But Jasmine wasn't listening. She was lost in that internal communion with her unborn daughter, submerged in the connection between them, feeling the shape of a consciousness that shouldn't exist yet—powerful, curious, and terrifyingly precocious. A mind that was already thinking, already learning, already wielding power that should have taken decades to master.
"She's afraid," Jasmine whispered suddenly, and tears began sliding down her cheeks unchecked. Her hand pressed harder against her belly, as if she could shield her daughter through will alone. "She can sense the danger too. She can feel the shadows gathering around us, the malevolent intentions focused on her. She knows something's coming. She's trying to prepare, trying to gather her strength. Oh gods, Althander, she's so small and she's already so afraid."
And in that moment, mother and daughter shared the same dread, the same terrible knowledge that their time together was running out. That the sanctuary they'd built, the protection they'd tried to weave around themselves, might not be enough. That the wolves were already circling, drawn by the scent of unprecedented power contained in such a vulnerable vessel.
The shelter itself told the story of their imprisonment. What had started as a crude lean-to of branches and leaves had evolved into something almost permanent—walls reinforced with clay that Jasmine had learned to harden using her energy, a roof woven so tightly that rain hadn't penetrated in months, a stone hearth where Althander had spent weeks arranging rocks to create proper ventilation. The path from their shelter to the stream was worn smooth, a groove in the earth from hundreds of daily trips. Thousands, maybe.
Althander's hair, which had been cut short when they first arrived, now fell past his shoulders. He'd stopped bothering to trim it around the time they'd accepted no rescue was coming. His beard, too, had grown long enough to braid, though he kept it tied back for practical reasons. The clothes he'd been wearing when they'd crashed here—or whatever had brought them to this place—had long since disintegrated. Now he wore garments made from animal hides he'd hunted and cured himself, the process taking weeks each time. The smell of the tanning solution was so familiar now that neither of them noticed it anymore.
Jasmine's body had changed too, beyond the pregnancy. Her skin had bronzed from constant sun exposure. Her hands, once soft, were calloused and scarred from working with roots and stone and fire. She'd learned to identify every plant on the island—which ones were edible, which ones could heal, which ones would kill. That knowledge had taken seasons to accumulate. Seasons of trial and error, of mild poisonings and successful harvests, of watching how the wildlife interacted with the flora around them.
The marks on the large tree near their shelter chronicled time in a way that made Sophia's chest tighten. Althander had carved a line for each full moon. She counted them. Forty-seven marks. They'd been here for forty-seven months. Nearly four years.
Four years of isolation. Four years of not knowing if they'd ever leave. Four years of building a life from nothing while knowing it could all be ripped away.
Near the hearth, Jasmine had arranged her collection of wooden bowls—she'd carved twelve of them, one each season, getting better with each attempt. The first was crude and lopsided. The most recent was smooth and beautiful, its interior polished to a shine. They represented not just skill development but the slow acceptance that they needed proper tools, proper dishes, proper things because this wasn't temporary anymore. This was their life now.
The garden Jasmine had cultivated stretched thirty feet from their shelter. Neat rows of vegetables that shouldn't have grown together but thrived under her careful energy manipulation. She'd learned to coax plants from seeds she'd found, to cross-pollinate species that would have been incompatible in any normal environment. The garden represented thousands of hours of work, of whispered conversations with roots and stems, of pouring her will into the earth season after season.
Sophia noticed how they moved around each other with the unconscious choreography of long familiarity. When Althander reached for the water skin, Jasmine was already handing it to him. When she needed the grinding stone, his hand was moving to retrieve it before she spoke. They'd worn grooves into each other's patterns the same way their feet had worn grooves into the earth. This was what four years of constant companionship looked like—two people who'd become extensions of each other out of necessity and, eventually, love.
The animal skulls arranged in a neat line outside their shelter numbered twenty-three. Trophies, but also markers. Althander had taken to adding one to the collection every few months, a way of marking time when the days blurred together into an endless present. Sophia could see the evolution of his hunting technique in them—the early kills were damaged, bones cracked from desperate, inefficient attacks. The later ones were clean, precise, the work of a predator who'd mastered his environment completely.