POV: Seren Adaeze
Lucian doesn't follow the footprints.
I expect him to. I'm already standing up, already looking at where they lead into the dense interior, and he stays crouched in the mud for a moment longer and then straightens and turns in a completely different direction.
"Not that way," he says.
"Those could be your mother's."
"I know."
"Then why—"
"Because if she's in there, she's been there for twelve years and she's not in danger." He says it quietly and with the particular flatness of a person who has already had every version of this argument with themselves and reached the end of it. "And because you need to see the ruins first, before anything else."
I look at the footprints, the trees leaning over them, the dark gap between the trunks where the path disappears.
I follow him.
He takes us inland on a different route, narrow and older looking, less a path than a memory of one. The ground rises slightly and the trees thin out and after twenty minutes of walking in silence we come through a gap in the rock and I stop.
The ruins are not what I expected, and I don't know what I expected.
Stone walls, maybe chest height in places, lower where they've partially collapsed, a rough rectangle of space at the center open to the sky, everything covered in thick growth except the walls themselves, which are mostly clear, and it takes me a moment to understand why.
The symbols carved into the stone go all the way around, dense and deliberate, line after line of them filling every surface from ground level to the top of the remaining walls. They are not worn down the way carvings get when they're very old. They look recent, like someone cut them last week.
My mouth goes dry.
I know these symbols, not from a book, not from research, but from my own hand, from the paintings I've been making for three years in my flat in Cardiff, the ones I couldn't explain, the ones I told Dami were just patterns I dreamed up, the ones that filled seven sketchbooks before I started putting them on canvas.
These exact symbols. This exact arrangement.
"Lucian." My voice comes out wrong, too flat.
"I know," he says. He's watching me, not the walls.
"These are mine."
"Or you're theirs."
I don't have the capacity to argue with that right now. I walk toward the nearest wall and crouch down in front of it and look at the symbols up close. The stone is cold and slightly damp and the carvings are deep, cut with something precise, and the more I look at them the more I recognise: this cluster here, three lines converging on a central point, the spiral that breaks and restarts, the repeated figure I always drew as a woman with her arms raised and never knew why.
I put my hand on the wall.
The images come so fast I can't separate them.
Fire, large and purposeful, not destroying but contained, ringed by people; a woman's face close up, mouth open mid-sentence or mid-cry; hands pressing against stone from the other side; a sound, not one I hear but one I feel in my back teeth, resonant and very old; voices overlapping in a language I don't know but understand anyway the way you understand dreams, by feel rather than translation.
And underneath all of it, one word, repeated, pressing up through everything else like something rising through deep water.
Return. Return. Return.
I pull my hand back.
I'm kneeling on the ground. I don't remember going from crouching to kneeling. My palm is pressed against my sternum and I'm breathing harder than I should be and Lucian is right beside me, close enough that I can feel the warmth of him, not touching me but near.
"How long?" he asks.
"I don't know. Seconds."
"You made a sound."
"What kind of sound."
He doesn't answer that directly. "Are you hurt?"
"No." I sit back on my heels. The images are fading but the word isn't, still running underneath everything like a low current. "I saw fire, a woman, hands on stone." I pause. "One word in a language I didn't know but understood."
"What word?"
I look at him. "Return."
He sits down on the ground beside me, not gracefully, just sits, like his legs decided without consulting him. He puts his elbows on his knees and looks at the carved wall and I can see him processing something, turning it over, looking at it from different angles before he decides what it means.
"My mother used to sit in here for hours," he says. "She said it was the only place on the island that felt like it was speaking clearly."
"Did she touch the walls?"
"Every time."
I look at my palm. It looks completely normal. "What language is it?"
"I don't know. I've had three linguists look at photographs of the symbols. None of them could identify the root language. One said it predated every written system she'd ever studied." He pauses. "She stopped responding to my emails after that."
I almost want to laugh. I don't.
I stand up and walk slowly along the inside of the wall, not touching, just reading. The symbols shift as I move, or my understanding of them does. Some sections feel like instruction. Some feel like record. Some feel like warning, though I couldn't say why I know the difference.
I stop.
I found it without looking for it, the way you find the thing you were supposed to find when you stop trying. On the far wall, running from the top of the remaining stonework down to the ground, there is a crack, clean edged and new, the stone on either side pale where it split, unstained, the crack wide enough at its base that I could fit my fingers into it.
I don't fit my fingers into it.
Because coming through the gap, faint and completely impossible, is a light, orange and steady, not flickering like fire, not diffuse like reflected sun, deliberate, like something on the other side of the stone has been left on and is waiting for someone to notice.
The wall is solid. There is nothing behind it but earth.
I turn to Lucian.
He is already on his feet, already looking at it, and his face is doing nothing at all except for his eyes, which are doing everything.
"That wasn't there yesterday," he says.