Sun Kissed Innsmouth
Part Eighty One
When they finally arrived back at the cave entrance with its profane marker, Felecia didn’t need any coaxing to come and drink her fill of the sweet well water. The skins and the pan were stowed away and the two of them went inside the cave to stash the eggs and hang dry the varied plants that had been collected in the meadow. Once again Felecia stayed by the work station and watched as Jacqueline fed the mushrooms and the worms using the contents of the nightsoil pan and her magic powders. The old woman took notice of her observations and sighed, “You’ll learn about this sort of thing when you’re ready to forgive and forget, not a moment before.”
They were in bed again, both barely able to keep their weary eyes open when Jaqueline reached up and took a thicker, dusty tome from the stacks and offered it to Felecia.
“This one isn’t about the local plants, or the locals at all. I want you to read it the same way you read Nana Tiasa’s book about growing plants, slow and steady.”
Felecia looked at the cover and barely managed to make out the word on the cover. The faded gold letters were barely legible in the dark and against the faded leather cover.
Ethics.
Exhausted and weary eyes opened wide on pages that smelled like dust and vanilla extract, Felecia’s tired eyes grew wide and drank deep of large, dark script rolled out on a press back before machines were made to do the sorting and the sewing. The book, large and voluminous as it was, was an item required to be made by hands as well as machines and it bore the marks unlike most of the books in the library back in the big house. Those marks made the tome somehow easier to consume and harder to ignore.
The single candle burnt down to the end of the wick as Felecia fought to keep reading until the last flickers of light faded. Sleep was hard to come by and hard to keep after she began to truly consume the work she had already started. Felecia began to lose herself in reading and trying to understand the subjects and ideas put to her and her fixation burned and grew through so many menial chores and colder weather routines as her time in the cave slowly crawled on.
She wouldn’t have been willing to admit it then or soon since but Felecia felt herself growing as she read the words of some strange man some three or four hundred years in his grave. Some strangely religious yet self-effacing man who continued time and time again to postulate that although he was stating the question, he wasn’t the only one or even the most important person looking for the answer.
It was absolutely refreshing if not worrying for Felecia to read the works of a European man explaining his own lack of important in the scheme of things globally instead of overstating it. The man, Spinoza, seemed far more preoccupied with the truth overall instead of just the truth as he saw it. The man seemed completely unconcerned with what might serve him at all and that was alien enough for Felecia as a concept that she chose to keep her insights to herself for the following days and even weeks.