The rain smelled of salt and something else—rotting kelp, maybe, clinging to the stone walls. Twilight bled across Haven’s harbor, a bruised purple and grey where the jagged cliffs met the restless sea. It wasn’t a pretty harbor, not anymore. The colors had been scrubbed clean by the wars, leaving only the grit of pulverized buildings and the ghosts of a name vanished. Haven. It used to be Haven, before the Order came and swallowed it whole.
Ay didn’t think much about names anymore. Names were dangerous things, like trying to hold water in your hands. They slipped through your fingers, leaving only wetness and a hollow space. He’d spent the last twenty-three years scrubbing that hollowness with labor, hauling fish – grey-scaled things he gutted with a brutal efficiency born of necessity and a deep-seated aversion to beauty.
He’d been fixing nets, patching holes in the canvas covers, when he saw her.
The light from the bioluminescent tides cast an eerie green sheen on the cobblestones, illuminating her as she knelt by the water’s edge. She wore a simple tunic of indigo wool, stained with indigo dye and mud, and her hair—a tangled riot of copper and charcoal—fell across her face. It wasn’t a beautiful sight, not in the way the old maps used to depict beauty, but it wasn’t ugly either. It was…present.
He straightened, the movement stiff from years spent hunched over a workbench. He watched her fingers trace patterns in the wet sand, creating circles and spirals that vanished with each retreating wave.
“What you doing?” He didn’t bother to mask the roughness in his voice. The words were like pebbles thrown against stone, sharp and direct.
She didn’t flinch as he approached. She continued her work, her movements deliberate and unhurried. Finally, she lifted a small, smooth stone—a piece of obsidian, black as midnight—and pressed it into the sand.
“Mapping,” she said, her voice a low melody, like water trickling over pebbles. “Heartprints.”
Ay paused, the word hanging in the damp air. “Heartprints?” He’d heard whispers about them in the taverns—dark tales of the Order, and their obsession with recording emotions through geological formations. The Order: a merciless organization that sought to control memory and emotion, believing it was the key to dominance. They used their machines – massive constructs of gears and crystal – to extract ‘pure’ data: every joy, every sorrow, every fear.
“They don’t build machines,” she continued, her hands moving with a practiced grace. “We do.” She held up another stone, this one striped with veins of quartz and rose. “Each stone holds a fragment.”
He squinted at the stone in her hand, then at the swirling patterns she’d created in the sand. It wasn’t just a design; it was a topographical map of emotion. The circles represented joy, the spirals grief. He recognized the symbols instinctively—a language older than Haven’s current iteration of existence, a language woven into the very fabric of the island.
“The Order…they came to erase everything,” he said, his voice tight. “They tried to bury the past.”
“The past isn’t something to be buried,” she said, her fingers continuing their work. “It’s a landscape. And landscapes need to be understood.” She picked up a third stone, a vibrant crimson flecked with gold. “This one…it’s rage.”
He felt a sudden, unsettling pressure in his chest. He hadn’t experienced rage in years – not real rage, anyway. Just a dull ache beneath the surface, a consequence of suppressing everything that felt too intense.
“What you want from me?” he asked, his gaze fixed on the patterns in the sand.
She looked up at him, her eyes—the color of deep sea jade—holding a startling clarity. “I need help,” she said, her voice unwavering. “This machine… it’s failing.”
She gestured to a structure half-hidden behind the cliffs—a tangle of gears, wires, and shimmering crystals that pulsed with a faint, unsettling light. It was a monstrosity of polished metal and dark wood, dominated by a large iridescent crystal that seemed to drink in the light.
“It’s supposed to capture a person’s core memory,” she explained, her fingers tracing the intricate carvings on its surface. “Extract a ‘heartprint’. Record it for posterity.”
“The Order stole the blueprints,” he said, his voice grim. “They destroyed everything that came before them.”
“Not everything,” she whispered, her eyes drifting back to the patterns in the sand. “I found fragments. These stones… they’re echoes.”
He stepped closer to the machine, a strange compulsion pulling him forward. He reached out and touched one of the gears, feeling its coldness against his skin. He noticed something that hadn’t been obvious before—a small, almost invisible inscription etched into the metal. A symbol he recognized from his own memory, a ghost of a past he couldn’t quite grasp.
“Your father,” he said, his voice barely a breath. “He was an engineer.”
Her gaze sharpened. “He built this,” she confirmed, her fingers tracing the outline of a component beneath a layer of grime. “Before they came.”
The air thickened with the weight of forgotten knowledge and the stench of decay. He saw it then – the truth hidden beneath layers of suppression. He wasn’t just fixing nets; he was carrying a legacy, a dormant skill that had been deliberately buried along with his father’s memories.
“Why are you doing this?” he asked, the question laced with a bitterness that surprised him. “To rebuild the past? To give them back what they stole?”
She turned to face him, her jade eyes reflecting the ghostly light of the machine. “I’m not trying to give them back their memories,” she said, her voice firm and clear. “I’m trying to understand them. To see what they saw, how they felt.”
She picked up the crimson stone and pressed it firmly into the sand. “This rage…it’s not an enemy to be feared,” she said, her fingers continuing their work. “It’s a warning.” “The order’s goal is to erase you, to remove your feelings from existence. To render you a shell.”
He understood now. This wasn’t about rebuilding the past; it was about protecting it—protecting the very essence of what made him human.
“I can help you,” he said, his voice no longer rough, but deliberate and resolute. “I know how this machine works.”
She looked at him, a flicker of hope in her eyes. “Then let’s finish what my father started.”
