And strangest of all, Sophia noticed the tree. The massive oak that stood sentinel over their shelter had grown. She'd watched the entire vision from the beginning—that tree had been large then. But now it was enormous, its trunk easily twice the diameter, its branches spreading like a protective canopy over everything below. Trees didn't grow that fast.
Not naturally. But four years of Jasmine living beneath it, of her energy seeping into the soil night after night, of her unconscious connection to the root systems feeding it power—that oak had become something more than a normal tree. It had become a monument to her presence, to the impossible energy she carried, to the years they'd spent in its shadow.
Four years. They'd been building a life here for four years. And now, when they'd finally created something resembling peace, when they were about to bring a child into the small world they'd carved from wilderness and isolation, everything was about to fall apart.
The truth came to Jasmine in pieces, like a puzzle assembling itself in her dreams.
It started small. She'd notice how the tides never seemed to follow any pattern she recognized—high at noon one day, high at midnight the next, with no lunar correlation whatsoever. Or how the stars visible from their beach didn't match any constellation either of them knew, despite Althander's extensive knowledge of celestial navigation from his clan's teachings.
"It's not that we're far from home," she'd told him one night, staring up at the unfamiliar sky. "It's that we're not... anywhere. Not anywhere that exists on normal maps."
But it was the roots that finally told her the truth.
Six months into their stay, she'd pushed her awareness deep into the earth, searching for water during a dry spell. Her consciousness had followed the root systems down, down, impossibly down, past layers of soil and stone and clay. And then she'd hit it—a barrier. Not physical. Not quite. It was like pushing against a membrane made of solidified intention, a boundary woven from pure will that had been holding for so long it had fossilized into reality itself.
She'd jerked back from the sensation, gasping.
"What is it?" Althander had asked.
"This island... it's not natural. It's not even real. Not entirely."
Over the following years, as her sensitivity to spiritual energy increased with her pregnancy, the truth had revealed itself in fragments. The island existed in a pocket—a fold in reality that someone had created deliberately. The ocean that surrounded them wasn't water in the traditional sense; it was the border between worlds, between what was real and what had been imagined into quasi-existence.
"Someone made this place," she'd explained to Althander during one of their long nights. "Created it as a... refuge, maybe? Or a prison. I can't tell which. But they wove it from their own energy and anchored it outside the normal flow of space and time."
"That's why no one can find us," Althander had realized. "We're not lost. We're hidden. Deliberately."
But hidden from what? That was the question that haunted them both.
The answer came to Jasmine in her seventh month, when her connection to the island had grown so strong she could feel every root, every blade of grass, every grain of sand as if it were part of her own body. She'd been standing at the shore, her feet in the shallow waves, when she'd felt it—a presence. Not current. Not alive. But not entirely gone either. An echo of consciousness imprinted so deeply into the fabric of this place that it had become inseparable from it.
Why did you bring us here? she'd asked silently, not expecting an answer.
But the island had responded. Not in words. In feeling. In knowing.
It showed her a memory—not her own. A woman, ancient and powerful, standing where Jasmine now stood. Her energy was vast, oceanic, exactly like the reservoir Jasmine carried within herself. The woman had been fleeing something. Something that had hunted her across worlds, across dimensions, relentlessly pursuing the power she contained. Power she couldn't use, couldn't access, but couldn't rid herself of either.
So she'd done the only thing she could. She'd taken all that vast, unused energy—that ocean of power that sat dormant within her—and she'd used it to create this place. A pocket dimension folded away from reality, hidden in the spaces between worlds. A sanctuary where that kind of power couldn't be tracked, couldn't be found, couldn't be taken.
And then she'd anchored herself to it. Became part of it. Dissolved her consciousness into the very fabric of the island so that her energy would sustain it forever, a perpetual battery powering a permanent hiding place.