POV: Seren Adaeze
The path to the ruins is different at night.
Not the layout, the ground is where I remember it, the rock, the rise, the gap in the stone that opens into the ruin space. But the island at night has a different quality to it, more present somehow, like it's paying closer attention. The trees don't lean because I can't see them well enough to tell, but I feel them. The hum through the ground is stronger in the dark.
I'm moving fast enough that I'm not thinking too carefully about what I'll say when I get there. That's probably deliberate on my part. If I think about what to say I'll slow down and if I slow down I'll convince myself to go back.
I come through the gap in the rock and stop.
The orange light is stronger than it was this afternoon, coming through the crack in the far wall steadily, no flicker, and lighting the inside of the ruins enough that I can see clearly.
Lucian is at the wall with his back to me.
His palm is flat against the stone, just beside the crack, not over it, beside it, the way you place your hand on a door when you're trying to hear through to the other side. His head is bowed slightly.
His shoulders are shaking.
Not much. If I'd come in quickly or carelessly I wouldn't have caught it. But I stopped in the gap and I'm watching him and I can see the small controlled movement of it, the way a person shakes when they are trying very hard not to and the trying is almost but not quite winning.
I have not seen this version of him. In four days I've seen controlled and careful and occasionally something underneath both of those things, but not this. This is what's left when all the management is gone. He looks smaller from the back, not physically, he's the same size, but the quality of his presence is different, like the thing that usually takes up space in a room ahead of him has gone somewhere else and left just the person.
He looks tired, not sleepy, the other kind, the kind that gets into your bones and stays there.
I don't know what to do. I should announce myself. Standing here watching him without him knowing is wrong, I know it's wrong, but moving feels equally wrong because whatever is happening at that wall is private in a way that I'd be interrupting by stepping into it.
I make the decision by accident. My foot shifts on the loose rock at the entrance and it scrapes and that's enough.
He goes very still.
He doesn't turn around immediately. He takes a breath I can see from here, his back expanding and then settling, and he lifts his hand from the wall slowly. He turns.
His face is not what I expected. I thought I'd see embarrassment, the expression of someone caught doing something they didn't want witnessed. That's not what's there. His eyes are red at the edges and his face is open in a way it never is during the day, all the careful arrangement of it gone, and what's underneath is not weakness.
It's just a person, unguarded and exhausted and real.
He looks at me for a long moment.
"How long were you standing there?" he says. His voice is rough at the edges.
"Not long."
He nods. He looks at the wall. The orange light pulses once very slightly, the same way it did this afternoon, and his jaw tightens in response.
"You should go back," he says.
"I'm not going back."
"Seren."
"Tell me what's happening."
He looks at me and something moves across his face, the same thing I saw earlier at the beach when he told me he'd updated his position, that quality of a decision being made. He pulls his hand through his hair and turns back to the crack in the wall and I come to stand beside him because standing across the ruins from him feels wrong given what I just saw.
The light coming through the crack is warm, genuinely warm, I can feel it on my face from two feet away.
"I started coming here at night about a year ago," he says, "when the light first appeared. At first I thought it was some kind of gas, something geological, I paid someone to do a survey of the island and they found nothing." He pauses. "Then I started standing here and after a while I started to feel like I wasn't alone on the other side of it."
I look at the crack.
"Not like a presence," he says. "More specific than that, like a specific person."
I understand before he says it. The understanding arrives in my chest a full second before the words.
"Lucian."
"She's here." He says it quietly and without drama, the way you say something you've been certain of for a long time but haven't said out loud yet because saying it out loud makes it real and real means having to do something about it. "My mother. She's inside the wall."
The light pulses again.
I look at him looking at the crack and I think about twelve years, twelve years of nothing, not a thread, not a shoe, and then one year ago a light appears in a wall that has no business having a light in it and the light feels like a person and the person feels specific, and he has been standing here in the dark pressing his hand against cold stone trying to reach her.
My throat does something I don't have time for right now.
"How do you know?" I ask.
"The same way you knew the symbols were yours before I told you." He looks at me. "You just know. It comes from somewhere that isn't logic."
I look at the crack, the light.
"The footprints," I say.
"Yes."
"You think she made them."
"I think something changed when you arrived. The light got stronger. The crack got wider." He says the next part carefully. "I think you're the reason she can reach through, I think whatever the island has been trying to return to, whatever that word means, you're part of how it happens."
The warmth from the light is steady on my face.
I put my hand out before I've fully decided to, not into the crack, just near it, the same way he was positioned when I walked in.
The warmth surges.
And through it, very faint, a sound.
A voice. A single syllable. A name.
Not mine.
His.