Entry 1

I’ve been told that my actual abstract and introduction should go somewhere else and that this is a space merely to record my thoughts and observations as I work. When I eventually publish my autobiography I’ll find these notes invaluable. But for now I dispense with the introduction as nobody else will be reading this rough draft anyway aside from you Ami (you’re not nearly as sneaky as you think). In addition, I’d rather not sacrifice this reedsilk for the sake of basic definitions.

The question of the Precursors has plagued me as long as I’ve known them etcetera etcetera this is not news and today I have received my most promising artifact yet. It is a small cylindrical device not unlike the memories within a longwing visor (Postmaster Mia-kef STILL refuses to allow me to examine his. For the attention of my future self: discover some way to bribe him). I have seen only illustrations of a dismantled visor, anyway, and inside the case there are these cylindrical devices.

Now one lands on my desk. It was not I that discovered it but one of the dredgers working at the docks. They would have thrown it out into the midden heap if not for one of my students (Heda-var was it?? Or Hebi-var. The pink one.) who had been buying fruit blocks at the floating market that very moment. He thought the device looked to be of interest to myself and he was right - I can confirm now that I’ve cleaned off the mud and exofauna that this is of Precursor origin. It is with some regret that I deny that particular student their [graduation] ceremony this year, unfortunately his scholarly work is borderline illiterate. I think I’ll tell him to join the trades instead.

Anyway. To any uneducated dock-selkie or unapprenticed fledgling, it may be hard to tell. I see before me a hand-long cylinder roughened by the sea, with a hole at either end, in which sits a small metal prong. Any craftsperson could make a replica of this, presuming they were only intending to copy the look. But it is the material that betrays its ancient origin. This is not reed resin or stone, it isn’t laminated silk, it’s not the carved and shaped shell of a sipho. This material is lightweight, and if scraped, reveals itself to have been white originally, under the discolouration. An obsidian knife will do the trick. In the white tracks you will find that it is shiny, as well. This substance is a form of resin used by Precursors, which we cannot reproduce (I’ve tried) (note to self, this would be a brilliant paragraph for my biography).

I have a few pieces myself in my personal bower, some very rare, which I brought with me from the Breaks. I still can’t believe that my most uncommon resin mounting bracket was being used as ballast in that dirty fishing boat. My goodness I’m glad I saved THAT.

Until this landed on my desk, my wire tab was my favourite. Having sent samples to the scholars of material science I can confirm that this cylinder’s origin is Siren: when heated in a furnace the structure behaves predictably, and the scholar described and illustrated his findings of oil droplets similar to our own resins produced from reed stalks. Oh - I suppose that’s for the results and methodologies, not this journal.

My bower is rather cramped and Ami-var is a passionate singer, so it’s difficult to arrange my thoughts. I believe that if I were to fix this artifact into a reciprocating slot within, say, a longwing visor, I might be capable of accessing some of its contents. It would be a breakthrough the likes of which we have not seen since my master Pelti-vas first published his theses on Precursor diet. This one is larger than a longwing visor cylinder certainly but I am fascinated by that implication; perhaps there is a larger visor somewhere, for larger PrecurSURELY one gets bored of ‘Over the Bowl-Run River’ after its EIGHTH chorus

Argued with Ami-var again. He still doesn’t believe that Precursors are anything more than a so-called 'common ancestor’ that we harpies developed from. We do agree that Precursors were likely most similar to us shortwings but where does that leave longwings in this 'evolutionary’ model? There is no fossil evidence of a so-called 'missing link’ between longwings and Precursors.

There are myths among the Western Spiral peoples of a common ancestor to all Sirenians, though they do focus more upon the sea-dwellers. Tektei-vas would not cease his yapping about all his travels among pelagic villages in every ocean and all their particular myths. I’d like to know whose dick he sucked to get such a venture funded. When I last proposed a research trip to Odr’s Sleep to view the Precursor structure there, Iuinti-vay-or laughed me out of his bower.

“How ridiculous! You want materials and funding for yourself, three students, two barge-workers, a visored navigator, and a dig team?” he said to me then as if my requests were unreasonable. What’s unreasonable about a dig team? We’re archaeologists! How else am I supposed to do my research?

But he would rather throw funding into the school of medical science because it’s such a crowd-pleaser. Don’t think I don’t see exactly why he favours them so much, and how the council enjoys such popularity when the medics are happy. Archaeology is just as important as-

Ami-var saw me writing and interrupted me. He accused me of muttering about our President again.

Who wouldn’t! The management of this place is abysmal and absolutely nothing I expected when I first came to this establishment.

“Master Gania-vas got screwed over by him too,” Ami-var said to me. “We were getting co-author credit on our new study about the morphological commonalities between Precursor, phocid, and shortwing phalanges. But they just sent us the study back asking us to fix the wording!”

This was news to me. I pressed him on it and he admitted that the council felt it was poor science to include phocids in the study.

“Just because they’re a different people,” Ami-var said. “So there’s no justification for roping them into shortwing science, but have you ever seen a phocid’s hand up close?"

"When would I ever have seen that?” I asked, perhaps a touch sardonically.

“Good grief, Qedi-var, would you ever get off your ass and leave the bower once in a while?” Ami-var said, without anger. “It’s really lazy of you.”

Maybe I like the peace and quiet of the bower when he leaves. And also, he’s taking his Spire birth for granted, he grew up around all sorts of people and all I had were shortwings. I’d never seen a phocid until I got here.

He told me that I was missing out on some great fried scaleworm stalls by the docks and that he only mentioned them because food was probably my only motivator. The usual accusations about my weight. We fought over that insult and I won, so he apologised. But that’s not important.

Back to the common ancestor myths. It’s just a curious aside, really, and I don’t find it terribly relevant to my work with Precursor artifacts, but when musing on the origin of intelligent life I suppose we could include the legends of the Spiral people and their belief in a common ancestor for all water-dwelling species. Their mythological figure naturally resembles a water person, not a harpy.

Precursors were obviously harpies, Ami-var insists when I remind him of these tales and their relevance to the mandated exclusion of phocids from his study. I asked the fool how he could justify the selkie-like teeth in his beloved fossils and he told me I was an airbrained idiot wasting my time on resins when I could be looking at some dusty bones. I’m getting tired of fucking him. It’s all just deflection with him and no real rigorous counter-argument, and I think his heart isn’t in the fights either. It’s as if he isn’t invested in us as much as I am (cut that part out later).

I’ve prepared my new memory cylinder for careful restoration but it won’t be easy. It’s so intact and whole that breaking it would be terrible and I’d have no other recourse than to immediately and promptly kill myself. But I have to get the dirt off somehow. If I can

–

Journal, much has happened since I spilled ink over the end of the above paragraph in my shock. I was holding the core and something in it started to emit light. Not very much, it was still dirty, but it was clearly no ordinary light. When it shone on the canopy, there were obvious lines.

The landstriders deep within the Bowl practice a form of shadow theatre by gluing their wing feathers into a board, painting it, and cutting designs into the surface so that firelight can shine through. I was reminded of the shadow theatre troupes I’d seen come through the Breaks, the slots cut between the feathers which would glow and cast orange lines onto our faces as the rest of the wing blocked the light.

But before I could scrape off more dirt to reveal the extent of the pattern, the damned thing perished. Here it lies now, innocently dull, on my desk. Perhaps the lack of sleep doesn’t agree with me. I sleep with Iuinti-vay-or’s stupid face at the forefront of my mind, as he stamps my proposals with denial, and this is hardly conducive to a restful environment. Ami-var will think I’m being unfaithful.

I didn’t show Ami-var when he got back. I’ll show him when I know what it is. He brought me some of that fried scalefish to atone for calling my thesis an appalling rag and myself a fat tourist, so I suppose we are level again. I suspect, also, that he feels some measure of guilt over forgetting my condition and the difficulties it imposes upon my ability to visit the docks.

My next port of call was to recreate the circumstances that caused that light. I held it every which way you could imagine to no avail until I let the end tip, tired of holding it, and the metal in its southern port contacted the wire coil on my desk. It did not light again, but it did let out a rather anaemic glow which could only be discerned because I'd had the foresight to draw the blackout canopy over my desk. That lasted as long as it took me to draw breath, and then no amount of contact with the wire could bring it back to life.

What I needed was a longwing visor. They are not easily parted with their owners but Ebb-a-vef is more easily bribed than his partner Mia-kef. Ami-var's peace offering did nicely but I wish I'd been able to eat it, it did look really good and I know that locals like Ami-var get higher quality stuff than what I could wrangle from the stalls with my Breaks accent. Ebb was well-pleased with the gift and agreed to part with his visor, the black Signaswun, for the afternoon.

Signaswun is one of the larger visors and certainly too large for me to comfortably operate. I promised I would not harm it. In hindsight I wish I'd lied, I should have opened the back panel to access the cylinders directly. Instead I was very precious with it and it took almost four hours to run my own wire coil into the back panel through the earpiece. Anyone less dextrous than myself would have destroyed both artifacts. And I confess that by the fourth hour I was increasingly in support of their destruction.

But with no help from Ebb or Signaswun I successfully fed the wire through the labyrinth and into the cylinder chamber. Then of course nothing happened, and I thought about re-training as a sweet harvester, or going into voluntary exile, until I heard an odd noise from within the visor. I had to wear it - by attaching it to one of the guy-ropes holding up the canopy and standing under it - but figuring out how to rig it just right was more than worthwhile.

Within the visor, the vision plate had illuminated. Words of Precursor Language appeared, accompanied by the same pattern that had shone out before, outlined by light. I see now why the visored longwings are so prone to wasting away with their eyes fixed on their vision plates, voices in their ears, as the visor draws you into a world outside your own.

The noise was somebody's voice, speaking. Speaking! A Precursor was speaking to me. The voice was somewhat selkie-ish, and there were familiar shapes to the words, edges I could almost fit into my own alphabet. I was so swept away by this that the picture on the plate was at first meaningless to me, before I understood that it was clearly a map.

The Western continent, and its most westerly coastline, too. A red spot highlighted a piece of headland I didn't recognise.