Made with AI trained only on my own artwork. The honest story of how, and why →
“Why are we turning,” Tam asked, from the bow, watching the green smudge of an island slide from dead ahead to off the port side without a single order given to the wheel.
“Because that’s Elämäkäs,” Captain Senna Voss said, “and I like my crew with their wits still screwed on.”
“It’s just an island.”
“It’s just an island the way a locked door is just wood.”
Tam looked at it a moment longer. Ordinary jungle, ordinary beach, gulls even, wheeling low over the shallows like it was any patch of coastline on any map in the world.
“You’ve been,” Tam said. It wasn’t a question.
Senna kept her eyes on the wheel a moment before she answered.
“I’ve been close enough,” she said. “Close enough is the only version of that story anyone tells twice.”
She was younger than Tam when she heard the first version of it, secondhand, in a dockside bar in Seafoam that smelled of tar and turtle oil, from a Duron diver three drinks past sensible.
Eiväloä, the diver had called it. A mineral that didn’t exist anywhere else on the charted world, found only on one island, an island that belonged, by every account she’d ever half-believed, to something that wasn’t a king and wasn’t an army and definitely wasn’t in the mood to negotiate.
“Belongs to the little ones,” the diver had said. “And whatever watches over them.”
“Little ones?”
The diver nodded. “Tiny Folk,” he said.
“Watches how?”
The diver had gone quiet in a way that told her more than his answer did.
She was twenty-two. She had a half share in a leaking two-master and a debt she couldn’t pay honestly in under six years. Eiväloä sold, rumor had it, for enough coin per handful to buy the whole ship outright.
Rumor is a terrible financial advisor.
She hired on with it anyway.
They anchored well off, the way every story she’d heard said to, and rowed the last stretch in a small boat under a moon that seemed, in hindsight, entirely too willing to cooperate with a bad idea.
Four of them.
Senna, the diver who’d talked her into it, and two hands who wanted the coin worse than they wanted to keep breathing normally. In hindsight, that should have told her something about the crew she’d assembled.
The beach came up pale and quiet under the hull.
Ordinary sand.
Ordinary surf, hissing in the ordinary way surf hisses.
...over and over...
The most boring sound in the world.
She remembers being disappointed by how boring it was.
She remembers thinking, we came all this way for a beach.
Riko went first. He always went first, on everything, right up until the one time it mattered that he hadn’t.
He swung a leg over the gunwale into the shallows, boot sinking into wet sand. He took one full stride toward dry land with the kind of confidence that gets men killed slowly enough to feel it happening.
His second boot touched the beach.
Senna has told this part exactly four times in her life, and every time, she runs out of the right words at the same place.
The surf stopped.
Not faded.
Not softened.
Stopped, mid-hiss.
A hand closing around a bell already ringing.
The wind, which had been picking at the edge of her collar all night, simply wasn’t anymore.
Not calmed.
Gone, the way a word is gone the instant after you’ve said it.
Her ward-lamp, hanging off the boat’s rail, had been humming low and steady the whole crossing. A particular sound every warded flame makes when it’s fed properly.
It went out.
Not snuffed.
Not blown.
The flame just wasn’t burning anymore, mid-flame, no smoke, no smell, as if someone upstream of the entire idea of fire had reached over and unmade the concept for one square mile of ocean.
She remembers turning to say something to Riko and finding she had no idea what her own voice was supposed to sound like anymore, because there was nothing left in the world to compare it to.
There is a very specific kind of terror in hearing your own heartbeat and nothing else.
She has never once needed it explained to her since.
“What did Riko do,” Tam asked, very quietly, because the story clearly had more of him in it and clearly not the kind of more anyone wanted.
“He turned around,” Senna said. “That’s the part people leave out when they tell it scary. He wasn’t grabbed. Nothing came out of the trees. He just stood there four heartbeats, staring at something none of the rest of us could see from the boat, and then he turned around and waded back out to us.”
“And?”
“And he never said one more word for the rest of his life. Not one. Not his name, not a curse, not so much as a laugh at a joke. He lived another thirty years and every one of them was silent. I have never known, to this day, whether that was a wound the island gave him or a promise he made himself standing on that sand.”
The compass on Senna’s belt had gone dead that night too. Needle frozen exactly where it stood. It stayed dead the whole row back to the ship, only shivering back to life once they’d cleared what she guessed, from the way her own ears popped, was some kind of line drawn in the water.
Sound came back to her all at once, somewhere past that line.
The oars.
The surf, ordinary again, hissing its ordinary hiss.
Her own breathing, ragged and enormous in her ears after an hour of hearing nothing at all.
She has never been so glad to hear anything boring in her life.
“So there’s no Eiväloä on this ship,” Tam said.
“There’s no Eiväloä on any ship I’ve ever sailed, and I intend to keep it that way.” Senna adjusted the wheel another half point, easing them further from the green smudge on the horizon. “I’ve heard every theory dockside drunks have ever floated about what’s actually on that island. Some kind of hero. Some kind of children. Some kind of old power that doesn’t answer to kings or gold or anybody’s good intentions.”
“Which one’s true?”
“I don’t know, and I’ve made my peace with not knowing, because the one thing every single person who’s gotten close enough agrees on is that it isn’t interested in visitors, invited or otherwise.”
She looked at Tam a long moment, weighing whether the next part was worth saying.
She decided it was.
“Riko never said why he turned around,” she said. “But I’ve had thirty years to think about it, and here’s where I’ve landed. Some doors don’t need a lock. Some places just make it very, very clear, the instant you cross the threshold, that you were never on the guest list.”
Tam watched the island a while longer, small and green and ordinary-looking on the horizon, gulls still wheeling over water that, from this distance, gave away absolutely nothing.
“Doesn’t look like much,” Tam said.
“Neither does a held breath,” Senna said, “until you’re the one holding it.”
She brought the wheel around another point, and the green smudge slid further off the port bow. The ship sailed on into water that made ordinary, boring, blessed noise the entire rest of the way home.
