Chapter One
OuroborosChapter One
Books upon books, articles to articles, sheets of stacked paper filled every shelf and nook in the room. A veritable graveyard of once green trees now serving the purpose of written language. Some texts were more noble than others, some scribbles exceedingly more pointless than many. Musty and without proper circulation, the air was stale with the smell of old newspapers and dry flakes of paper.
Two large arched windows with squared grilles let in ample light from one side of the room leaving the far corners to be illuminated with faint and old light bulbs. The afternoon sun scorched the full archive room, and waltzing into this already stacked room came two new boxes full of paper and cardboard.
“And where am I supposed to place these?”
Another tower of boxes followed the first one into the room bumping into it, bringing them both to a stop before a head streaming with sweat peaked out from the side.
“Just find some floor space, you can sort them wherever right?”
“Sort them now? In this heat?”
“That’s what you get for only working part time here, Joy. Now come on my arms are tired!”
Joy moved further in the room with her first tower of boxes, lowering them carefully onto the ground before the second set of boxes followed her placed on top of her stack.
Both attempted to catch their breath as Joy looked at her co-worker with misery and pleading eyes.
“Come on, Hyun-seok please…”
“Hey, not my orders. The sooner you start the sooner you’ll be done. I’ll bring the fan here and bring you some ice tea. You get started,” he said as he turned around and waved, quickly removing himself from the potential sorting of boxes.
Joy slumped onto the chair by the only desk in the room, a desk that was also stacked with papers. The air-conditioner in this room had broken a couple of months earlier and its repair wasn’t ordered until a few days earlier as nobody visits the archive room very often, especially not for prolonged time periods.
The sound of shuffling boxes and paper filled the room as Joy began her search through the stacks. Soon enough Hyun-seok brought a fan and a drink much to the gratitude of Joy and she continued toiling in the heat for a while. It didn’t take long however for almost all of her energy to have been sapped away from her and she was unable to continue organizing.
Most of the material she read through was old articles from her newspaper as well as other publications, mundane old things. There were scientific journal articles used for reference and some maps and assortments, as well as a few books and works of fiction. Almost everything was found online nowadays that physical paper copies were becoming obsolete in most everyday instances. But occasionally they would have to visit the archives or a library as not everything had been put online, especially not old and obscure material.
As repetitive and tiring as the sorting of the archives could be, she found joy in reading and finding old exciting new references and sorting through information. It was the bread and butter of her work as an investigative journalist and she was one of the few who came into the archives, which is partially the reason that she was always given the duty of sorting and archiving it properly. There were amazing stories hidden in the mundane scribbles, a shining diamond hiding in a pile of mud.
The heat had completely rendered her inert and lethargic and for a few minutes she stared off at the ceiling, debating whether she would call it a day and come back to finish this off tomorrow even though she wasn’t assigned to come in. She worked part time at the Eummo Newspaper coming in a few days of the week and the rest of her time she was a freelance investigative journalist. This open schedule allowed her lots of freedom to decide her work hours and timing, especially since her contracted hours to the newspaper weren’t fixed days, merely a running monthly quota of hours she had to reach every month. It allowed her the freedom to pursue interesting stories and usually she would end up selling her stories to Eummo News anyway, or find it published in one of the monthly’s they produced.
The limp hand dipped into the box next to her one last time, fiddling in an attempt to catch something and then pulled out pieces of paper attached to one another. She lifted it enough to give it a side glance as it hung over the box.
“Dame T. hat mir gesagt das Zeit ist nähe. Dass diesmal der Zyklus unterbrochen werden kann und ich glaube ihr. Wie hat viele Verbündete gesammelt so können wir der Leere (Kult) aus der Welt auslöschen. Wir können die Rückkehr von verhindern...”
Her eyes blinked a couple times gathering moisture and to refocus on the paper. What was this weird text on the bottom of this page? Was this German? All she could recognize was the word “kult”. That stood for “cult”.
She brought the page closer to her and inspected it. It was definitely written in German. A fragile, old piece of parchment, handwritten. The small excerpt was the only thing on the page and above it most of the text was spoiled. She looked at the few other pages of the same kind stuck together. More text on a few pages some of it having bled from water and illegible. On the last page there was a drawing.
It was of a very beautiful woman, the details on her face and the penmanship was outstanding. She looked white, European. Whoever drew it had managed to bring her to life - the eyes full of soul, the faint smile gracing her lips, looking out into the distance at something pleasant, something that brought her peace. She wore a wide brimmed sun hat and a frilled linen shirt, clearly dressed in a manner of comfort and relaxation. Joy flipped the drawing to find a text on the back side.
“Zu meiner geliebten und schönsten Dame T. Der Rest meines Lebens möchte ohne dich schmerzlich leer sein.
Mit grenzenloser Liebe,
Herr Bauerschaft”
On another page there were two symbols drawn both of them with text. The first symbol was of an intricate lock that almost looked like a tree with women around it embracing each other. The accompanied text said “Ewige Damen”. The second symbol had what appeared to be a woman with frazzled long hair half covering a gaunt face, with just the eyes piercing through and surrounding it spines and thorns wrapping and warping around its neck. It read “Kinder der Leere (Kult)”.
The second symbol must be the symbol of the cult she read earlier. The other one was a complete mystery, she needed a German dictionary. Joy fished her phone out and typed into an online translator the two names found on the symbols. The cult’s name, Kinder der Leere translated to ‘Children of the Void’. Now that was an interesting and ominous name. The corner’s of spread further into a smile as excitement built within her. This could end up being an amazing story.
The second name Ewige Damen translated to Eternal Ladies. Even that had a great ring to it. Were these two symbols for different groups or the same? Were they opposed to each other? Who was this beautiful woman in the drawing? Was she one of the Eternal Ladies, or the “mother” of these children? One thing was certain though; she was hooked on the potential of this story and needed to find more.
The exhaustion and lethargy from earlier completely disappeared and she was invigorated like never before to dive into these boxes to find more of the missing pages. She shifted and lifted pages, stacking the unrelated papers to the side while trying to find more. Unending sorting continued a good couple of hours, and although sweat streamed from her forehead with her long black hair sticking to her scalp, she continued uninterrupted.
Oranges and yellows pushed their way in through the window as the afternoon went on making way for the evening. Joy had managed to go through all the boxes and find twelve more pages of the same variety to a total of seventeen. All of them were written in German, all of them handwritten by the same handwriting. She would have to take them home to study them more.
Her meandering mind was interrupted by the sound of her phone ringing.
“Joy.”
“Hey, where you at?”
“Oh, Mina. How’s your German?”
“My what? German?”
“Yeah I’m coming home with some text that needs translating. You home already?”
“Does a bear poop in the woods even if it’s Wednesday?”
“Does a bear what…?"
“I know German, you should know this. As the assistant professor of medieval Europe I’d be pretty useless if I didn’t. Come bring your text I’ll have a look.”
“You making dinner before I get home?”
“You make dinner. I translate.”
“....fine. I’ll see you in a bit. Byeeeeee!”
Finishing the phone call Joy wrapped and filed the pages neatly into a folder and placed it in her shoulder bag before shutting off all electronics in the room and rushing off out of the office. She had translating to do and mysteries to solve.
By the time Joy reached home it was dark as she unfortunately lived across the city from the newspaper’s offices. She waltzed in through the front door expecting a smell of food before being disappointed and remembering she had to sort dinner tonight. Time for takeout. There was no way she was sitting by the stove when they had interesting text to solve.
The lights were on and her housemate and best friend Mina was sitting on the floor with a pillow, eating away at snacks and watching TV. Joy snatched the takeout menu from the kitchen side and dropped it on her lap before plopping on the couch behind her. Uninterrupted by this, Mina kept eating giving a glance at the menu then lifting her hand showing the order number with her fingers while Joy tapped the order into her phone in silence. This was a common ritual for the two. Working hard and long hours often left them too tired to be bothered to cook themselves.
“So what’s this text you wanted me to translated?” Mina got up from the floor making her way to the dining table, a narrow three seater jutting out from the side of the wall. Their officetel studio apartment was rather small so they had to be efficient with their space.
Joy followed suite and sat across her pulling the pages out of her bag and giving them to Mina. The page on top was the first one that Joy had found in the box which had piqued her initial interest.
Mina slipped the pages out of the cover and began reading that first page.
“Well? I could understand the word ‘kult’ in there.”
“This top part is illegible with the way the inks run, but the bottom part says;
Lady T. told me the time was near. That this time the cycle could be broken, and I believe in her. We have gathered many allies enough to wipe all of the damned cultists from the face of the earth. We can forever prevent the return of...
Then it stops and the rest of the text has bled out.”
“The cycle could be broken. Cycle of vengeance?”
“Perhaps,” Mina looked up at the focused expression of Joy, a small smile curling on her lips at her concentrated look. “Also allies, wiping out the cultists and preventing the return of something. This is some serious text you have here. Where did you find it?”
“It came in these new boxes we received into the archives. I think they were one Choi Kwang-soo’s private collection. He passed away recently and many of his collection were willed to us. He used to work at the newspaper apparently.”
Mina eyed the paper closer touching it and feeling the fabric, trying to get a sense of the age of the paper and the text in it.
“Any dates on these papers?”
“Unfortunately no.”
“Well, I’d say these are not medieval but definitely renaissance period. The language and paper quality would suggest that.”
“Now that is something. I didn’t really go through all in detail but I looked at these other two in particular,” Joy said pulling out the next couple of pages, the one with the symbols and the drawing of the lady. “The translating app gave me two names for these symbols; Eternal Ladies and Children of the Void. There’s a text behind the drawing that I didn't’ translate however.”
“She’s beautiful…” Mina gasped looking at the drawing, her eyes focusing on her face.
“What’s the text say?”
Mina flipped the page around translating it to Joy. “To my dearest and fairest Lady T. The rest of my life will be painfully empty without you. With boundless love, yours truly. Mr. Bauerschaft”
“Seems this lady T. was this Mr. Bauerschaft’s love. Although I wonder why her name is only an initial? This clearly implies they were definitely parting ways though.”
“It could be unrequited love by a stalker who didn’t know her name?”
“Or…” Joy rolled her eyes at Mina before continuing, “she is part of one of these symbols groups and her identity is meant to be kept secret.”
“Ahh, maybe that too.”
“You watch too many weird drama’s.”
“Shut up.”
The two kept staring at the drawing entranced by the lady. The longer they looked at her the more it called to them. Her smile and look of fulfilment and content was beckoning and calming. Their stare was only broken by the ringing of the doorbell. Food was here.
“I’ll…” Joy finally looked up from the drawing at Mina,” I’ll get the food, you start translating the rest of these pages."
She shoved the file to Mina before going downstairs to get the food and returned soon to find her engrossed in the pages. The two enjoyed their dinner while carefully rifling through them, Mina translating the text while Joy wrote everything down with her added notes and thoughts on the matter.
Dinner gorged and the day fast approaching midnight the translations of the pages was complete. Although they had a total of seventeen pages, some of them were drawings and diagrams of places or items while a lot of them had suffered damage from elements; the ink bleeding and pages being torn. This left them with barely two standard A4 sheets of translated text.
Glancing over the texts on Joy’s laptop they attempted to organize them into some coherent order, to get a chronology of events and unravel a story. It was clear that these pages had come off at random at different page locations from a book making it difficult to piece together a timeline, especially without any dates present. They were certain that the first page Joy had found was towards the end if not last, and the picture was also most likely in the end of this story, a farewell in the face of the events to unfold as described.
Even with the very disjointed narrative and jumping timeframe they were able to gather a timeline. A lot of it read like a journal, with a narrative on topics of discussion and the environment, weather and how the author personally felt about things. There were two other initials that popped up once each; I. and M., but T. was repeated most often. They could infer that the Lady T. in the drawing was the same, and that he was closest to her. He was in love with her.
No dates or years were mentioned in any of the pages but the timeline, as far as they could get from the pages was; they were in a private house in Vienna for much of the time and at some point they moved to Constantinople, modern day Istanbul. There they gathered allies, or it was a hideout of some sort.
Lady T. and Herr Bauerschaft were part of the Ewige Damen, or Eternal Ladies. They opposed a cult known as Children of the Void. The purpose of their cult and their goal wasn’t clear, but the Eternal Ladies faction was zealously opposed to them. A quick internet search revealed no information on the surface about these two. Either they were a very secretive organisation or this whole thing was a work of fiction.
“You know, I’m a specialist of medieval Europe but not too familiar with the renaissance period. I could ask my friend Wendy, she’s the resident renaissance expert,” Mina sighed as she distanced herself from the stack of papers on the floor. At some point during the evening they had moved from the table to the living room floor giving them more space to spread the papers out to see the whole picture.
“Oh yeah I remember Wendy! Sure, if you think it will help.”
“I’m certain it will. With that in mind,” Mina got up from the floor and began cleaning their takeaway food from the floor, ”I will go sleep. I’ll message Wendy to see if she has time tomorrow to meet at the university.”
As Mina cleaned the rest of the mess up and went to bed Joy stayed a moment longer to linger among the notes and papers, her imagination running wild with all the possibilities that this story could unfold. She whispered a wish and prayer that this wasn’t some bad fiction that she had uncovered, but that she was truly after some old secret society.
Her eyelids began to weigh on her and she cleared the papers up before heading off to bed herself. With any luck they would get a breakthrough tomorrow.
----
How long had it been?
The delivery was supposed to arrive over half an hour ago and yet here she was stuck waiting for it after hours. Sometimes she felt like a glorified assistant. No matter the credentials and Master’s degrees she held, some old wrinkled fart still treated her like all she was good for was fetching coffee. No matter what anybody said she was going to record these hours and claim the over time. If they wished to pay her 45,000 won an hour to wait on a delivery then it was up to them.
The wait for the delivery today was however filled with more anxiety than usual. Her twin brother hadn’t messaged her since yesterday after lunch which was highly unusual. The two still shared an apartment as rent in Seoul was too high to live alone and the two were inseparable as twins tend to be. They would keep in touch throughout the day and talk about everything, but now uncharacteristically so, her brother hadn’t messaged her in over 24 hours nor had he come home the night before.
Maybe he had spent the night with a friend, or a “special” friend and his phone had run out of battery. She tried to keep thinking positive thoughts but such a long time of no contact was so uncharacteristic of him it made her worry.
She dialled in her brother’s number and attempted to call again. No response once more. Luckily for her she didn’t have much time to dwell on this as the buzzer to the office rang; the delivery was finally here. Letting the delivery man inside she guided him over to the correct spot where the machine would be assembled as the delivery man, an older uncle in his fifties apologized for the delays. He was clearly in a hurry since as soon after the box was in its place he quickly untied and gathered his belongings before hurrying out the same way. Poor man still had a long evening ahead of him.
Slumping on the chair next to the delivery box she strummed the cable ties around the box. This would require more than her to unpack and besides her job was just to wait for the delivery; they could unpack and build it tomorrow. As the last in the office and laboratory she had to still go around making sure all the lights and other non-essential machines were off and check that the cultivation shelves were at optimum temperature and power before leaving.
Finishing the final rounds she turned off the lights in the last room when her fingers curled up on their own and she gasped for a single breath of air. The fingers cramped further before straightening out, straining her muscles as if the fingers were attempting to fly off her hand as a shock and explosion of energy ran through her spine, numbness taking over her head and then her whole body.
Irene leaned on the wall but her legs gave out quickly and she fell on her knees, trying to hold her head with her outstretched fingers as searing pain coursed through her feeling like she was being filled to the brim with something. She twitched and spasmed on the floor, sweat forming on her brow, her teeth gritting harder with blood trickling from her gums as the pain grew with the feeling of fullness. Her mind was flooded with images shambled and disjointed - more and more images just pouring in, feelings and thoughts. Whole lives.
The intensity ramped up as her body began to shake more violently in a similar appearance not unlike having a seizure. Alone in the dark hallway of her laboratories she couldn’t even scream in anguish as the air in her lungs had been flushed out and the spasms prevented her from taking in a breath. The only thought in her mind was that this was it the end of her life. She was having some form of a and here she would die alone.
At the peak of her anguish and terror, her overwhelming sense and dread of death and not being able to say goodbye to her friends and to her brother, it stopped, and with it came clarity as everything that had been poured into her was organized into coherent memories.
She remembered. She remembered hundreds of lifetimes, languages, skills and professions, people and locations.
She remembered the Cycle.
It hadn’t been broken for good. They must have failed to end the Cycle the last time and since she had been awoken it meant so had all the Daughters souls been awakened as well as The Door’s.
The countdown to the inevitable attempt at sacrifice, the summoning of the plague and doom of the world had been started once again and they would have to race against time to gather themselves and find out where the sacrifice was to be made.
Irene sighed a relief since at least this time with all the modern technology travelling and communication wouldn’t be an issue; however neither would it be for the Cult. The same advantages of technology assisted them. She was also in a new body and a completely new group of people and now had added Korean as a new language and culture to an ever growing set of skills and languages she knew.
Irene attempted to move and lift herself up from the fetal position her body had curled into when the pain from the awakening had struck her, however none of her muscles responded to any of her commands. She would have to lay there for a moment for her body to recover.
She could never get used to the feeling and the pain that it caused. For a few awakenings before this one she had felt that every time they re-awakened with the start of a new Cycle it was just slightly more intense, just a little bit more painful, as one new lifetime of memory was added to the ever growing list of lives they had lived so far.
The one thing she was thankful for was the immediacy of the memory recovery. That the moment she was fully awakened, she remembered everything immediately and her mind had clarity from the start. It would be a terrible thing if for the first couple of days her mind was lost and broken too, although thinking about how the pain from each awakening had been increasing it was a distinct possibility that soon it would start affecting their mind.
Categorizing her thoughts as her mind raced through all the recently acquired memories, they almost instantly lingered on the one person she cared for the most. Where was she now? What did she look like in this life? What was her name this time? How much time together would they have?
It felt like they had just parted ways not moments ago, but she knew it to be a false sensation, that the last time they had met was many years ago. A whole other lifetime. A whole other life.
How long had it been?
Comments