POV: Seren Adaeze
Nobody came.
The captain fired the flare and we all watched it arc over the water and die in the fog, and whatever was following us either stopped or was never there to begin with. I spent the rest of the crossing standing at the back of the boat staring at the water behind us until my eyes hurt, and I saw nothing, just fog thickening as we moved forward, swallowing the distance we covered like it was erasing our path as we made it.
Lucian didn't tell me to stop looking. He stood beside me for a while without speaking and I didn't ask him to leave.
That's the part I keep thinking about, that I didn't ask him to leave.
The island arrives without announcement. One minute there is fog and dark water and then the fog shifts and it's just there, close enough that I can see individual trees, green and dense and completely still, no birds, no sound coming off it at all.
I know this place.
That's the thought that hits me before any other, before I can stop it or argue with it. My body recognises it the way you recognise a voice you haven't heard in years. Something in my chest pulls toward it like a cord being slowly reeled in.
I grip the railing.
"First time seeing it?" the captain asks. He's watching me, not the island.
"Yes," I say.
He makes a small sound that isn't agreement.
We come in close and anchor a short distance from shore. Lucian lowers a smaller boat and I climb down into it without being asked because waiting would make it worse. The water between the boat and the shore is very shallow and very clear and I can see the bottom the whole way in, sand, pale and smooth, undisturbed.
The moment my feet touch the shore I stop walking.
The ground hums. It's not a sound, it's more like a vibration that starts under my feet and moves upward through my legs, low and steady, like a note a cello holds after the bow lifts. My first instinct is to step back off it. My second instinct, which wins, is to stand completely still and let myself feel it.
I have been here in my sleep so many times I have lost count. But in the dreams there is always something slightly wrong about the scale of things, the way everything in a dream is almost right but not completely. Standing here now with the ground humming under me and the smell of it in my lungs, something in me settles into place like a bone going back into a joint.
It is nothing like the dreams. It is more than the dreams. That's what's frightening about it.
Lucian comes up beside me. "You've gone very still," he says.
"The ground."
"I know."
"You feel it too?"
He looks at his feet and then at mine. "Not the way you do, I think."
I want to ask him what that means but I'm not sure I want the answer yet. I start walking instead, up the shore toward the tree line, and he follows without making it feel like he's following me. The trees are dense but the light comes through them easily and the air under them is warm, warmer than it should be, warmer than it was on the water.
I stop at the edge of the trees.
There is a path, narrow and old-looking, the kind that gets made by years of the same footsteps going the same direction. I didn't see it from the water but here it is, obvious as anything.
"How many times have you been here?" I ask.
"Fourteen."
"And this path."
"It's always there."
"Has anyone else been here with you?"
He takes just a beat too long. "Once."
I turn to look at him. He's looking at the path.
"Who?"
"Someone who couldn't stay," he says.
That is not a full answer. I file it away and don't push yet because something else is happening, something I need to pay attention to. The humming underfoot has changed, it was steady when I first stepped off the boat and now it has a rhythm, a faint slow pulse keeping time with something.
My heartbeat. It's keeping time with my heartbeat.
I press my hand flat against the nearest tree to check if I'm imagining it. The bark is warm. The pulse moves through it against my palm, steady and calm, matching mine beat for beat.
I pull my hand back.
"Lucian."
"I see it," he says, very quietly.
"What is this."
"I don't know the right word for it. But it started the moment you stepped off the boat. It didn't do this before you came." He looks at me with that careful expression he gets when he's deciding how much to say. "I've been trying to understand the island for years, trying to understand why I can find it when no one else can, why it appears for me, what it wants." He stops. "I think it was waiting for you, not for me. I was just the way to get you here."
I should be unsettled by that. I am unsettled by that. But underneath the unsettled part is something else I won't name yet.
"The person who couldn't stay," I say. "Did the island respond to them the way it's responding to me?"
A long pause. "No."
Before I can ask anything else, the fog moves.
I hear it before I see it, a soft sound like a door being pulled shut from the other side. I turn back toward the water and the fog is rolling in fast from every direction at once, not drifting but moving with intention, and within seconds I can't see the anchor boat, within ten seconds I can't see the water, within thirty the whole shoreline is white and thick and completely closed.
Behind us, the path. Ahead of us, nothing.
The captain's voice comes through the white somewhere, distant, then cut off entirely, like a signal dropped mid-sentence.
Then silence.
Just me and Lucian and the island breathing steadily under our feet, waiting for something only it knows is coming.
Lucian reaches into his jacket, pulls out a photograph, and holds it out to me face down.
"There's something I should have told you before we left," he says. "I need you to see this first."