Hope in Ruins Book III: The Fountain and the City of Salt

The Day the Kilns were Made

--From the Journal of Caleb Martin

I suppose you want to know what happened that day, the day the kilns were made. But which day was that? Like most things that matter, it didn't happen in a single day, not really.

Our work on the kilns took months. We had many failures before the first kiln was functional and many more before the final perfected kiln, and there were many milestones along the way. But if I had to pick a day that really mattered. Let me see....

Silence does funny things to a person because there's never really truly silence, is there? The absence of words and stories is in itself a kind of story. Why are there no words? Why is the story no longer told? What is the silence saying? You'll have to forgive me if this story is a bit disjointed, for I've spent the past three hundred years in silence. Speaking words that have been unsaid for so long... well, it's not easy.

But that's a rabbit trail for another day. Maybe the kilns were made... yes, the day I created the first functional kiln. Maybe that was the day. It was a sunny day. A warm day. Pelicans sailed across the sky over the water, barely moving their wings at all. Why would I remember that? Why would I remember pelicans most of all?

I've just realized that you've never seen a pelican. I guess that's yet another thing I have to be sorry about.

That day I had gone out for a walk to clear my head. I had worked all night, just me, in the lab, when I made a breakthrough and finally got the kiln working. We didn't have cell reception down in the lab (you don't know what I mean, do you? What a cell phone is? Well... never mind), so I had gone outside to call Joshua and Etta and tell them the good news. But then I saw the pelicans gliding across a perfectly blue sky, and I just stopped and stared at them.

No, wait, maybe the day this all started was the day Etta found me.

There'd been some awards banquet. I was being honored for... do you know, I can't even remember what I was being honored for? I know I'd been chasing it for years, that I remember. Now I can't for the life of me remember what it was.... The dinner had been sublime and long and the bar open, yet I remember I had left early, just after receiving my award. I wonder why I did that. Joshua was still inside. Would things have been different if he'd left early instead of me? I've asked myself that question over and over again, hating the answer each time. But what good is it to wonder?

It was raining. I remember that because Etta caught me on the steps and I had forgotten my umbrella inside, and I was trying to get a cab but not having too much luck until I did. That was when Etta appeared. She was wearing white. The hem of her dress was soaking. She told me she had a job offer for me and it would pay well. It would make us all rich. Very rich. The rain came harder, and I tried to get in the cab (is this another thing you don't know about?) and get rid of this annoying woman who'd remembered her umbrella, but she said... she said it wasn't about the money, not for her. She said she wanted to find out what really happened to her mother.

I don't want you to think I did all this out of selflessness. I wish I had. It wasn't the story about her mother that made me take the job. It might have intrigued Joshua, but I imagine he would have said yes because of the money. It really was an outrageous offer.

But this all didn't really start with me, did it? How could it? Joshua and I were only tools she used to get what she wanted. I suppose it all started with Etta. For her, this was all about her mother, you know. You won't find that in the storybooks. Oh, yes, I know there's a story in that ridiculous storybook about how Henrietta Loraine came to be, how little Henrietta lost her mother to a wicked witch, or some nonsense like that. Truly, it is nonsense. But the more I read that story, the more I realized there was an element of truth to it. She did lose her mother. And there was a monster.

But I'm just not sure I know who the monster really is anymore.

Anyway, here's what she told me all those three hundred years ago. Who knows if it's true or not. Probably not the details, but the feeling of it is true. It had been so long, and Etta was so... so very different when I met her than when she was a little girl, that I can't imagine this story really being completely true. But it's what she told me.

Her mother had been kind. She had loved color and music and dancing, and she had loved Etta most of all. Her mother called her Henri. They lived near the ocean. That part is true. They were happy. But one day, her mother said she would be going away and not to worry, Henri would be well looked after. So Henri stayed with a neighbor who smelled like smoke and tea for two weeks. Henri thought her mother was never coming back.

But she did, and something wasn't right.

Henri said her mother had changed. She was not the same person who called her Henri and took her to the beach and sometimes bought ice-cream sandwiches for dinner. And suddenly, they had money. They moved to a much nicer apartment farther from the ocean. Henri started at a much nicer school. One with uniforms. Her mother got a job that required her to wear a suit and heels. But more than all that, Henri's mother was now cold and cruel and distant.

Little Henri felt like she'd lost her mother. I don't know when she realized that her mother was truly gone, but on some particular day now lost to us, she knew that her mother was not the same person. And that's probably the real day this all started—the day Henrietta Longstreet decided to find out what really happened to her mother.

She told me she spent years trying searching and found nothing. But she never stopped looking. Then the woman who called herself Henri's mother died. Among the dead woman's possessions, Henri found the answers she was looking for. Henri found notes and papers and boxes and boxes of research by some dead doctor. And there was a news article about some murdered old couple. She connected a few dots and went looking for me thinking I could help.

I can't tell you the exact day the kilns were made because they mean too much. The kilns are too big and too powerful to simply have been created one day out of nothingness. Even I don't have that kind of power. I suppose it took many important days to create the Henrietta Loraine, kilns, and what we now call Nova, and Juliette... and Juliette is one of the most important pieces, isn't she?