This is the last moment that Martin Rank was seen. As of 3:17pm, we don’t know where he is.
We don’t know what happened to him. Maybe he’s lost in time. Maybe he was lost in the Storm. Maybe he was spirited away to another location. Lauren couldn’t sense him anymore, that’s all we know for sure. We’re lost in the dark right now, but Dey mentioned the story in Inlaudetus might help us to find him. The transcription of that story is here:
I wake in the room of a hospital. Gray buildings loom outside the grime-stained window. I am in the city again. How? What do I last remember? Sand. Ships half-buried in it, bows pointing to the silver sun. A hand, outstretched, calling for me. A welcome. I had walked to far into those woods that I found the sea. A strange green sea where all manner of mast and man had washed ashore. People dressed in bygone fashions and others wearing clothes from what must have been times yet to come. A shore where time was as ever-changing as the great great sea itself. And then a voice called to me. From the dark world I left. How had they found me? Had I not wandered far enough into my new world. They called me by my name.
A name I thought I’d left in the dead gray city along with all the memories of my life before wonder. I stepped into the sand but felt a hand on my shoulder. And somehow the sea and the shore of times intermixed and began to fade away. As if someone had drawn a curtain down over it. A curtain painted with the mundane world I thought I had escaped.
A girl found me walking in a dry river bed, unable to hear or see her. She went to the farmer who employed me. In my cabin they found the name of a doctor in New York City whose care I had been in before I ventured to the green world, and then beyond. The doctor who listened to my fractured recollections. Of other worlds. And other lives. The doctor knew my name. He’d been the one who drew me back from what he tried to explain were nothing more than imaginings. That all I had seen and heard, tasted,and touched, had been inside my sundered mind.
I fought with all my will against that thought. It could not have been a dream. I had found a world so wondrous it was beyond any man’s ability to conjure, least of all mine. But his insistence worked its way in me and now I am here in the city again. Withered. The doctor speaks my name as if it were an anchor keep me from drifting away again. He has cursed me. I can not see the wondrous world. Only gray. I ask to be left alone. To forget. To sleep until I do not wake again, because I have remembered something. I’ve remembered that this place holds untold loss for me. A loss so profound that I beg sleep to sweep me away.
But this morning the doctor brings me a box. Inside is what I left behind when I first escaped the city. He tells me I have a life that is worth fighting to find again. My purpose is to discover what happened, what split me, and how to mend myself once again.
Inside, a flannel shirt and billfold. Trousers made of strange material. He remarks that the shoes are odd, with soles like indian with soles possibly rubber, fashioned in another country. Perhaps I am from another land, he wonders. I nod. But as I hold all the things I left behind, my clothing, my shoes, my watch, a new truth behind to grow inside my breast. I am here in the gray but my vision has opened something inside me. I can see now that my heart has drifted on the great green sea of time. I don’t belong here, as i have long suspected. Who I am and what I am here to do behind to crash against me all at once. I have somehow drifted onto the edge of another era with magic in my heart and a great purpose only now awakening, pulling me toward shore. Not another land, my doctor. I have sailed here from another time.
To me, Marty is one of us. I’ve known him since December. When I first emailed him, he was this gruff, stand-offish reporter who none of us were sure about… And through these last several months I’ve had the privilege of getting to learn more about what a brave, strong individual he is. He’s a good person, and I don’t know what happened to him…but I won’t rest until I do.
Please guys, let’s put that Mountie magiq to work and do what we can to save our friend.
