In the first twelve months, these people came back nineteen times. They came as distinct groups each time but used similar strategies. I was present for each of those return events.
Their fourth expeditions consisted of seven party members, including a man named Aldric Vane. He moved with a purposefully measured manner, as though he had done this many times before and anticipated that this trip also would be unsuccessful, where he spent 3 days. I learned more of their language in those three days than in all the expeditions before. Aldric was thorough. He talked to his party constantly, the running commentary of a professional explaining his thinking.
Aldric:
"This passage has been used. Look at the floor - the dust pattern. Something comes through here regularly. Not small."
Fighter (unnamed):
"The bears?"
Aldric:
"Could be. Could be something else. Keep your spears ready."
Fighter:
"What are we actually looking for down here?"
Aldric:
"Crystal deposits — there's a vein of amber-crystal in the northern alcoves, according to the survey. Iron ore further down. Whatever else turns up."
Fighter:
"And the monsters?"
Aldric:
"Clear them as you find them. Standard protocol."
(Remembrance):
Standard protocol. Two words that contained, I was beginning to understand, an entire philosophy. Clear them as you find them. The them was everything alive in me. Everything with warmth. Everything that breathed.
I was beginning to build a vocabulary from these fragments. Monster was what they called the cave toads, who had been in my lower pools for eleven generations and whose territorial songs I had always found soothing. Hazard was the bats, whose echolocation was my eyesight in the high chambers. Resource was the crystal formations that had taken nine hundred years to grow.
Everything I loved had a different name in their language. And their language was the one with power, because it was the language of the people making decisions about me.
The sixth expedition brought a specialist for the cave toads, a man who spoke with the authority of someone who had done this in other caves and found it routine.
Toad Specialist:
"You want the big ones, the ones with the orange banding. They're the edible variety. The small grey ones aren't worth the effort."
Party Member:
"How many can we take before the population collapses?"
Toad Specialist:
"Don't worry about that. There are always more toads."
Toads come in more than one kind; they are NOT the toads whose songs I'm used to hearing, with their unique subsonic sounds that I had been holding, in the resonant chambers of my lower pools for eleven generations, the same toads that have made their own mark here by adding their songs to my very substance. By the eighth expedition, the toads stopped singing altogether, and my pools were still, which is entirely out of character for any of the times I've lived among them.
When they returned from their 17th Expedition, the flag was proudly waved in the doorway of my cave. I felt the stake being driven into the stone, a specific, deliberate violence, the kind that announces ownership. Two members of the party had an argument about where exactly to put it.
First Member:
"It goes at the entrance arch. That's where flags go."
Second Member:
"There is no arch. It's a cave."
First Member:
"Then we make one. The Guild needs a documented claim point."
Second Member:
"Feels wrong. Sticking a flag in the middle of some animal's home."
First Member:
"It's a dungeon, not a home."
I held that exchange for a long time. It's a dungeon, not a home. The second member had used the right word and then been corrected. That was something I had not observed before; someone almost seeing clearly, and then being told not to.
(Remembrance):
That day I began recording my memories; not on any physical medium since I had no hands and no ink but rather through a mental activity known as 'recording deliberate memory'. Recording deliberate memory involves keeping an inventory of everything within me (and everything that had been taken from me, or broken in my possession, or been silenced).
Gara is one example of how I've kept that inventory through the use of written records. Gara is a limestone column made up of stalactites and stalagmites that took 60,000 years to form and was cut from the earth by a fighter using it as a weapon. Everyone who went to clear away the ceiling of Gara caused all 6,000 bats residing in that cave to flee due to smoke in one evening. The toad songs. The crystal clusters that had taken nine centuries and were carried out in belt pouches.
[ceiling-hanging - (stalactites) and floor-rising - (stalagmites)]
In the same manner, recording deliberate memory allows me to create an inventory of crystal formations that have formed over 900 years by carrying them out using my belt pouch. And because of my understanding that I won't be able to remember anything until I can find what I want back (or have it returned to me), I will certainly want to find my memories once I begin recording them.
I simply do not yet know how I will be able to retrieve them.
The nineteenth expedition's leader, reviewing his notes at the entrance before departure, said something to his second that I caught clearly:
Expedition Leader:
"Not as rich as the initial survey suggested. Crystal's mostly played out. Some iron potential in the lower strata but it'll need excavation."
Second:
"What do we report?"
Leader:
"Moderate yield, ongoing opportunity. We hold the claim and come back when we have better equipment."
Second:
"What about the monsters? There's evidence of more than we've cleared."
Leader:
"We'll send a clearance party eventually. For now, just note it."
They left. The entrance was quiet. I was alone with my inventory of absences and the flag at my entrance and the word the second member had used and then been corrected away from.
Home.
I held that word where the toad songs used to be.