Work Text:
In the middle of the Strait of Gibraltar, there rests a monument to an unnamed god. Erected over two millennia ago, the twisted obsidian skeleton stuck into a marble pedestal sits amidst the backdrop of a massive roman complex, that in this day and age rests mostly flooded. Though the complex itself in rough shape, marred by vandalism and bearing the scars of wars long past, the monument itself has remained untouched throughout the ages, and its copper plaque readable to any versed in latin. For the scholarly mind, it rests a puzzle for the ages; regardless, I wasn’t a scholar and it wasn’t what I was here for anyways. At the time, I didn’t even know Latin. Standing on the bow of the skiff ferrying me to the Island, I stood a 90s college college dropout; a dropout, by the name of Edgar Rogers.
Money doesn’t come easy, especially for one in a foreign country who has been severed from financial aid. It had been a tough choice, looking back, but considering it now it was the right one. My parents were not good people, and I could not live among them, complicit in their crimes. Even now I get letters from my brothers asking why I refuse to travel and see them in their final hours, imploring me to bring home a prodigal son, but I really couldn’t care less about seeing them off now. To me, they had died the time I left South Africa for Portugal. When the checks stopped coming, I stopped caring, and traveling Europe looking for ways to put my thoughts to paper I accepted whatever jobs I could as long as they put a roof over my head. Food was a luxury, but sometimes I found something that put enough of it on the table to reward sticking around longer than a few days.
For then, it meant being a Janitor; not a typical Janitor, but a Janitor nonetheless. Clean up vandalism. Report unexploded shells. Keep the bird shit off the monument, and keep your own shit off the rocks. And, most importantly, keep everything clean, just in case somebody comes to visit. Typical Janitor stuff, even though it was a live-in job taking place on a mostly abandoned island with ancient heritage that nobody seemed to care about.
From afar it didn’t seem too bad a job, good pay and guaranteed food and board, but once the boat let me off a few yards away from a rocky basalt shoreline I began to have a sneaking suspicion that perhaps I had got a bit more than I had bargained for. Stiffing the cabbie a tip I waded out into the water, and shimmying up the rocks that had made proper docking impossible I began my first day in isolation.
Perhaps isolation is a bad word for it. Solitude would be better fitting, at least for how it was at first; regardless of the proper word, as the boatman left me on the island I was well and truly alone, stuck on a silent piece of rock with nothing more than the monument and the building to keep me company. I must confess that I didn’t try to read the inscription at first, as I felt much more pressed by the sight of the building with which I was to spend the next few months of my life than with a seemingly melted model; thus I passed by, and for the first time inspected the complex that would consume my every conscious moment for the rest of my life.
It was a domed structure, with high but ornate stone walls that buffeted the waves. Just gazing at the thing one would wonder what it was designed for, or even if it was designed at all and not simply shat out in chunks by multiple civilizations that decided to play an inter age game of architectural telephone. Stairs descending into watery or muddy pits, hallways sunken directly into the basalt, the whole place seemed very haphazard apart from two areas. The first, was the living quarters, an odd series of rooms filled with artwork and old documents that I still refuse to believe ever existed. The second was the library; flooded up to a great concrete landing of some sort, I never will understand why somebody would elect to store their books there. Haphazard or not, every area in the place seemed to lack a sense of… well… sense. No matter the thought I put into it, nothing seemed to ever click just right.
Who was even paying me for this job? Supposedly there was some private benefactor who used this island for one purpose or another, and was paying for its continual upkeep in the state which it had found itself in in 1740, but why would such a specific time period be set for it to be frozen at? What possible motive could one have to keep it at that time? Why would people come out of their way to spray paint messages on the outside of the complex in the middle of the night, despite the danger? This island seemed to be a potential goldmine for any archeologist, an odd intersection of culture and architecture placed at a pivotal point in the Mediterranean. Why did so few people seem to care or even know about it? Why had I been left here alone?
In my times of searching, my mind wandered to the library. Three shelves, stone and set into the walls, lines with codexes that only grew older and more arcane the further to the ceiling one reached. Books in Spanish, English, Arabic, German, Latin; rack upon rack they piled up into the heavens in all shapes and sizes, from all sorts of authors and disciplines, and in my wandering and my wondering I read them all.
It’s hard to imagine the grip that boredom has on one’s mind. If one is bored enough, one will do anything to please themselves; although six months doesn’t seem like too long of a time, when left alone with nothing but your thoughts and a pile of books in odd languages, at a certain point your brain stops seeing gibberish and starts parsing sentences just for it to have something for it to do. Even though to this day I fail to properly pronounce many words in Greek or Italian, if I can see it in text I know it instinctively.
Even reading wasn’t enough to hold my mind forever, though. Halfway through the first column of the library, I began to break mentally. Well, perhaps break isn’t the right word; warp would probably be more accurate in this case, but no matter the word used at this time I began to feel quite odd. Walking down and exploring the dark passageways as I had before, I found them whispering; whispering, always, talking to me, inquiring in odd dialogues in forgotten tongues as to whether I had found the name yet. Always, it was about the name. Would I find the name in the books? Inscribed on the walls? I didn’t know. Thus, I read, and I searched. More and more I read, and more and more I looked.
Two shelves in, the bend got worse. The whispers were louder. Have you found the name? Have you come to free us? Have you finally finished the greatest errand? No longer in whispers did they ask. The walls spoke freely, even chatting to themselves. Returning to the ordered quarters I found the voices gone, with nothing but silence in their place. I would find the name. Could I find the name in the paintings that had been hung, in the drawers of damp documents and legal papers that pertained to empires that no longer held influence? I did not know. Perhaps I would find it in my blood. That was what the voices said. But were those the voices of the halls, or of my head? The distinction is pointless. I bled to find the name, and I bled much.
Almost to the completion of the third shelf the voices grew even louder. They now yelled, not asking questions but hurling insults. You will never find the name! You are not worthy to have come here! Go and find another, and they shall complete the charge for you! Even in the sleeping rooms they yelled that I was unworthy of finding the name, that I lacked dedication. Tearing the paintings only stopped them for moments. Tearing sheets and ripping skin only egged them on. The only haven left was the library, the spot where I sat and slept in fever as I searched the final pages for any mention of the name. Only one voice advocated continuing, the voice that said perhaps it was written on my bones. I scratched and etched the most profane of wounds upon them, but it was still not enough. The name was not within my bones.
On the last day of my charge, I completed the final books upon the third shelf. The voices still could not reach the library, but they had almost gotten there. Overlapping and in ancient tongue they mocked me from the outer halls, but they could not penetrate my sanctum. Turning the final page, I still had no name to give. Standing at the shelf I cried at my fate, and rammed my head against it. Yelling primally, I rammed over and over, until my head had cracked and I had fallen from the landing into the water. I tried swimming, but my head could hold no thoughts of such. My hands clawed at the water, trying to pull me up from the depths, but my fingers could not form and my legs could not stroke. I fell struggling, and was pulled further and further into the water below.
Perhaps minutes by; perhaps it was hours instead. The distinction does not matter, for regardless of time spent en route I ended at the bottom of the pit all the same. The well had been a large one, for the architecture no longer looked roman, but instead failed to look even human. Shifting dark walls undulated around me, and into another sideways pit I was dragged, a pit deep and empty of noise. The floor carried me along, down, down, down and outwards into the bowls of the earth. And where it stopped, I gazed in wonder.
Clad in light, a dull stone statue sat atop a throne of human bones in eternal prostration. On each, a single word in a common tongue, but on none the correct name. The statue faced me, and I felt it gaze into my soul. In its hand it held a bone, clean and unmarked, and in the silence I knew what it was telling me. Find my name, Edgar. Find it, and return it to me. Return it and free me, and I shall free you from the bonds that you do not know that you possess.
I took the bone, and at once the voices returned. And at once, consciousness returned.
Through some coincidence, my mysterious benefactor had been at the complex that day, supposedly for the intent of delivering a reverence offering to the monument out front, and had found me facedown and bleeding in the library. Acting quickly, he had taken me to a hospital and through miracle or magic I had been able to recover enough to continue my travels. The headaches never went away, sadly, and the voices will probably follow me for the rest of my life, but they were a small price to pay for the things that I took from that small Island. For from there, I had recovered a marvelous book penned in the language of the highest beings speaking of a higher place, far more wondrous and vast than a building on a small island jutting out of a gap between larger lands, and from there I would find the true nature of the bone and the words to inscribe to it.
In the middle of the Strait of Gibraltar, there sits a monument to an unnamed god. The plaque below speaks of a deity long trapped, a seeker of blood and revenge that would grant forbidden power to those who can return to her her only rightful possession. I have not gone back to the island since my tenure there, but I shall return. And when I do, it shall be a nameless god no more.