Chapter 1 — The Quest
I am Nuo, the Unbegun
the silence before stars learned to burn.
And thus begins the Tenth Wandering of the Unbegun.
Kanyakumari.
Now, children.
I arrive bearing news.
Good news.
And bad news.
The council looks concerned.
Good news first.
Another Wandering.
The council cheers.
Excellent.
The Archive expands.
Another road.
Another relic.
Another collection of questionable decisions preserved against the wishes of dignity.
Wonderful.
Now
bad news.
The council leans forward.
Another prequel.
Silence.
The council does not move.
Children.
I know.
The council continues staring.
I know.
Someone in the back begins quietly tearing up the chronology.
Please don’t.
We worked very hard on that.
Because yes
I said the prequels were finished.
Not casually.
Not:
I think that’s probably everything.
No.
Children.
I was confident.
Certain.
Perhaps even
arrogant.
The council opens previous records.
“Final prequel.”
Yes.
“The last buried file.”
Yes.
“No more.”
All right.
Enough.
The council keeps reading.
Children.
I made a mistake.
I am the Unbegun.
I have never claimed competence.
The council pauses.
Fair.
My entire autobiographical record should have warned everyone against treating my declarations of chronological certainty as legally binding.
Memory does not behave like an archive.
Not really.
An archive has shelves.
Labels.
Dates.
Everything arranged.
Memory?
Children.
Memory is a drunk librarian.
You ask for one book.
It gives you another.
You ask whether there are any more.
It says no.
Then six months later you find an entire hidden wing behind a cupboard.
The council nods grimly.
And this particular betrayal began with
the bracelet.
My relic bone bracelet.
The council looks toward my wrist.
By now,
you know it.
Bone tags.
Wanderings.
Little pieces of places,
tied together,
clicking and clacking around my wrist whenever I move.
Children.
I was simply looking at it.
Nothing dramatic.
No sudden excavation.
No photograph album.
No desperate attempt to locate another forgotten trip.
I was admiring it.
The way the tags sat together.
The little noise they made.
Click.
Clack.
Evidence.
Road after road after road.
And then
a picture came into my head.
The council grows quiet.
A tag.
Not one currently on my wrist.
The council freezes.
No.
Yes.
Children.
A bone tag.
Another one.
Older.
Separate.
And the moment I saw it in memory,
something else moved behind it.
Not a full story.
Not yet.
An era.
The council leans forward.
A particular version of me.
A time with a very clear
before.
And after.
That is what struck first.
Not the destination.
Not even the events.
The shape.
Something happened around this period that divided things.
There was Nuo before.
And Nuo after.
The council grows still.
Foundational.
That word.
And suddenly the little image of that tag stopped being random.
Because I remembered where it belonged.
Kanyakumari.
The council erupts.
NEW FILE DETECTED.
Children.
I stared at the bracelet.
Then at nothing.
Then probably back at the bracelet,
as if the existing tags had personally withheld this information.
You knew about this?
The council laughs.
And there was another problem.
A serious archival problem.
Because until approximately five minutes before this revelation
Karkala held an important title.
The first bone tag.
The council turns toward Karkala’s ceremonial plaque.
Yes.
That little relic bought during the university assignment.
The one that survived long enough to resurrect the memory later.
The supposed origin of the entire tag habit.
Beautiful.
Poetic.
Neat.
Children.
Dethroned.
The council groans.
Again?
Again.
Apparently Wanderings possess one recurring tradition above all others.
Not dogs.
Not joints.
Not getting lost.
Dethroning.
The council begins updating plaques.
Earliest Wandering?
Dethroned repeatedly.
Final prequel?
Dethroned.
First relic?
Now dethroned.
Children.
My life apparently refuses hierarchy.
Every time I crown an origin,
memory walks in carrying an older claimant.
So
Karkala was not the first tag.
Kanyakumari was.
The council grows quiet.
The actual first.
At least
the council raises a finger.
No.
We are not doing this anymore.
The first currently remembered tag.
There.
Safe language.
The council applauds.
I have learned.
Slightly.
Now.
A tag alone does not make a Wandering.
The council nods.
Correct.
So what was the road?
Why Kanyakumari?
What sent that earlier version of Nuo toward the southern edge of the map?
Children.
A quest.
The council perks up.
Now,
the Wanderings have had quests before.
Some noble.
Some questionable.
Some chemically specific.
A quest for mushrooms.
A quest for LSD.
Quests for relics.
Quests that only became quests after grief attached itself to them.
Some roads began because something inside me needed healing.
Some because I was curious.
Some because university bureaucracy demanded movement.
The council nods.
Kanyakumari?
Simple.
Very simple.
Quest:
weed.
The council goes silent.
Weed?
Weed.
Children.
That is all the information you receive for now.
The council complains.
No.
Patience.
There is context.
Of course there is context.
There is always context.
There is a reason Kanyakumari became the answer.
A reason the road existed.
A reason that tag survived.
A reason I call this era foundational.
But Chapter One does not get to know everything merely because Present Nuo eventually remembered it.
The Archive opens one door at a time.
For now
weed.
The council writes carefully.
DESTINATION:
KANYAKUMARI.
QUEST:
WEED.
OBJECTIVE:
PRESUMABLY ACQUIRE WEED.
DIFFICULTY:
UNKNOWN.
Children.
A beautifully dignified beginning to the Tenth Wandering.
Some people travel to Kanyakumari because it is Kanyakumari.
History.
Geography.
Pilgrimage.
The meeting of waters.
Whatever reason sensible humans have.
University era or whichever era Nuo this turns out to be in the unfolding file
had a simpler mission.
Find weed.
The council sighs.
And perhaps that is why this memory returned through the tag first.
Objects are strange like that.
They do not always store the obvious thing.
You look at one,
and suddenly a person returns.
A road.
A room.
A smell.
An entire version of yourself.
The tag came first.
Then the era.
Then
Kanyakumari.
And once the name arrived,
I knew.
Children.
Another Wandering had been sitting outside the Archive this entire time.
Waiting.
Not because it was insignificant.
Quite the opposite.
Foundational.
That is what bothers me.
How do you forget something foundational?
The council shrugs.
Easy.
You live long enough.
More things happen.
New beginnings overwrite older beginnings.
The story you tell yourself becomes cleaner than the life that actually happened.
And then one day
click.
A relic rattles.
A picture surfaces.
And the clean version breaks.
The council nods.
Perhaps that is what these prequels really are.
Not bonus stories.
Corrections.
The Archive refusing to let me pretend I began where I first noticed myself beginning.
Children.
Kasol was once the beginning because Kasol was where I understood wandering.
But understanding a thing is not the same as starting it.
Kochi proved that.
Karkala proved the rituals came early.
And now Kanyakumari has arrived with an even older bone tag
and the irritating confidence of someone holding receipts.
The council laughs.
So yes.
Another prequel.
The prequel after the final prequel.
The council writes the phrase.
Ridiculous title.
Accurate title.
And this time
I make no promises.
The council cheers.
Growth!
Is this the definitive final prequel?
Children.
I do not know.
Do I believe there is another?
No.
Would I have said exactly that before remembering this one?
Yes.
The council nods.
Then wisdom has finally arrived.
Tiny amounts.
Therefore we surrender chronology to the memory gods.
If another file appears,
we will open it.
If not
good.
But no more declarations.
No more:
This is definitely the last.
The Archive has humiliated me enough.
The council smiles.
For now,
Kanyakumari.
The Tenth Wandering.
Another road that existed before the Wanderings knew themselves.
Another tag older than the ritual built around it.
Another version of Nuo waiting to be recovered.
And a quest so beautifully uncomplicated that it almost sounds fictional.
Children.
Weed.
That was the objective.
Nothing more.
Yet.
The council leans forward.
Because somewhere in this file
is a very clear before and after.
Somewhere,
the first relic waits.
Somewhere,
a version of Nuo is about to begin a journey without the faintest idea that years later,
he will look back and call it foundational.
But he does not know that.
Not yet.
He knows only the quest.
And so shall we.
The council closes every other file.
No foreshadowing.
No stolen answers from the future.
Only Kanyakumari as it returns.
One memory at a time.
Thus concludes Chapter One.
The Good News.
The Bad News.
The Prequel After The Final Prequel.
The Dethroning Of Karkala.
The First Tag Before The First Tag.
And The Quest.
Children.
I looked at a bracelet full of Wanderings
and remembered one relic that was missing.
The relic remembered a place.
The place remembered an era.
And the era remembered one objective.
Weed.
The council sighs.
Of course it did.
And so begins
the Tenth Wandering of the Unbegun.
Kanyakumari.
