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Wow.

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I wrote way more than I'd intended yesterday. It was a day for introspection and no small amount of freaking out. I'm a lot calmer now though.

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Going to work in about half an hour, yeah, it's sunday, so what? I don't have anything better to do at the moment, and there's work I can do today which will make tomorrow easier.

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I also picked up my book again last night. By my book I mean the one I'm writing. I started it 2 years ago, and then my life kind of fell apart, so it got put on long term hold. I did a little more on it last night, and rediscovered how very difficult it is to write.

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Mind you, I also read part of the book again (it's about 50 pages so far), and went wow, I wrote that? I can see parts that are awkward, but over all it's not too bad.

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I might be the only person who'll ever read this, or I might not, but I'm putting the first chapter in just below this comment.

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If nothing else it'll serve as a marker point, a grand leap backwards into the mind of the person I used to be.

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———- QSD CHAPTER 1 —————

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Chapter One

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It was in retrospect, as is often the case; it occurred to him that this might not have been the best idea after all.

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The sun was nearing the horizon, and from the other direction he could see what looked like angry storm clouds on the move. The wind had picked up within the last hour, stirring the dust with reckless abandon.

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Thomas looked down at his shovel, and the hole he'd been digging. The soil here was mostly gravel, with just enough muck holding it together to make it slow work. With every shovelful more debris fell into the hole, forcing him to make it larger than originally planned.

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The mountainside was beautiful.

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He could see it in his mind's eye from the pictures he'd taken over the last couple of months. A single mountain, set in the middle of plains and rolling hills that stretched as far as the eye could see. Beaten, weathered, with two fractured and snow covered peaks rising above the land. Tall trees took root almost to the snow line. The mountain commanded an impressive view of the landscape. It was quite possible to see the entire county from it on a clear day.

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Hikers, climbers and naturalists considered this place a home away from home. It was one of the few places you could walk all day in the height of summer, and not get eaten alive by bugs. Indeed, there did not seem to be any insects at all, anywhere near or on the mountain.

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The southern face was not the same; a large piece was missing. In its place a depression- seemingly carved out of the rock, only thirty feet at its deepest, but stretching a half a mile in diameter, and nearly 300 yards back in to the mountain, it seemed very much out of place.

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It too was beautiful, in its own way, but no trees grew here, just moss and tiny flowers, yellows and whites, which blanketed this place from early spring to late fall. Even that seemed a stretch; the soil seemed to lack the ingredients necessary to grow anything.

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At times the villagers climbed this mountain to the lowest part of the hole, named Caverna Quasso “The Shattered Cave”, and brought flowers back from it. Despite the efforts of some very good gardeners, the flowers always died with a few days. These flowers were seen nowhere else in the county, thin and fragile looking they still managed to grow and thrive in the worst weather a mountain can deliver.

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Too he could see his dig site, smack dab in the middle of this space, a low hill whose base he had visited only in pictures before. Low and rounded, it somehow seemed the right place to start this foolish endeavor. A trail of holes like giant footprints seemed to follow his path around the base of the hill to his current position on top of it.

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“But no amount of remembering will get this damn hole dug,” he muttered to himself, as he slung yet another spade full out of the hole. “I've been at this for nearly 3 hours now, it's getting late. I'm sore, tired, and starting to get cranky. I don't even know why I came up here, or what I expect to find. I swear, if I don't find something soon-“

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CLINK!

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Just then his shovel hit something that did not make the same noises he'd been hearing for hours. It sounded… metallic? Surely no one would bury treasure halfway up a mountainside.

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“Now what do we have here hmmm?” Moving faster now to force the dirt from the hole- to see what he'd discovered, he found that while he still couldn't make out what it was through the muck and gravel, he could see it was large.

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20 minutes later he had a space almost two feet square and three deep hitting the object. He leaned the shovel against the side of the hole, and started digging with spade and brush. The storm was closing fast and the wind had risen. Dust and dirt were starting to swirl around him as the light faded.

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