POV: Seren Adaeze
The voice says don't be afraid and I am already afraid, which makes the instruction useless, but I put my hand on the door anyway.
There is no handle. No mechanism I can see. I press my palm flat against the stone the way I've learned to press against things on this island, with intention rather than force, and the door moves inward immediately, smoothly, like it was waiting for exactly the weight of my specific hand and nothing else.
The darkness inside is not complete. Something in the walls gives off a low light, sourceless and soft, and as my eyes adjust I see the shapes on the walls and I stop moving entirely.
Paintings.
Floor to ceiling, every surface, no stone left uncovered. Not symbols, not carvings. Paintings. Made with colour and intention and a hand that knew exactly what it was doing. The style is not mine. The brushwork is looser than I work, more gestural, the lines made with a confidence I'm still building toward in my own practice. But the images.
The images are mine.
The recurring dream of the burning circle with the figures around it, the one I've painted eleven times in three years trying to get it right. It's here, on the left wall, rendered in ochre and deep red with a precision that makes my eleven attempts look like sketches. The woman with her arms raised that I've drawn since I was a teenager without knowing why. She's here too, twice, on opposite walls, both versions slightly different, like someone studying the same subject from different angles across different sittings.
The grey sea I've been painting for years, the one Dami says looks like it's alive. It's here on the ceiling.
I stand in the middle of the room and I turn slowly and every vision I have ever had looks back at me from walls that were painted long before I was born.
My throat closes up. I don't let myself stand still long enough to fully process it because I think if I do I will sit down on the floor and not get up for a while, and sitting on the floor is not useful right now.
Lucian has come as far as the doorway. He's not coming in, I can feel him holding himself at the threshold, giving me the room in a way that is so deliberate and so careful that it makes my chest do something I choose not to examine.
"Did you know this was here?" I ask.
"No."
I believe him. His voice has the same quality it had last night looking at the footprints. The quality of something landing that he wasn't braced for.
I move slowly along the left wall, looking at each painting. They're not arranged randomly. There's a sequence to them, a progression. The early ones, near the door, are quieter, single figures, simple shapes. As I move deeper into the room they become more complex, more layered, more urgent. Like the painter was building toward something. Like each image was a step in a larger argument.
I stop at one near the back wall.
It's a painting of two people standing at the entrance to a corridor. A narrow stone corridor with doors along the sides. The two figures are small, painted from above, and I can't see their faces. But one of them has dark hair and a sketchbook under her arm.
I take a step back.
"Lucian." My voice comes out flat. "Come in here."
He comes in. He stops beside me. He looks at the painting.
He is very quiet for a moment. "That's this corridor," he says.
"Yes."
"And those two figures."
"Yes."
He looks at it for a long time. I watch his face and it does something I haven't seen it do before, not the careful nothing and not the unguarded exhaustion from last night. Something in between. Something that looks like a person realising the story they're in is much older and much larger than they understood.
"Someone painted this and knew we'd stand here looking at it," I say.
"Yes."
"And painted everything else I've ever seen in my head."
"Yes."
I turn away from it because I can't look at it anymore right now. I move toward the back corner of the room because I need to do something with the energy moving through me that isn't standing still, and in the back corner I nearly step on it.
A stone ledge, low to the ground, tucked into the angle where two walls meet. I would have missed it in the dark if I hadn't moved exactly here. On the ledge, small and dark with age, is a journal.
Leather cover. Thick pages, the edges brown and soft. I crouch down and pick it up and it is lighter than it looks and solid in my hands in the way objects are solid when they've been made carefully and kept carefully and have outlasted most of the hands that have touched them.
I look at the cover.
The handwriting is not quite mine. Close enough that my first instinct is to think I wrote it and then immediately know I didn't. The letter shapes are similar, the slight backward lean of my lowercase, the way I close my e. But older. More formal. The hand of someone who learned to write when writing was taught differently.
Five words on the cover.
For the one who comes after me.
And below it, in smaller letters, a date.
I sit back on my heels and I look at it and I don't open it. Not yet. My hands want to open it immediately and the wanting is strong enough that I make myself wait, because something about the weight of it in my hands tells me that opening it is a decision with consequences and I need to make it deliberately.
"What is it?" Lucian asks from behind me.
I turn so he can see. He looks at the journal and then at my face and then at the journal again.
"The handwriting," he says.
"I know."
"It's almost yours."
"I know." I look at the date. "1943. My grandmother would have been twenty-three."
The silence sits between us.
"She was here before me," I say. "She came here. She painted all of this." I look at the walls. "She knew I was coming."
"Open it," Lucian says quietly.
I look at the cover one more time. The five words in handwriting that is almost mine but belongs to a woman who has been dead for thirty years and somehow knew to leave this here, in this room, behind a door that appeared overnight with my name carved into it.
I open the journal.
The first line stops my breath entirely.
Seren, by the time you find this, the island will already be running out of time.