Hunter was pleased to find that the history department was actually situated in the soul of the campus. Although their guide had been mostly correct when he’d shown Hunter and Aera the sightseeing tour when they’d first arrived at Barnum, he’d neglected to mention that there were classes held in some of those rooms.
Unfortunately, the Foundations of Martial Arts class was located a bit further away, and had gone exactly how he’d assumed. News of his attack had apparently made the rounds over the last month. He’d received a lot of attention when he showed up, which was something he was growing used to. The reactions ran the usual gamut, from pity, to curiosity, to scorn. Even the the instructor— a man named Immanuel who refused to be called a professor— was skeptical about Hunters presence, especially after he’d run Hunter through a fitness test, something he should have gone through had he been able to attend the class from the beginning.
His time with Aera had done wonders for his endurance, but he was still far from adequate enough to keep up with everyone else.
When it was clear Hunter was done, the instructor let him sit to the side for the rest of the class. He ignored the looks he got from everyone, including Instructor Immanuel, and instead of lamenting over his poor physique he used that time to practice some of focusing techniques. He figured if he wanted to make the most progress he could in the shortest period of time, he needed to take advantage of any free time he had. The focusing exercises didn’t require hours and hours— although it was better to dive into deeper states of focus over those longer periods, but even 15 minutes would be enough to help with easing the transition into a focused state, at the very least.
He found that when he went deep enough, time seemed to melt away. Even the short session he did during the class felt like mere minutes before the class was dismissed. Hunter’s next class wouldn’t start for an hour, so he had time to go and get changed before grabbing a snack and a coffee. Then he was on his way to the soul.
It made sense, he figured, that the most historically dense place on campus would be where history was taught. He’d spent some time looking into his teacher, but couldn’t find much about the man aside from his name, and a short mention about a successful career in archaeology and translating ancient languages, especially Asutnahem. Having seen that, Hunter felt that he’d made the right choice with taking his elective. His interest in the Asutnahem went beyond his previous desire to feel closer to his father. Now it was more personal. The Asutnahem had a lot of mystery surrounding them, and Hunter’s intuition told him that those mysteries were worth the time it would take to wrap his head around.
Not just for the potential to discover ancient glyphs. The tale of the Journeyer had struck a chord in him, ever since he had seen it. It was like it planted as seed in him, that slowly took root and began to sprout. He saw a lot of himself in the Journeyer, and he figured that many would see a reflection of the events in their lives. Making do with what you have in order to cross a great gap of uncertainty; It spoke of the human soul, and challenges which human beings encounter, and the inner strength that it cultivates. He wondered what else the Asutnahem had in store for him.
Everything that had happened to him so far seemed to point in in the direction of finding strength, which was like the woman inviting the Journeyer across the chasm. Hunters tools to cross that chasm were his fathers journals. He’d realized that he was in the process of discovering something about himself, something that was slightly unnerving but nevertheless appeared to be working for him.
He wasn’t who he thought he was.
In fact, he was both better and worse than he thought he was. His tenacity had brought him pride, yet the flexibility of his integrity had given him pause. He wondered if he were the kind of men to constantly bend to circumstances. So far, he’d betrayed his old ideals and not only joined a corporation, but a Council family. Granted, Trey didn’t cut quite the same figure of the greedy executives he always used to imagine, but the fact remained.
It was the same with the journals, and with the Internal Arts. What surprised Hunter the most is that the guilt felt skin deep. When he really questioned himself, and confronted the idea that what he was doing might be the wrong choice, he found that didn’t regret his choices.
Actually, that wasn’t true. His choices had brought him face to face with Aera. So there was some regret.
“Good morning, class. Good to see you all again, and it looks like we have a new face!” Professor Jackson broke Hunter out of his contemplation as he walked into the classroom. He had a large, over-stuffed satchel filled with what Hunter could only guess were tomes of great wisdom. The man was short, chubby, and had tufts of long grey hair shooting out from under a green trilby hat. He wore a tweed jacket, a thick pair of blue jeans. This man was exactly what Hunter had been imagining when he’d first heard about the history professor.
He looked like a man who would teach history. You could see it, even if you were to encounter him randomly on the street. You would just know that the man had devoted his life to studying the past.
“I’m—” Hunter started to say, but Professor Jackson held up a hand.
“Don’t tell me. Let me see,” he said, running his finger down a list, “Ah, Mr. Hunter Oberon Koar. Well then Mr. Koar, welcome to my class— such as it is. Now, where were we? Last class I believe we were talking about the 4th Illaic dynasty, correct?”
The class shared confused looks with each other. Professor Jackson frowned.
“No? That must be next class, then. Can someone remind me what we covered, last time?”
A young man at the front of the class raised his hand.
“Yes,” Professor Jackson invited him to speak.
“We were talking about the Asutnahem influence of early Illaic symbolism.”
If lightbulbs really did go off in peoples heads when they had a moment of epiphany, Hunter imagined that Professor Jacksons head must be filled with a dozen of them, at least.
“Then I was about to introduce you to my favorite area of research, one near and dear to my heart. Do any of you know what I did in my past life? Before becoming an esteemed professor of history, that is. Anyone?”
Hunter raised his hand.
“Mr. Koar”
“I read that you were an archaeologist and translator.”
“Among other things, but you’re mostly correct. You see how the two go hand in hand, yes? Good. I’ve spent a considerable portion of my life immersed in ancient languages, studying not only meaning, but how meaning evolved throughout the ages. And I've discovered some very wonderful things. Oh, I should stop there, before I get in trouble.”
The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
The man had a look in his eye that gave Hunter the impression that he had no intention on stopping himself from saying whatever he was planning on saying.
“Ah, who cares. If anyone asks, tell them I started to digress and that I warned you all sufficiently that what I’m about to tell you is far from the consensus. In fact, I tried to have this information included in the syllabus, but alas, the world doesn’t appear ready for what I have to share,” Professor Jackson sighed.
He picked up some chalk and started to jot down a word on the chalkboard behind him, and in his enthusiasm the chalk slipped from his hand and split as it hit the floor, but the man’s passion was untouched.
“What does that say?” He asked the class.
“Sanctuary,” someone called out.
“Sanctuary! Yes, our home, no? Sanctuary, safety, home. It makes sense that our ancestors, and having made homes in caves, and who had braved untamed wilds— clawing their way up through the food chain— would come to find great solace in the place they called ‘home.’ These homes would multiply, combine, and migrate, culminating in great empires throughout history.
By my colleagues estimation, the Asutnahem were little better than bronze-age cultural savages. Oh, they had some degree of etheric knowledge, and their symbolic lineages and arts are quite matured compared to some later civilizations, but make no mistake! They were far less sophisticated than we are. At least, that’s what my colleagues would have you believe,” he said, underlining the word on the board.
“Sanctuary, where does the name come from? It came from the ancient Illaic word for the world which we inhabit, which we have traced back through the ancient Mideni Kingdoms, whose word for homeland, or country, eventually made its way to the Illaic peoples, whose literature and social dramas we so enjoy today. But before all of that, my contemporaries would have you believe that such a word evolved from the Asutnahem word for safe haven, or home. Do we agree?”
He asked the class, but it didn’t take a genius to understand that the question was rhetorical.
“Perhaps. There is good reason to believe it, but my studies have revealed another possibility altogether. The Asutnahem are quite a puzzle, are they not? Want to know something? A very dirty little secret which many of my colleagues would refuse to admit I assure you. The Asutnahem language, as we know it, is full of holes. Deep, dark holes that could recontextualize everything we think we know about them. For instance,” the professor picked up some more chalk and started sketching out a series of lines and curves on the board behind him.
“Who recognizes it? None of you? Right, its a bit advanced and you wouldn’t have seen it until your 3rd year of studies. This is a line from an Asutnahem scroll which, depending on who you ask, is either a verse from an epic-length poem, a record of real estate, a reference to a blanket, or a pronouncement of an Asutnahem priest.
‘Folded over the land which we lay down our heads’, is the supposed meaning of this phrase. It’s an approximate translation and you will find many others who disagree to varying degrees. But most will say, its accurate enough,” he said, though his voice was mocking.
“And guess what? They’re wrong. Even the ones who disagree are wrong. Everyone is so, so, so wrong. Look. See these lines here? The Asutnahem language evolved over millennia— yes, they were around for a long, long time. These lines disappeared over time,” his voice rose to a higher pitch as he spoke, and he circled certain dashes and curves in the text he'd written on the board.
“We can track linguistic drift throughout Asutnahem history. What a word means now is not necessarily what it will mean a century or two from now, let alone 9 centuries. Understand? So how are we supposed to expect this line here,” he circled the words he had written, and then punctuated the action by underlining it, “to mean the same thing to the nth generation of descendants of the individual who wrote it? Its absolutely absurd. Take any religion in modern times— how many interpretations are their of the exact same text? How many translatations, and disagreements on translations, do we have to deal with? Future historians are going to have an absolute mess on their hands trying to track that particular memetic genealogy, mark my words,” he said, scratching his head and considering the chalkboard once more.
“Anyways, where was I?” he mumbled to himself, and then he struck a victorious finger up into the air, “Right, I’ve spent the last few years using this phrase as a marker, an ‘anchor’, if you will. I’ve traced the genealogy of these words as far backwards and forwards as I can, and the entire phrase can be condensed into two words in our current language.
"The line contains two points of interest. See here, ‘the land which we lay down our heads,’ and that this land is being ‘folded over’. Yet, this line is complete. Complete? You ask. Yes, complete, as in the idea conveyed is implied to contain all it needs in order to transmit a full packet of meaning to the intended recipient.
"My studies have seen various versions of ‘folded over’, bubbling up all over the Asutnahem timeline. Recently, an archaeological dig uncovered what is believed to be an old Asutnahem recipe book. It took a couple of years to translate most of it, but the context that this phrase appears within implies that ‘folded over’ originally meant— and this book was written within the same linguistic era as the document that our anchor was written in— it originally meant ‘enclosed,’ or ‘contained.’
"So. This changes the entire phrase, does it not? Now what we have is, ‘Contained’ and, ‘the land which we lay down our heads. So, what? A bedroom? Perhaps a house? Yes, it would certainly seem so. But I was not content with that answer. I had a gut feeling, you see? Pay attention to those,” the professor paused his lecture, staring each of them in the eye, “very important. Damn the consequences, go with your gut.”
“Where was I? Land which we lay down, right. I was going to say that, believe it or not, laying down our heads has nothing to do with the original translation— or I suppose it does, but its peripherally related. This one was more complex, and I'll save you from the long, messy road that I had to travel to get to where I’ve gotten now. But I suppose I can give you the cliff notes. The ‘laying down of heads’ is an Illaic phrase, a poetic statement that gained popularity throughout their culture quite rapidly.
“Much of the work they did in translating history was sloppy, which was hardly their fault, there were many pressures influencing that— but I digress. We now have enough information to understand that the ‘laying down of heads’ they believed they found in the Asutnahem language came from a late-Asutnahem text which described the passage of time, from dawn till dusk— which I’ve found correlates to an entire preserved body of work describing a very strange cosmology.
“What is 'contained', what is the phrase saying is 'contained'? It is the land which we lay down our heads, but this land is presented in a greater context, one which the Asutnahem descendants used to describe not just the land, but the passing of time as marked by the sun. The land, the sun, the stars. The development of ecosystems, the process of change. The world! The world! Or, more specifically, and this is a very important nuance, a world. The world implies a singular, specific world. But ‘a’ world implies one among others. If I’m right, and I do believe that I am, then this phrase means: ‘a contained world’.”
He paused. The implication was sinking in.
“You’re saying they knew?” Hunter asked, his head spinning at the revelation. But how could they? They wouldn’t have had any way of leaving the world.
“They knew!” the professor said.
“Ridiculous,” one of the students said. The professor laughed.
“Then prove me wrong,” the professor shrugged, “you can’t, obviously. You’re all young and have no idea about any of this. But my colleagues have yet to give me any evidence which can contradict my discovery. Until they do, I will continue to believe that at the very least, the Asutnahem had an understanding of our world that we are only recently beginning to catch up to.”
The professor checked his watch.
“We still have quite a bit of time left, and we should probably get you all back on track. Thank you all for entertaining my little rant. Now, Illaic symbolism, was it? Right…”
Hunter couldn’t believe his luck. He had attended this class out of all the others— just in time to hear one of the most incredible digressions he’d ever heard. The rest of the class passed by in a blur, Hunters mind constantly returning to Professor Jacksons’ speech.
The Asutnahem knew? It was an incredible claim, one that Hunter would want to have verified as soon as possible. But who could he talk to about this?
He’d be disappointed if this turned out to an elaborate crackpot theory. But the implications— did the Asutnahem have a presence beyond their world? If not, how did they discover that the world had an edge, that it was ‘contained?’
Trey would probably be interested in the professor’s work. Maybe he’d know someone who could verify the claims.