Alisaura
Blue Crack Supplier
Might as well post this now... I'm starting a new role at work tomorrow that I don't really want, but someone needs to fill in while another girl is on maternity leave... so I think I'll need some ego-boosting when I get home tomorrow... 
... 
Anyway, to continue...
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, don't know the band or anything, any innaccuracies are entirely my own.
end of chapter 24:
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I hovered over the "reply" button, then finally clicked it.
"Yes, I've had the same dreams, although I didn't know about Ewain's internal thoughts," I wrote. "As far as I'm concerned, it has ended in the real world. I'll see what I can do about the geophys."
I sent it.
And I hadn't told Glen about any of these emails, either.
-----------
Chapter 25:
-----------
----------------------------------
"I wanna show you guys somethin'. Have a read o' this."
"... Who's Lisa?"
"It's that geologist woman he met in Wales, remember? He must've sent this to me accidentally."
"Never mind that, who's Mag and Ewain?"
"I've no idea. But I don't like this at all."
"What's that about a knife?"
"I'm really not sure we should be reading this."
"Somethin's not right with him, and this woman's behind it. He told me he and she are havin' the same dreams, or some bollocks, but I didn't think he was serious."
"How can this Lisa be responsible for what he's dreaming? I think you're being paranoid. He's a big boy, he's hardly going to get suckered by some con-artist. And whatever this email's about, it's his business, not ours."
"Unless it affects all of us."
"Right. And it has. His head's been all over the place lately."
"I don't think that's enough to justify our reading his email. If he wants to tell us something, he will."
"It's one message he just sent to the wrong person. I'm not sayin' we should hack into his computer or anythin'."
"His wife told me he spends half the night awake, typing on his laptop. She thought he was working on songs, but I'm not sure now. He hasn't brought in anything new for a while..."
"You see? It is affecting the band. And maybe his family, too."
"Now, that is his business, and his alone. I still think we're better off waiting."
-------------------------------------
I still had the geophys, of course. I kept copies (or the originals, I should say) of all the work I did, and it was only a matter of converting a couple of the large-scale images into jpeg files and emailing them to Ed. And since I had them up, I took a look at them myself.
Having dreamed about it so often, it was easy enough to remember the valleys around the circle, and the site of the village. Assuming a village had ever existed in that spot. Looking at the geophys, it certainly seemed that something had been there. There was a jumble of reflections in the right area; large, roughly circular blobs indicating disturbed ground. Nothing very sharp, since the people of that time hadn't been using metal.
My eyes wandering over the coloured images, I found odd thoughts surfacing as if from nowhere. Moryn and Gwenna's hut. The communal hearth near the centre of the village. A sheep pen. Ewain's hut... Memories forced their way up, Mag's memories of the many nights she had spent there. I pushed those away, but images of the interior remained in my head. That must have been the Ritemaster's dwelling, I thought, dragging my eyes further along. Where Mag lived after Eleri had died. The contents of that hut were even clearer in my mind than those of Ewain's. And there, near the edge of this map, was the place Mag had lived with Alun and their children. Where Alun continued to live, after Mag had taken up residence in the Ritemaster's hut. Mag tried to maintain something of her role as mother and mate, but she spent less and less time there as the years went on.
I tried, very hard, to remind myself that I had absolutely no evidence that what I'd been dreaming about had ever really happened. That these people likely never existed, and that I was interpreting these reflections completely on guesswork, or worse.
The assurances I tried to give myself sounded more and more hollow with every repetition.
----------
"They need to work faster! We need to work faster. You know it would be best if the circle was finished by the summer solstice." Ewain was pacing agitatedly in my hut, the hut where Eleri had lived and died.
"Yes, I know that. I also know that the last winter was lean and we need to replenish the food stores. The village needs more people working in the fields, or hunting." I was sitting on the floor, watching him.
"The circle needs to be completed. Everything will be fine then, you'll see. The spirits will answer with full crops, and more animals born. But it is going too slowly! I think more people should be involved in raising the stones here – that will give the others more time to go and get the next ones. And it will be good for the whole village to feel involved, all of us working together to honour the spirits. It will make the circle stronger."
I was silent for a moment. "Which of us is Ritemaster, Ewain?"
His back was turned at that moment, and I would have given much to see his face. When he turned around, he looked sheepish, contrite.
"You know you are, Mag. And the elders will listen to you, you know that." Ewain walked over and sat beside me, reaching for my hand and meeting my eyes. "The decision is yours, of course. I'm sorry if I get carried away sometimes, but I feel... I know this is right. I know this is something I, and we, have to do. You feel that too, don't you?"
Looking into Ewain's earnest face, I couldn't maintain my cool demeanour. I smiled, and he smiled back. It was true that the fire that had been between us for so long was beginning to fade, and I knew that it would dwindle soon. But that didn't mean we couldn't still work together for the benefit of the village.
"You're wrong about one thing," I said, and smiled again at the consternation on his face. "I am not at all sure that the elders would listen to me, especially if my voice was in opposition to yours. Which it won't be," I added, seeing the look on Ewain's face. "You have more sway with them than a young upstart Ritemaster who barely knows the difference between Air and Earth." Perhaps I was exaggerating the low opinion in which I was held, but I felt the essence of my statement to be true.
----------
The week before Christmas, I got a warning from my current employer. Or rather, one of the supervisors. She caught me 'daydreaming'... and I suppose that's exactly what I was doing. She'd seen me staring out the window several times before that too, and had been prompted to examine my work. And to my everlasting humiliation, she found mistakes. It didn't make me feel any better to know that there were other mistakes I'd made, but had caught in time to correct them. Bigger ones. These were relatively minor, the errors the supervisor found, but they were ones I should never have made. It was Dr. Lawson all over again, only the prickly feeling in my guts was worse. I'd made a conscious decision not to scan inside the circle that first time, after all, but this was different. I'd screwed up, pure and simple, without realising it.
I offered no excuse for my lapse, apologised profusely, and vowed that it would not happen again. So it was in a state of sorely wounded pride that I worked for that next week, before we had the Christmas break. I'd considered cancelling my leave and working through, but Glen talked me out of it. He'd taken leave too, after all, and we were supposed to be spending the holiday period with his family, further along the south coast of Wales.
I hadn't had a reply yet to my sending the geophys scans to Ed, only several more dreams. And one of those crushing, dark, terrifying nightmares – the details of those were growing sharper, much to my dismay. Once again, I had woken Glen with my thrashing about, and been forced to admit the cause of the disturbance. He had been resigned, and worried. Always worried. I knew he was thinking something, but I also knew I'd never get it out of him until he was ready.
Christmas came and went uneventfully, aside from the usual festivities and frivolities and gift-giving. I rather liked Glen's family, so it was nice enough to spend a week with them, huddling in front of the fire, and watching the rain beat down outside.
Glen's mother had given me a book about Stonehenge. The poor woman thought I hated the present at first, going by the looks that appeared on both mine and Glen's faces at the sight of it. She babbled worriedly that Glen had mentioned to her that I'd been interested in a stone circle in the field, and she'd just thought I would enjoy that... Glen and I had both hastily assured her that it had been very thoughtful of her, and yes it was a lovely book, I was indeed rather interested in standing stones and the like, and I would certainly enjoy reading it. After my profuse thanks, she finally subsided, and seemed relieved. Glen and I had shared a quick glance that conveyed far more than a glance should.
When we got home again after the New Year, there was an email from Ed waiting for me. After a moment's concern that the attachments could contain viruses, I shook the paranoia off (and scanned them anyway). Ed had sent me back the geophys images, labelled with features from the village in the dreams. It corresponded almost exactly with my own musings, but that hardly shocked me by this stage. Ed had gone into much more detail than my quick perusal. The second attachment seemed to be a hand-drawn picture of a stone knife, one which set off alarm bells of recognition in my head. It looked an awful lot like a knife Ewain had in the dreams; a long, tapering blade of obsidian, the hilt wrapped in strips of leather. Even the pattern of chips and flakes was familiar.
The email told me that Ed wanted to go back there, to look for this knife.
"If I can find it where I think it is, then that will be the proof," he'd written. "You might not take it as proof, since I could make it all up and find someone who can make stone tools, but it will prove it to me."
I resisted an urge to reply back, and ask him what he hoped to achieve by proving anything. Maybe he thought it would make the dreams stop. I was becoming resigned to the fact that they were now a part of my life, just another thing to put up with.
Ed's email also referred to some earlier missive, in which he'd dreamed specifically about this knife, but I didn't remember reading anything about that. I went back to read through the other emails, but I must not have received that particular one. I shrugged.
"Whatever," I said aloud to the computer. Glen had gone out – I avoided checking my email, these days, while he was around. "Do what you like, just leave me out of it." I was sure it wouldn't do any good to point out to him that Welsh Heritage would have a dozen fits if he just barged into a site like that and started randomly digging artefacts up. I was pretty sure that was illegal, anyway.
I didn't care to admit my own curiosity about whether he would find anything. Assuming I took him at his word, what did that mean for me? I wanted to believe he would find nothing, but I knew that absence of proof was not proof of absence. But it was something. I anticipated feeling relief if he found nothing – relief that there was no correspondence between these dreams and ancient events in the real world. Strange enough that Ed and I were dreaming the same thing – it was another thing entirely to believe these were real memories or had any actual meaning.
But then there were always those niggling doubts (or illogical certainties, or the fear of them)... what if he did find that knife where he expected to? Ed said it would prove to him that it was all real. It could be a co-incidence, although an exceedingly unlikely one, if he just happened to dig in the exact place where a knife was buried that resembled the one in his dream. Would I be able to tack another co-incidence on the ever-growing chain and pretend it all still meant nothing?
I didn't know what to think, and that was discomfiting as well.
-------------------------
... Anyway, to continue...
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, don't know the band or anything, any innaccuracies are entirely my own.
end of chapter 24:
----------
I hovered over the "reply" button, then finally clicked it.
"Yes, I've had the same dreams, although I didn't know about Ewain's internal thoughts," I wrote. "As far as I'm concerned, it has ended in the real world. I'll see what I can do about the geophys."
I sent it.
And I hadn't told Glen about any of these emails, either.
-----------
Chapter 25:
-----------
----------------------------------
"I wanna show you guys somethin'. Have a read o' this."
"... Who's Lisa?"
"It's that geologist woman he met in Wales, remember? He must've sent this to me accidentally."
"Never mind that, who's Mag and Ewain?"
"I've no idea. But I don't like this at all."
"What's that about a knife?"
"I'm really not sure we should be reading this."
"Somethin's not right with him, and this woman's behind it. He told me he and she are havin' the same dreams, or some bollocks, but I didn't think he was serious."
"How can this Lisa be responsible for what he's dreaming? I think you're being paranoid. He's a big boy, he's hardly going to get suckered by some con-artist. And whatever this email's about, it's his business, not ours."
"Unless it affects all of us."
"Right. And it has. His head's been all over the place lately."
"I don't think that's enough to justify our reading his email. If he wants to tell us something, he will."
"It's one message he just sent to the wrong person. I'm not sayin' we should hack into his computer or anythin'."
"His wife told me he spends half the night awake, typing on his laptop. She thought he was working on songs, but I'm not sure now. He hasn't brought in anything new for a while..."
"You see? It is affecting the band. And maybe his family, too."
"Now, that is his business, and his alone. I still think we're better off waiting."
-------------------------------------
I still had the geophys, of course. I kept copies (or the originals, I should say) of all the work I did, and it was only a matter of converting a couple of the large-scale images into jpeg files and emailing them to Ed. And since I had them up, I took a look at them myself.
Having dreamed about it so often, it was easy enough to remember the valleys around the circle, and the site of the village. Assuming a village had ever existed in that spot. Looking at the geophys, it certainly seemed that something had been there. There was a jumble of reflections in the right area; large, roughly circular blobs indicating disturbed ground. Nothing very sharp, since the people of that time hadn't been using metal.
My eyes wandering over the coloured images, I found odd thoughts surfacing as if from nowhere. Moryn and Gwenna's hut. The communal hearth near the centre of the village. A sheep pen. Ewain's hut... Memories forced their way up, Mag's memories of the many nights she had spent there. I pushed those away, but images of the interior remained in my head. That must have been the Ritemaster's dwelling, I thought, dragging my eyes further along. Where Mag lived after Eleri had died. The contents of that hut were even clearer in my mind than those of Ewain's. And there, near the edge of this map, was the place Mag had lived with Alun and their children. Where Alun continued to live, after Mag had taken up residence in the Ritemaster's hut. Mag tried to maintain something of her role as mother and mate, but she spent less and less time there as the years went on.
I tried, very hard, to remind myself that I had absolutely no evidence that what I'd been dreaming about had ever really happened. That these people likely never existed, and that I was interpreting these reflections completely on guesswork, or worse.
The assurances I tried to give myself sounded more and more hollow with every repetition.
----------
"They need to work faster! We need to work faster. You know it would be best if the circle was finished by the summer solstice." Ewain was pacing agitatedly in my hut, the hut where Eleri had lived and died.
"Yes, I know that. I also know that the last winter was lean and we need to replenish the food stores. The village needs more people working in the fields, or hunting." I was sitting on the floor, watching him.
"The circle needs to be completed. Everything will be fine then, you'll see. The spirits will answer with full crops, and more animals born. But it is going too slowly! I think more people should be involved in raising the stones here – that will give the others more time to go and get the next ones. And it will be good for the whole village to feel involved, all of us working together to honour the spirits. It will make the circle stronger."
I was silent for a moment. "Which of us is Ritemaster, Ewain?"
His back was turned at that moment, and I would have given much to see his face. When he turned around, he looked sheepish, contrite.
"You know you are, Mag. And the elders will listen to you, you know that." Ewain walked over and sat beside me, reaching for my hand and meeting my eyes. "The decision is yours, of course. I'm sorry if I get carried away sometimes, but I feel... I know this is right. I know this is something I, and we, have to do. You feel that too, don't you?"
Looking into Ewain's earnest face, I couldn't maintain my cool demeanour. I smiled, and he smiled back. It was true that the fire that had been between us for so long was beginning to fade, and I knew that it would dwindle soon. But that didn't mean we couldn't still work together for the benefit of the village.
"You're wrong about one thing," I said, and smiled again at the consternation on his face. "I am not at all sure that the elders would listen to me, especially if my voice was in opposition to yours. Which it won't be," I added, seeing the look on Ewain's face. "You have more sway with them than a young upstart Ritemaster who barely knows the difference between Air and Earth." Perhaps I was exaggerating the low opinion in which I was held, but I felt the essence of my statement to be true.
----------
The week before Christmas, I got a warning from my current employer. Or rather, one of the supervisors. She caught me 'daydreaming'... and I suppose that's exactly what I was doing. She'd seen me staring out the window several times before that too, and had been prompted to examine my work. And to my everlasting humiliation, she found mistakes. It didn't make me feel any better to know that there were other mistakes I'd made, but had caught in time to correct them. Bigger ones. These were relatively minor, the errors the supervisor found, but they were ones I should never have made. It was Dr. Lawson all over again, only the prickly feeling in my guts was worse. I'd made a conscious decision not to scan inside the circle that first time, after all, but this was different. I'd screwed up, pure and simple, without realising it.
I offered no excuse for my lapse, apologised profusely, and vowed that it would not happen again. So it was in a state of sorely wounded pride that I worked for that next week, before we had the Christmas break. I'd considered cancelling my leave and working through, but Glen talked me out of it. He'd taken leave too, after all, and we were supposed to be spending the holiday period with his family, further along the south coast of Wales.
I hadn't had a reply yet to my sending the geophys scans to Ed, only several more dreams. And one of those crushing, dark, terrifying nightmares – the details of those were growing sharper, much to my dismay. Once again, I had woken Glen with my thrashing about, and been forced to admit the cause of the disturbance. He had been resigned, and worried. Always worried. I knew he was thinking something, but I also knew I'd never get it out of him until he was ready.
Christmas came and went uneventfully, aside from the usual festivities and frivolities and gift-giving. I rather liked Glen's family, so it was nice enough to spend a week with them, huddling in front of the fire, and watching the rain beat down outside.
Glen's mother had given me a book about Stonehenge. The poor woman thought I hated the present at first, going by the looks that appeared on both mine and Glen's faces at the sight of it. She babbled worriedly that Glen had mentioned to her that I'd been interested in a stone circle in the field, and she'd just thought I would enjoy that... Glen and I had both hastily assured her that it had been very thoughtful of her, and yes it was a lovely book, I was indeed rather interested in standing stones and the like, and I would certainly enjoy reading it. After my profuse thanks, she finally subsided, and seemed relieved. Glen and I had shared a quick glance that conveyed far more than a glance should.
When we got home again after the New Year, there was an email from Ed waiting for me. After a moment's concern that the attachments could contain viruses, I shook the paranoia off (and scanned them anyway). Ed had sent me back the geophys images, labelled with features from the village in the dreams. It corresponded almost exactly with my own musings, but that hardly shocked me by this stage. Ed had gone into much more detail than my quick perusal. The second attachment seemed to be a hand-drawn picture of a stone knife, one which set off alarm bells of recognition in my head. It looked an awful lot like a knife Ewain had in the dreams; a long, tapering blade of obsidian, the hilt wrapped in strips of leather. Even the pattern of chips and flakes was familiar.
The email told me that Ed wanted to go back there, to look for this knife.
"If I can find it where I think it is, then that will be the proof," he'd written. "You might not take it as proof, since I could make it all up and find someone who can make stone tools, but it will prove it to me."
I resisted an urge to reply back, and ask him what he hoped to achieve by proving anything. Maybe he thought it would make the dreams stop. I was becoming resigned to the fact that they were now a part of my life, just another thing to put up with.
Ed's email also referred to some earlier missive, in which he'd dreamed specifically about this knife, but I didn't remember reading anything about that. I went back to read through the other emails, but I must not have received that particular one. I shrugged.
"Whatever," I said aloud to the computer. Glen had gone out – I avoided checking my email, these days, while he was around. "Do what you like, just leave me out of it." I was sure it wouldn't do any good to point out to him that Welsh Heritage would have a dozen fits if he just barged into a site like that and started randomly digging artefacts up. I was pretty sure that was illegal, anyway.
I didn't care to admit my own curiosity about whether he would find anything. Assuming I took him at his word, what did that mean for me? I wanted to believe he would find nothing, but I knew that absence of proof was not proof of absence. But it was something. I anticipated feeling relief if he found nothing – relief that there was no correspondence between these dreams and ancient events in the real world. Strange enough that Ed and I were dreaming the same thing – it was another thing entirely to believe these were real memories or had any actual meaning.
But then there were always those niggling doubts (or illogical certainties, or the fear of them)... what if he did find that knife where he expected to? Ed said it would prove to him that it was all real. It could be a co-incidence, although an exceedingly unlikely one, if he just happened to dig in the exact place where a knife was buried that resembled the one in his dream. Would I be able to tack another co-incidence on the ever-growing chain and pretend it all still meant nothing?
I didn't know what to think, and that was discomfiting as well.
-------------------------
I wonder if he'll find it!
Yay... Ye posted it! I'll be back later when I've got more time to read it...
Mark of a fine writer, that. More soon, please.. 
I bags first dibs...hold the other girls back, I'm front of the queue)... (Oh, and a little bewhiskered Edge for afters wouldn't go amiss either). 
or 
I have discovered fire.
Look, you arse! I've discovered fire! Fire! Fucking fire!!
