He feels confused. He wants to stay and look a little more. How is it possible that such important pages of Parsana Narratives were forbidden? Had she really been exiled? To where? Or perhaps this sentence was never carried out and to avoid any further confusion, it was concealed. He had believed in Parsana’s ultimate purity all these years, but he doesn’t know how he feels about it. He feels soar and sick in his stomach and wants to find out all the omitted narratives, if there are any more! He must open the silver box; the rest must be in there. But he is not feeling well, coughs, soaring stomach and tears are making him lose his mind. He still has the forbidden library key. He can come back again tomorrow morning. He takes the silver box and the book with him, but he hesitates. Puts the box back on the table and takes the book. He closes and locks the cabin door behind him. He hesitates again, wanting to go back and bring the box out. But he hears a voice. Someone is coming out of the common library cabin, shining a torch light in the corridor. Tirad hurries up to the staircase before he is seen with the forbidden blue book.

Chapter 11

The narratives of Hami, Ariad and Parsana begin after the Great Fog. They don’t give any account of the disasters that lead to it. But people have been orally passing along the tales and oral sayings on the sea means forgetting many events and replacing them with occult tales and extravagant myths. Everyone would agree on that but there is no true univalent source to confirm or deny the stories. No one knew which Ship residents or people of which island had best kept in their memories the accounts of the past and had protected the historical happenings with less distortion, as they were passed along one generation to the next. The most ambiguous part of the accounts is the duration of the occurrences. Some people believed that there was ten years of earthquakes and tsunamis, ten years of draught followed by ten years of rain that ended with the Great Fog. While some say the whole disaster, starting from the earthquakes and the droughts to the Great Fog, happened in less than a year. The only part that is similar in all the tales is the sequence of the events. Continuous formidable earthquakes had flattened the mountains. The earth had opened devouring the towns and the cities. The fallen cities buried the corpses of animals and humans in their ruins and the next earthquake vanished them all altogether. The moors had split open and the shores would rise with one landslide and go under the water with the next. All the telecommunication and air transport systems had gone down within one week of the earthquake. Governments didn’t have the power and resources to help the devastated survivors. People had been plundering and sabotaging the remaining cities, turning them into ravaged ruins. The epidemic sicknesses due to water and electricity cuts had spread, filling up what had remained of the hospitals and clinics. People fled from one city to the next until there were no more places to go to and they didn’t feel safe anywhere. They hid themselves between the ruins of the once great cities, in the ravaged jungles, moors and farms, awaiting their death. But they knew there was no hiding. The ground beneath them could shake under their feet any moment, open up a hole and take them in. Reconstruction was useless. They just had to stay alive until they could. And those who stayed alive, had finally stood on the stable ground, but what they had inherited was vast wastelands.