Vade mecum

[grassangel]

Title: Vade mecum
Rating: G
Genre: General
Character/Pairing: None! (Ed and Al by inflection though)
Day/Theme: Oct. 27, 'vade mecum'

 

It is battered and worn, pages stuffed in and torn out, pen scratches everywhere. Bits of debris fall out as you read it, assorted notes and photos, train tickets, cards and pencil sketches, enveloped samples and discarded letters.
Pages are filled with chicken scrawl, smudged every way imgainable.
Hardly legible, not even coherent; it is a collection of paragraphs about a town and this city and a small community in the middle of nowhere.

Lists of expenses, extensive directions to a location; all these details might nag someone knowledgeable that this book is not an ordinary travel journal but something else.
All doubts are turned aside though when you turn to the next page, a description of a lovely town nestled in the foothills of a mountain range greeting your eyes, a postcard and a letter stuffed in the page after it.

It's a travel journal, the story of someone's travels written down for the world to read.
The story it tells is haphazard, told in excruciating detail in places, sparse in others, a miscellany mixed in with it.

And it starts with a not so likely beginning.

"On the eleventh of October, Continental year 1910, when I was eleven and my brother ten, we set out on a journey to explore the world and to find what we wanted most.....