009 – Saga I – 1066 – PART FIVE TRANSCRIPT

AUTHOR’S NOTE:

The inscribed parchment that the writer of this saga talks about was brought into the possession of the Conclave in 1253 after it was discovered over a hundred years prior through one of our people. It was said to have been found when the ruins of the church were raised for a new house of worship to be built in its stead. We know this not to be true, as you will too reader, as you continue reading.

 There was much confusion and mystery surrounding the parchment, and many considered it the ravings of a madman. This was mainly due to no one being able to understand the language it was written in. Many people attempted to understand it, from many different regions and places and all to no avail. Unlike the saga which is written in clear Anglo Saxon, the language of this parchment continues to be a mystery for all who try to read it. Fortunately, it came into the hands of one of the Conclave and was secreted away for safekeeping within our secret vaults. Our experts, including myself, scrutinized and studied it for many years, and while we believe we were able to understand certain parts of words ,the message as a whole still continues to dumbfound us. So it will remain in the safe keeping of the Conclave until the day the language may be understood. But for the sake of thoroughness and completion it is here reproduced in its entirety in this enigmatic language:

RECORDER’S NOTE:

Sorry to interrupt here, but if I don’t, you’re going to wonder why no one could understand the bloody language where it’s written in clear English when I reproduce it here. And that’s because the original creator of this note to the Ostium Network wrote it in code. A cipher I think it’s called. It looked like double Dutch to me when I saw it, but thanks to Zhang’s brilliance, they were able to apply their superior acumen and easily break the code and then provide me with a translation which was much more easily understandable, and I now return y0u to the Author’s Note and the translated and reproduced note forthwith.

AUTHOR’S NOTE CONTINUES:

Dear Ostium Network, you fucked up, adn fucked up real bad. I’m stuck here in the eleventh century. My name is Jonathan Frazier and I was sent back through a door in Ostium to document the Battle of Hastings and the aftermath. When I was scheduled to return through the Ostium door it didn’t work. You need to get me out of here. I want to go back to my time. Don’t fail me.

The note on the outside of the folded parchment, which eludes us just as the message does, is reproduced here:

Ostium Network. April 12th, 2155. 

We now return to the original words of the chronicler of the saga.

SAGA CONTINUES:

Upon my return to the town, I was greeted by friends and those I had grown close to as if I had been on an extremely short vacation. I explained I’d suffered and accident with my hand and gotten lost. I had not originally told anyone of what I was to do on my trip, but then I had also not expected to see any of these people again.

I let things settle down for a while; a full week in fact; getting back into the routine of things. BUt at the appointed time each day I made sure I was at the church, trying to see if the door would work this time, or if the message I had left for my future liberators had reached its intended target. After that week I stopped going permanently. It was too depressing and would really ruin my mood. People were starting to notice. And I knew it would only be a matter of time before someone became too curious and started following to see where I was going. It wouldn’t be much of a mysterious story, if they found where I kept going. It wasn’t like there was a secret fucking door that would take me back to the future. They’d just find a  broken man in a broken place.

But it fortunately never happened, and I was saved the excruciating embarrassment. Before I knew it, another month had passed; then two months; then six months; and then a year. Before long I met someone; she came up to me in fact and introduced herself, and then we became close, then intimate, and then we were soon married. And then the children came. And before I knew it I was forgetting all about a strange, empty town called Ostium; the place known as the Ostium Network, and the whole reason I’d come here. But if I am being completely truthful to myself, what had truly happened was essentially a dream come true. I had dreamed of this place for most of my life, and now I would be spending the rest of my life literally living right here. I had a wife I loved, children I cared for more than anything in the world; many friends who meant a lot to me. And as simple as things were here compared to my former life, I was happy here. I was happy with my life.

And that’s the way things went, for decades. My wife and I grew old, while my kids grew up and soon had families of their own.

And then I found the parchment that changed all that.