POV: Seren Adaeze
We don't talk about the light.
We stand there looking at it for long enough that the sky above the open ruins starts to change colour, and then Lucian says we should get back before dark and I don't argue because I need to be somewhere with more open sky above me and less stone pressing in from every side.
He doesn't explain the light. I don't ask him to yet. I'm storing it with the other things I don't have categories for, which is becoming a long list.
By the time we reach the beach the sun is low and the fog has stayed back from the shore, which Lucian says doesn't always happen. He says it like it's a minor logistical note and not the island making a decision. I'm starting to understand that this is how he handles things he can't control, describing them practically and keeping moving.
He builds a fire without making a production of it. I sit on the sand a few feet back and watch him work and think about the word that's still running underneath everything else in my head like a signal I can't switch off.
Return.
The fire takes quickly. He sits back on his heels and then, instead of moving to the far side of the fire the way he usually positions himself when we're in the same space, he sits where he is, which puts him maybe four feet from me.
I notice this and say nothing about it.
We eat from the supplies the captain left before the fog closed in, simple things. Neither of us talks for a while and it's not the uncomfortable silence of two people who don't know each other well enough. It's something else. The fire does its work and the sea makes its sounds and Lucian sits with his forearms on his knees and stares into the middle of the flame and for the first time since I arrived on this island he looks like a person who has put something down.
Not all the way down, but some of it.
He looks younger like this, not young, but less managed, the version of him that exists when he's stopped deciding how to be in a room.
I watch him without meaning to for longer than I should.
"Can I ask you something?" I say.
He looks at me. "You always do anyway."
"Do you actually believe in magic?"
He looks back at the fire, not immediately, the way people do when a question is easy. He actually thinks about it, the fire shifts and he watches it shift and I watch him watch it.
"I believe in things I cannot explain," he says. "That seems like the same thing."
I think about that for a moment. "Most people go the other direction. They can't explain something so they decide it isn't real."
"Most people haven't spent four years coming back to an island that doesn't exist on any map."
"Fair point."
He almost smiles, not quite, but the corner of his mouth moves in a way that changes his whole face and I look away from it because I don't need that particular piece of information right now.
"The symbols," I say. "How long have they been there?"
"As long as I can remember. My mother used to copy them into notebooks. She had twelve of them by the time she disappeared." He pauses. "I still have them."
"Did she know what they meant?"
"She thought she was getting close. She said the language wasn't something you translated, it was something you remembered." He picks up a small piece of wood and turns it in his fingers. "I thought that was her being romantic about it. Now I think she was being literal."
I look at my right hand, the one I pressed against the wall. "When I touched the stone I didn't hear it like a language. It came in as images, feeling, the word came through underneath everything else like a bass note."
"Return."
"Yes."
He throws the piece of wood into the fire and watches it catch. "My mother used to say the island was looking for its people, that it had been scattered and it was trying to gather itself back." He says it carefully, like he's been holding the sentence for a long time and isn't sure what it weighs now that it's out. "I thought she meant something abstract."
"And now?"
He looks at me directly. "And now you're here and the island responds to you the way it responded to her and there are footprints in the mud that are the same size as hers and I have a crack in a wall that wasn't there yesterday with a light coming through it that has no physical explanation." He holds my gaze for a moment. "So I've updated my position."
I look at the fire.
"I'm not her," I say.
"No."
"Whatever the island wants from me, it's not the same as what it wanted from her."
"I know that."
"Do you?"
He looks at me for a long moment. "Yes," he says, and something in the way he says it closes the subject gently but completely, the way you close a door you're not ready to go through yet.
We sit for another hour. The conversation moves to smaller things, the island's geography, the captain's history, a question he asks about Cardiff that I answer and then find myself asking how he knew I was from Cardiff. He says I mentioned it on the boat. I don't remember mentioning it on the boat.
I go to sleep listening to the fire and the sea and I don't dream of anything, which is the first time since I arrived.
I wake up and the fire is still lit.
This is wrong before I'm fully awake. It's deep in the night, well past the point where a fire that size would burn without tending. The wood has been added to, recently.
I sit up.
His sleeping bag is empty.
I look at the fire, properly tended, wood stacked to last. I look at the beach in both directions. I look at the treeline.
The footprints in the sand are clear in the firelight, leading away from camp, into the dark, toward the interior, toward the ruins.
I sit with that for exactly five seconds, five seconds of telling myself this is not my business, that he is an adult who knows this island, that the light behind the cracked wall was not my responsibility and the footprints in the mud were not my mystery to solve.
Then I pull on my shoes.