Puzzle pieces

Who: Doc
Where: His room
When: early afternoon

As always, the sunrise hadn't failed to impress Doc, but it never did. He could get lost in a single vein of changing color, watching it bleed from deep blues and purples to softer reds for the whole duration of the dawn. There was just something about the promise of a new day, or maybe the end of the night. Or maybe neither.

He'd said before, years ago, that he loved the rising and setting so much because it was a moment when the world was both night and day, yet neither. The setting was a time when the two worlds he lived in collided, and the dawning? A handful of minutes where neither side held sway. The creatures he'd hunted for decades returned to wherever they called home, so much of the human world had yet to start their day. The only ones who held claim were the people like him. And while Eric Martens had never been a greedy man, he liked being able to claim that part of each day.

It wasn't as if he'd been sleeping, at any rate. His current zeal had blossomed the night before, after talking with Dylan and Leija, when an email had dropped neatly into his lap after weeks of fruitless searching. As much as the man was a scholar, and as good as he was at following a lead, when there was none? Skill didn't matter.

He'd been digging for information on the long-dead smith who'd forged Big Iron some hundred and forty years ago, a Frenchman of some sort who'd shown up as nothing more than a footnote in the annals of this country when he'd come here and done... whatever it was he'd done. Of course, that footnote was useless; the man appeared during the western migration, he'd been living among the indigenous tribes. Which tribe, though?

That had been the question Doc couldn't answer; some had assimilated with larger ones over time, others had been wiped out forever, both had lost their histories and secrets. Until the email, at least. Doc's query hadn't even been to the man who'd written him, it had been asked of a friend, who asked another friend and so on and so forth for who knew how many links of chain before hitting the mark. But when he'd opened the file he'd received? Well, Doc figured in that moment that he owed every link in that searching chain a drink or two.

The file was an old paper, nine years old to be exact, written by a professor of Native American Studies out on the east coast. It had been a culmination of effort for the writer, a gathering of lost lores from those tribes whose numbers dwindled with every year, who Doc's own children might outlive. And buried in that paper? Well, there was the name Doc had been looking for. Gericault.

"This one did not speak as the other white men. His tongue was that of the hunters and priests, not used for so long that only two elders remembered it. His name was a slippery thing, Garecall he said, and he spoke of seeking holy ground. Our elders aimed him towards sunrise, and we did not see him for many days."

It wasn't much to go on, only a bare passage from one interview, but it was a start. The man giving the interview had been from the Goshute tribe, and that detail led to another, and another beyond it. So the night had been spent tracking down where the tribal lands had been before the tribe had been removed, where their 'holy ground' might lie beyond that, and most frustratingly? Doc had been trying his damndest to reconfigure star patterns, to guess as close as he could at recreating the conditions Gericault had used when he'd forged the gun Kurt used now.

Of course, he wasn't an astronomer, or even an astro-physicist. "Three more years of school and I could've been," he murmured from his seat on his bed, skimming an atlas idly and grabbing some discarded papers. At least he was getting somewhere. From what he could tell, the site that had seen the forging was just powerful. Maybe the stars' alignment didn't affect it. Maybe it would always confer power, though he would be clueless about what that power might be.

All Doc knew was that he needed to get out that way, and soon. THe man cited for the interview had been 73 when he'd given it, recounting a tale told by his father. The Goshute were dying, down to a bare 120 when they'd once numbered in the hundreds of thousands. If all that were left were people who didn't know their own ways?

"Not gonna happen," he murmured to himself, "They're still hanging on. I'll make it." Of course, he was putting the cart before the horse in this case. There was a party to throw tonight; dinner, drinks, introducing his recruits to his kids, maybe even a loose plan for the end of the world to discuss. "I'm gonna need to pick up some more beers," Doc said, blinking with the realization and hopping from his bed. "Voltaire!" he called as he shut his room up tight, "Time for walkies!"