Warmth.
Birdsong.
Waves that were gentle and slow and completely wrong for what the ocean had just done to them.
Saber opened his eyes.
Above him — leaves. Massive ones, broader than his arms could reach, deep waxy green, completely still despite the fact that there should have been wind. The light coming through them was gold and thick and late afternoon heavy.
That was wrong.
It had been morning when the storm hit.
He sat up slowly.
Dark sand. A narrow beach. Trees pressing right to the waterline like they were leaning in to look at him. The ocean here was completely flat — unnaturally so — moving in slow deliberate waves like breathing.
The air felt different.
Not temperature. Not smell. Something harder to name. Like the air here was paying attention. Like standing in a room where something important had just happened and the feeling of it was still hanging in the space.
His chest ached faintly. That familiar dull pulse, there and then gone.
He pressed his hand against it absently and didn't think about it.
"You're awake."
Shree. Two meters away. Knees drawn up, watching him with dark steady eyes. Soaked through, hair loose around her face, a dried cut above her left eyebrow. She had positioned herself — he noticed this slowly — to see both him and the treeline at the same time.
She had been watching the trees while he was unconscious.
She had been scared.
She would never say so.
"Where are we?" He asked.
She looked at the ocean. Then the trees. Then the ocean again.
"I don't know." A pause. Then quieter: "But this place..."
She didn't finish.
She didn't need to. He felt it too — that quality in the air, that impossible stillness, the sense of being somewhere that mattered in ways neither of them had words for yet.
Saber stood slowly, legs unsteady beneath him. He looked at the dark sand. The impossible trees. The ocean breathing in and out with that slow deliberate patience.
Then his stomach growled.
Loudly.
He looked down at himself. Then at the treeline.
Then his eyes went very wide.
Somewhere in the trees — not far, maybe thirty meters in — was a tree unlike anything on Sabaody. Hanging from its branches were fruits the size of his fist, deep gold and red, glowing faintly in the late light like something lit them from inside.
He had never seen that fruit before in his life.
Nobody had. He was completely certain of it.
His mouth was already open.
"Saber—" Shree started.
"SHREE." He grabbed her shoulders with both hands. His eyes were enormous. "SHREE. DO YOU SEE THAT."
"I see—"
"THAT FRUIT. THAT COLOR. NOBODY HAS EVER EATEN THAT IN THE ENTIRE WORLD—"
"We don't know if it's safe—"
"IT'S GLOWING." He said this like it was the most compelling argument ever made by any human being in history. "GLOWING FRUIT IS ALWAYS GOOD."
"That is not a rule that exists—"
He was already moving.
"SABER!"
Gone.
Shree stood on the dark sand of an island she didn't recognize and watched him disappear into impossible trees chasing glowing fruit he'd never seen before while still soaking wet from nearly drowning.
She pressed two fingers to her temple.
Then she followed him.
Because she always followed him.
She found him halfway up the fruit tree, already eating, eyes closed, with the expression of someone experiencing something genuinely religious.
"Shree." He said without opening his eyes. "Shree this is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me."
"We almost drowned twenty minutes ago."
"Second greatest." He threw one down to her. "Try it."
She caught it. Examined it carefully. Smelled it. Then took a small careful bite.
She said nothing for a moment.
"...It's good." She admitted quietly.
"IT'S INCREDIBLE—"
"It's good." She said firmly. "Don't make it weird."
He made it weird. He made it very weird. He ate four more and named each one.
Shree ate two more in silence and pretended she wasn't enjoying them.
She almost missed it on the way back to the beach.
Half buried in the roots of an ancient tree, covered in centuries of moss — a rock. Small enough to overlook. But beneath the moss, just barely visible, were markings. Carved deep and precise and deliberate into the stone.
Not words she recognized.
Not any language she had ever seen.
But a pattern. Careful and old and meaningful in a way that made her feel the weight of however many years had passed since someone had knelt here and made these marks with enormous intention.
She crouched in front of it. Her fingers hovered just above the surface without touching.
Something about it felt like a held breath.
Like it was waiting for the right person to finally read it.
"SHREE." Saber's voice from the beach. "COME LOOK AT THE SUNSET FROM HERE IT'S UNBELIEVABLE—"
She looked at the rock one more moment.
Memorized what she could of the markings.
Then stood up and walked back to the beach and said nothing about it.
The rock stayed where it was.
Patient.
Waiting.
They made camp as the light failed, sheltering in the curve of massive roots from the largest tree on the beach. Saber had eaten six of the gold fruits total and was lying on his back in a state of complete contentment looking up at the stars through the canopy.
"Shree."
"Hm."
"Do you feel that."
"Feel what."
He was quiet for a moment, struggling for words in the way he rarely did. "Like this place knows we're here. Like it was expecting us."
Shree said nothing.
"It doesn't scare me though." He said it slowly. Honestly. "It feels like we were supposed to end up here."
She looked at him. His eyes were still on the stars, face open and unguarded the way it only got right before sleep took him.
She looked back at the darkness between the trees.
Somewhere deep in the island something made a sound. Not threatening. Almost like acknowledgment. Like something very old exhaling slowly after holding its breath for a long time.
Then silence.
Shree pressed her hand flat against her chest.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
She kept it there longer than usual.
Saber's breathing deepened and slowed beside her.
She watched the dark between the trees and did not sleep for a very long time.
Neither of them knew what island this was.
Neither of them knew yet what it meant that they were here.
But somewhere in the roots beneath them, and the ancient marked stone half buried in the moss, and the air pressing gently and deliberately against their skin—
The island knew.
And it had let them in.
And somewhere deep in the forest, if either of them had been awake to see it—
A single light moved slowly between the trees.
There.
Then gone.
Like something checking that they had arrived safely.
Like something that had been waiting for them for a very long time.
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— END OF CHAPTER 2 —