They spent the day in uneasy motion. The scroll was placed beneath the altar stone, hidden but accessible. Jude worked beside Zoey and Sophie clearing the western trail, but his mind wandered constantly. Every word from the scroll echoed in him like a bell in a canyon. The others avoided talking about it directly, but glances lingered on him now. Looks held longer than they should. As if trying to see sothing deeper beneath his skin.
When the rain returned that afternoon, it ca in short bursts, hard and loud. By then the wives were scattered through the orchard, collecting leaves, checking trap lines, reinforcing canopies. Jude helped Layla repair one of the fish-drying racks by the river. She worked in silence, arms strong, hair tied in a wet knot.
"You think it’s true?" she asked suddenly, not looking at him.
He didn’t answer right away. "What part?"
"That you’re not really one of us."
He looked at her. Her eyes were not angry, just tired. Tired and curious.
"I am," he said. "But I’m more."
She nodded, as if she’d expected it.
That night, the rain stopped and the air turned warm. The canopy above the firepit glowed with torchlight. Dinner was subdued, smoked fish, wild greens, honey bread, but conversation circled nothing, and everyone knew it.
After the children were asleep and the fire burned low, Jude rose. Eleven pairs of eyes followed him.
"I need to go," he said.
They didn’t ask where.
"The mountain," Grace whispered.
"Yes."
Susan stood. "Alone?"
"I don’t want to be."
"I’ll co," said Serena.
" too," said Natalie.
Zoey, Lucy, and Grace stepped forward.
"No," Jude said gently. "Not yet. The watchers gave the ssage. I need to go first. If I don’t co back by the third sunrise, then follow."
They argued. Of course they did. Rose pleaded. Layla paced. Stella swore. But in the end, they knew. It was sothing he had to do. Sothing ancient. Sothing waiting.
That night, Jude made love to Grace as if it were the last night of the world. No words. Just breath and hands and the desperate, beautiful silence that love becos when everything else falls away. She wept when he kissed her one last ti. So did he.
He left before dawn.
He walked with a torch and a satchel of dried food. A blade at his side. Glyphs painted onto his arms in blue and white, protection and peace, inked there by Sophie’s hand before he left.
The path toward the mountain was not empty. Watchers drifted around him, silent sentinels. They made no move to stop him. If anything, they parted for him.
He crossed the orchard line.
He walked deeper than ever before.
The jungle closed in. Creatures snarled in the distance. Eyes blinked in the underbrush. But nothing touched him. The monsters remained just beyond reach.
As he climbed the lower hills, fog thickened. Trees twisted. The air turned tallic. The ground vibrated faintly beneath his feet.
At sunset, he found the first ruin.
Stone pillars covered in glyphs, long overgrown, pulsing faintly with light. At the center of the ruin: a bowl. Inside: bones. Human. Old. And at the base of the stone: the sa symbol from the scroll. The eye. The three lines.
He touched it.
The earth responded.
The glyphs lit.
And the mountain opened.
A path ford before him, lit with pale blue fire. He stepped forward.
He didn’t look back.
Behind him, far in the orchard, eleven won stood watching the distant glow. Grace held Laurel and Raven against her. Susan and Stella linked arms. Rose wiped her cheek, fierce and silent. Emma held Natalie’s hand.
They watched the mountain open. Watched their husband disappear into light and mist.
And they waited.
For whatever would co next.
The air shifted the mont Jude passed through the opening in the mountain. A slow, unnatural warmth rolled over him like a breath held beneath the skin of the world. The tunnel ahead glowed with a strange internal light, neither fla nor moon nor bioluminescence, but sothing deeper, like the mory of fire. He walked slowly, each footstep echoing too long, as if the walls themselves whispered each sound back in a different voice. The glyphs carved into the stone pulsed faintly with blue light, repeating patterns that stirred sothing behind his eyes, like forgotten dreams clawing toward the surface.
He didn’t know how long he walked. Ti folded strangely here. The mountain didn’t rise around him as much as it folded inward, like a mouth opening wider with every step. There was no fear, only a dense pressure in his chest, like standing too close to thunder. His arms burned where Sophie had painted the glyphs in ink and ash; they grew warm now, and shimred faintly. He ran his fingers over one, and the pain that answered was sharp, but not cruel, it was like a blade drawing blood in an oath.
Then the tunnel ended.
He stepped into a vast hollow chamber. The ceiling was lost in darkness above, but the floor stretched far and flat, carved with spirals and runes so ancient they looked more like erosion than language. At the center was a pool of black water, still and mirror-flat, surrounded by stone arches half-buried in moss and vine. In the water, his reflection shimred, then changed. The face staring back wasn’t his.
Long hair. Eyes the color of burning leaves. Skin paler, marked with a silver ring at the throat.
He staggered back.
But the image didn’t vanish.
Then the water rippled, and a voice echoed, not aloud, but inside his bones.
"Welco back."
Jude dropped to one knee, breath shallow. "What is this place?"
The water pulsed. The arches around the pool began to glow faintly. Mist rose from the surface.
"Your birthright. Your mory. The na you buried."
Jude stood slowly, staring into the shifting water. "I am Jude."
"You are not."
The voice was neither male nor female. Not a voice at all, really, more like a knowing that spoke. The kind of truth that makes the spine itch.
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