Classical Flourishing: The Temporal Witnesses, Volume 5

By Ricardo Gómez

The Temporal Witnesses Volume 5: Classical Flourishing

They have always gone together. This time they go to different centuries, alone.

Eight months ago Cuchu Ramirez and Matias Kim were two teenagers frightened of a school board. Now they train forty students a week in five schools and three countries, and the work has grown past the two of them.

So Dr. Sarah Crow Feather brings two more. Sofia Reyes thinks out loud in probabilities and cannot stop talking. James Running Wolf can barely be got to speak, and his grandfather told him the family gift skips generations and always comes back. Neither of them will travel. They will hold the connection from a Seattle apartment while Cuchu goes to one past and Matias goes to another.

Two Societies. Two Travellers, Separately. One Attack on What People Can Remember.

TEOTIHUAC N, 150 CE: A city of sixty thousand people with more arriving every season, most of its ground already laid out, an avenue running between painted compounds toward the pyramids. Three districts are arguing about water in a dry season, and Cuchu is put in front of forty of their representatives and told to ask her questions. Her first attempt comes apart in the courtyard while she is standing in the middle of it.

HOPEWELL, OHIO, 250 CE: Geometric earthworks in autumn woodland, and a web of obligations that reaches the Great Lakes, the Gulf Coast and the mountains, with no capital and nobody at the top of it. Copper, mica and obsidian are fetched in person across thousands of miles. Matias lays out the whole continent on the ground in stones and twigs, forty people agree the picture is true, and then the runner who spent all day teaching him says no, in front of all of them, and is right.

While they are gone, the Patrimony Foundation 2.0 stops working on what children are taught and starts working on what people can remember. Cuchu wakes on Wednesday with Tuesday missing.

What comes back from both journeys is smaller than anybody wanted and harder to argue with. A council that settles nothing while the city meets the dry season anyway. A refusal from a man who could have taught the routes to a child in an afternoon and could not hand over who opens the door at the ninth house. And a librarian who has to be got back one visitor at a time, by eleven people, most of whom have never been in the room where any of this was planned.

Ten chapters, two societies, and the first journey Cuchu and Matias do not take side by side.

Perfect for fans of: Ursula K. Le Guin's ethical complexity, Octavia E. Butler's questions about who carries the past, and anyone who wants to know what a city of sixty thousand people looked like on an ordinary working morning.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0FR3NN8P2
• ISBN13: 9798265145161
• Release Date: September 2025
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 82 Pages
• Weight: 0.24 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.2" x 6.0" x 9.0"