…” She turns the next phrase over and over in her mind. “Then I died. And woke up in a new era. And learned how much of what I thought I knew was mistaken. Or ignorant. The willful ignorance of people who wanted to use the land, or the simple lack of knowledge that science and progress would amend.”
“I was shaped by my time. Given memories that still control my thinking. Then shown how much I did not know. I struggled to learn. Now, I am in a new place, and must learn anew once again. Are my memories of the 21st century now equally a hindrance, if this is where we will live our lives?”
Leah pats Charlotte on the shoulder gently, then returns to her own work. “We’re gonna make it home. Everyone deserves to be home. Whatever ‘home’ means to them.”
The Garuda has flown west along the Spanish coast. Finally Mini-Jason spots the landmark Manny called out, and banks toward it.
At first the skull seems disappointed. “The Roman lighthouse be no more, I see,” he mutters.
Jason checks the Garuda’s onboard map. Although they’re literally in a different universe than where the craft originated, not everything will have changed. “Faro de Cabo de Lastres. Lighthouse of Cape Lastres,” he announces.
Manny offers his story in a soft, reverent tone. “The story the Cap’n told is of a pirate ship, laden with treasure cruelly taken. A lad of only fifteen climbed the outside of the old Roman edifice in the dark and the rain. He fought with the fareros - the lighthouse keepers - and extinguished the flame. Deprived of their beacon, the pirates foundered on the rocks. They dragged their treasure to a cave for concealment, but were slaughtered to a man by Spanish soldiers as they tried to flee cross country. As for the lad - he fell from the tower to his death.”
Daph tilts her head, then speaks up. “It was for revenge,” she says, sounding uncertain and yet convinced she must speak. “The pirates had killed his family. He had nothing left. He knew what he was doing. He couldn’t do anything else, but he did that much.”
She looks around the cabin awkwardly and taps the side of her head with a finger. “Data dump from ol’ Vengy McRevengeface. He loves this shit.”
Bodark nods approvingly. “Do what is in your reach, then die. Young man is hero. Will drink to him.”
Maury speaks up next. “Sonder. It’s a word that means the realization that everyone you meet has an inner life as rich and vivid as yours. It’s easy for us to think of ‘the tide of history’ and just chalk it up to kings and nations doing their thing while the faceless masses toil away in the background. But everyone has a life. Everyone’s got hopes and dreams and feelings. And then… those lives just sort of… go away. Nobody remembers them. Maybe nobody could remember them. Too many stories, too much detail…”
Daph replies, more sad than surprised at her own god-given knowledge. “It’s frustrating. The power I have is for revenge. Despite the Eigendrakes destroying so much, taking so much, you know… They’re just trying to preserve those stories. They’re doing what they can to keep those old lives from being lost. But, you know, even if it’s forgotten, things like revenge matter to people. We just can’t let a story go until it ends, even if it ends badly.”
Her mouth twists into a slanted grimace. “Makes me wonder what I can do to contribute on a mission like this, yannow? Is it enough to just remember?”
Manny smiles. “The Cap’n thought the same.” He turns back to the viewscreen, where Mini-Jason is lowering the Garuda to a secret cave, well screened by the rocky cliffs of the Spanish coast.
The team navigates through a narrow passage. Maury’s wheelchair, gifted to her by Otto and the other Newmans, is able to transform into a full-body exoskeleton and let her move through even the most difficult segments of the cave system. She leads the way, with the lights on board the exo-suit illuminating the path.
There are twists and turns and multiple routes to choose from, but Manny steers the group from his centuries-old memories. And in time they reach an interior chamber. Graffiti in multiple languages has been carved into the walls. There are a few coins, hinting at what must have once been a great treasure. There is a cross, planted in the fashion of a memorial or headstone, but without a grave to accompany it.
Maury leans down, and the cameras on the exo-suit track her head movements to capture what she’s looking at. She reads an inscription carved into the cross.
“Carlos. Whose ascent to Heaven brought devils to hell.”
She looks back at Manny for an explanation.
“The lad who did the deed,” the skull says quietly. “Cap’n gave him a memorial here. Took what treasure there was. Some to his crew, to keep 'em happy. Much to the village the lad hailed from.”
He looks about the cavern, and floats closer to a coin resting in the dust. And as his head tilts, the others can see a spectral hand reach out from where Manny’s body would be, and take hold of a phantom replica of the coin.
“Tis only one doubloon, Cap’n,” he says aloud, speaking to nobody. “A token of remembrance.”
Silence, and then:
“Aye aye cap’n. Then… a remembrance of another kind.”
The ghostly hand sets the coin gently down, matching its current place on the cave floor.
Manny rises, and presents a newly formed shoulder for inspection. Thereon is a tattoo of a coin, with a symbolic flame in the center of it. “Thus did I resolve to remember through ink. I’d take naught but memories out of this place, and pay Charon’s obol to let the brave lad pass his way through the afterlife.”
He looks down at his newly regained arm. “Perhaps that be what a ghost is meant for. The forgotten demanding the living remember them.”