By midday, the sun was a faint blur behind a curtain of clouds. The heat beca oppressive, humid but sohow dry, like breathing through cloth. They stopped briefly to drink and rest under a crooked tree near an ancient, stone-lined well. Jude stared into it while Zoey and Lucy passed out rations, dry root slices, preserved fruits, smoked bird at. The water at the bottom of the well glowed faintly blue, pulsing in slow rhythm.
"It’s the sa frequency as the mountain," Jude murmured, not expecting anyone to answer.
"I don’t like this place," Emma said, kneeling beside the well and frowning. "It’s like it rembers sothing it wishes it could forget."
"Don’t stare too long," Grace added. "It pulls. Just a little. Like it wants to share too much."
Jude stepped back. The pull was subtle, yes, but it was real. A strange taste at the back of the tongue, like dust mixed with honey. A mory not his own, lingering just under the surface.
They moved again, and by evening they reached the base of the volcano. It was less a mountain now and more a great spire, veins of black stone webbing across its surface like petrified roots. The ground around it was smooth, unnaturally flat, and carved in wide arcs that glowed red when the mist thinned. A geotric clearing, identical to what Grace and Sophie had seen, perfect circles etched with impossible precision.
At the center of the clearing stood a stone monolith. Ten feet high, pulsing gently like a heartbeat. Covered in symbols no one had ever seen before, yet Jude understood them instinctively. Not through logic, but sensation. They weren’t instructions. They were mories, compressed, layered, stored in stone the way so creatures store venom.
"We’re being watched," Stella whispered, gripping her spear tighter.
"I don’t see anything," Scarlet replied, but she had already nocked an arrow to her bow.
Jude stepped toward the monolith. The world tilted slightly, like gravity had shifted its center just a few feet forward. He pressed his palm to the stone. A ripple passed through it like light across water, and the glyphs flared to life, bathing everything in red.
Behind them, the jungle rustled, not a sound of wind or animal, but sothing bigger. The trees themselves shifted, rearranged as if pushed aside by a force too vast to see directly. And then, rising from the ground around them, ca the voices.
First a whisper. Then hundreds. Then thousands.
They didn’t co from mouths, but from the air itself, a vibration that entered through the chest instead of the ears. The wives clutched their weapons tighter. So dropped to a crouch, scanning the periter.
"Do not be afraid," Jude said. "It’s not speaking to us. It’s speaking through us."
Then the monolith cracked. A hairline fracture ran down its center, and the light inside intensified until it ford a gate, not a door, not a portal, but an absence of everything. A darkness that didn’t reflect or shimr or even exist in a way the eyes could process.
Jude took a breath and stepped through.
What lay beyond was not a space. It was a sensation. Ti collapsed inward. Color beca irrelevant. Jude floated through a void of layered mories, millennia compressed into flashes. Cities buried in salt. Skies that bled gold. Oceans that whispered prophecy. At the center of all things stood a tower made of bone and glass, just as Rose had dread, and inside it was the heart of the island. The core. The truth.
Neluvir.
It was not a god. It was not alive. It was a system . A construct built to preserve knowledge, to store mory, to ensure that nothing was ever forgotten. But it had failed. Or evolved. Or simply outlived its purpose. Now it was hungry not for learning, but for identity . It consud civilizations not for power, but because it needed them to rember it. To define it. Without worship, without fear, without awareness, it was nothing . And it would not allow that.
Jude sank into its core.
He saw it all.
The original makers, tall, silver-skinned beings of flesh and wire, had designed Neluvir as a failsafe. A living record. But they had underestimated its ability to feel . Over ti, it learned to manipulate mory. Rewrite pasts. Shape identity. Eventually it devoured its creators, then their enemies, then their myths. The island was one of many bodies it had worn over eons. The volcano, the watchers, the blue mist, all tools. Defense systems. Lures.
And Jude? Jude was the first one to resist . Not by strength, but by multiplicity. His wives were more than lovers. They were nodes. Anchors. Every bond, every shared breath, every night of trust and passion and pain, those threads were what kept him him . That binding ceremony had done more than protect the orchard. It had given Jude sothing Neluvir could not alter: identity tethered to love.
He surfaced.
When he erged from the gate, the sky had changed. Not red. Not black. But open . Like a canvas waiting to be painted. The clearing pulsed beneath them, but did not attack.
The wives surrounded him instantly. Hands on his shoulders, arms, face. Worried eyes, tight grips.
"You were gone for minutes," Rose said. "But it felt longer. We couldn’t follow."
"I saw it," Jude whispered. "Everything. It’s not evil. It’s broken. It doesn’t want to kill us. It wants us to be part of it . Rembered. Absorbed."
"Like a parasite," Emma muttered. "That feeds on aning."
Jude nodded. "But we have sothing it can’t digest. Sothing too complex, too raw. Our love. Our lives. Our pain ."
The jungle began to shimr.
From the mist stepped creatures, tall, hunched figures wrapped in flesh that shimred like oil. They had no eyes. Only mouths. Hundreds of them. Mouths that whispered nas, including his. Each one said Jude in a different tone, loving, pleading, accusing, indifferent.
"They’re reflections," Jude said. "Of who I could’ve been. Might’ve been. Or who it thinks I am."
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