What the Island Doesn't Talk About:

Abby woke to a sound that didn't belong in the dark.

Not a scream. Something quieter and worse — a wet, ragged rattling, like breath fighting its way through something it shouldn't have to fight through. She sat up before she was fully awake, the way you do when your body understands danger faster than your mind does, and in the low coal-light of the banked fire she saw Eleo on the floor, on his side, shaking.

"Eleo—"

His whole body was convulsing in short, hard pulses, heels drumming against the floorboards. A thin line of blood ran from one nostril. Another traced down from the corner of his mouth, dark in the dim light, mixed with something pale and foamed at his lips that made her stomach drop before her mind caught up to why.

"Eleo, hey — hey, look at me—"

She was on her knees beside him in an instant, hands hovering, not sure where it was safe to touch, doing the only thing she knew to do — the thing her mother had taught her without ever explaining why she needed to know it. She pressed two fingers to the side of his throat, searching for the pulse.

It was there. Too fast. Hammering.

"Come on," she whispered. "Come on, come back—"

The shaking stopped.

All at once, the way a held breath finally releases — his whole body went still, and for one second, one merciful second, Abby thought it was over.

His eyes opened.

They weren't his eyes.

The blue was gone, drowned entirely in a red so deep it looked wet, like something newly spilled. There was no recognition in them. No Eleo. Just something looking out through him, patient and awake and completely without mercy.

She didn't have time to say his name again.

His hand closed around her throat and the world tilted sideways as he drove her down into the floorboards, the air punched out of her lungs before she understood she was falling. He was over her, on her, a weight that had never once felt like a threat in her whole life suddenly feeling like the only thing in the world that mattered, and his grip tightened, and tightened, and the room went soft and grey at its edges.

She clawed at his wrist. Her mouth opened around nothing. Somewhere very far away, she was aware that she was crying — that tears were running sideways into her hair, that some small, stupid, still-thinking part of her brain was cataloguing this, was aware enough to be ashamed of how frightened she was.

*Not like this,* she thought, distant and strange. *Not from you.*

And then — nothing.

The hand went slack. The weight above her wavered, tipped, and Eleo collapsed sideways onto the floor beside her, boneless, gone, breathing in the slow deep rhythm of someone who had fallen through the floor of themselves entirely.

Abby lay where she was for a long moment, one hand pressed to her own throat, staring at the ceiling beams, shaking almost as badly as he had been.

She did not call for her mother.

She sat up, eventually. Wiped her face with the back of her wrist. Looked at him — small and curled and utterly harmless again, breathing evenly now, blood drying at his nose, the foam already gone dry and flaking at the corner of his mouth. She got a cloth. She cleaned his face while he slept, gently, the way you'd tend to someone who couldn't be blamed for a storm that had only borrowed their body for a while.

Then she sat with her back against the wall, knees drawn up, and watched him breathe until the window began to grey with morning.

This had never happened before.

That was the part she couldn't get past, sitting there in the grey light with her back against the wall — not that it had happened, but that her whole life of knowing him, sharing a home, every ordinary day this island had to offer, had given her nothing that could have prepared her for it. No warning. No pattern to recognize. He'd fallen asleep giggling about ink powers and woken up as something wearing his face, and there had been no bridge between those two boys at all, nothing root-deep enough to have seen it coming.

She didn't know what she'd just seen. She only knew, with the flat, frightening certainty of a decision made alone in the dark, that whatever it was, it hadn't been his fault — and that meant it wasn't hers to hand to anyone else. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

Nobody else knew.

Not Lucy, who noticed everything and had somehow, this one time, noticed nothing, because Abby made sure her voice was steady and the door was shut long before the window began to grey. Not Kuma, off wherever Kuma was. Not Gou. It stayed inside four walls and one decision, made by an eight-year-old girl who'd chosen, in the space of a single night, to carry a weight so the boy she loved wouldn't have to learn what he was capable of.

---

By late morning, nothing about him gave it away at all.

Eleo sat cross-legged on the floor of Abby's room, sunlight falling warm across his shoulders through the open shutter, utterly absorbed in a slim, badly bound little pamphlet with a carrot wearing a cape drawn crookedly on the cover. He turned the pages with the particular, total focus he gave to almost nothing else in his life except training and Abby, snorting through his nose every few panels, occasionally reading a line out loud in a booming hero-voice that fooled no one, least of all himself.

"'FEAR NOT, CITIZENS,'" he announced to the empty room, "'FOR THE CARROT HERO HAS ARRIVED TO — ' pfft — 'HAS ARRIVED TO SAVE THE HARVEST FROM THE DREADED SLUG KING—'" He wheezed. "Abby. ABBY. There's a slug king."

Abby, sitting across the room with a scroll she wasn't really reading, looked up. Her throat still ached faintly beneath her collar, a private, dull soreness she'd already decided not to think about until later, maybe never, maybe just carry it quietly the way the island carried its own old bruises — the Second Leader's silence, the founding's unspoken wound, things understood and never explained. Some things here didn't get talked about. She was, apparently, one more of them now.

"There's always a slug king," she said. "It's the third one this arc."

"HE KEEPS COMING BACK, ABBY."

"He's a slug. That's what they do."

Eleo cackled and flipped the page, entirely unaware of the shape his own hand had made around her throat six hours earlier, entirely unaware of anything at all except the joy of a badly drawn vegetable punching a mollusk through a barn wall. There was no shadow in him this morning. None at all — like it had simply never happened, like the boy on the floor last night and the greenie giggling over a slug king were two different people who happened to share a face. That was somehow the worst part, Abby thought. Not the red in his eyes in the dark, but how completely the sun had washed it out of him by morning.

She hadn't bought him the comic. He'd bought it himself, three days ago, off a peddler's cart that set up near the Smokeline docks whenever a supply ship called — a wiry old islander who sold cheap, hand-copied pamphlets alongside dried fish and rope, and who'd said, handing it over with a wink, the same thing he said to every parent who pretended they weren't buying one for themselves:

*"Kids love The Carrot Hero. Adults pretend they don't. They buy it anyway."*

Eleo had bought two.

"Hey," Eleo said now, not looking up. "You okay? You've got a face."

"I have a face, yeah."

"No, a *face* face. Like something's wrong."

Abby's hand twitched toward her collar before she stopped it. "Didn't sleep great," she said, which was true in the way that mattered least.

Eleo studied her for exactly as long as his attention span allowed, which was not very long, and then nodded, satisfied, because he had no reason not to be. "You should eat something. Mom makes good breakfast when you're tired." He grinned, buck teeth and all, entirely himself. "Carrots fix everything."

"They really don't."

"They mostly do."

She almost laughed. It came out smaller than she meant it to, but it came out, and that, this morning, felt like enough.

---

The morning Abby decided they were going exploring, she didn't announce it. She just appeared at the foot of Eleo's bedroll with her satchel packed and her hair tied back and said "get up" in the tone that meant the decision had already been made.

Eleo got up.

They left before the Iron Fang's kitchen had properly started, slipping out through the back while Lucy was still arranging the morning delivery of carrots and dried fish. But Lucy noticed. She always noticed.

"Back before dark," she called, without turning around.

"Yes, Mom."

"And eat something before you go. There's bread on the counter."

"Yes, Mom."

"Eleo."

Eleo stopped in the doorway. "Yes, Miss Lucy?"

She turned then, and looked at him with the particular expression she had that wasn't quite a smile and wasn't quite something else. Like she was filing something away. "You've got ink on your ear," she said. "From yesterday."

He touched his ear. There it was, dried black at the tip. He'd missed it.

"Oh."

"Take care of each other." She turned back to the carrots. "That's all."

He stood there for a second longer than he needed to, not sure why, and then Abby grabbed his sleeve and pulled him out into the morning.

Pork Island in the early hours had a quality hard to name and harder to forget. The light came in low from the east, golden and hazy with ocean moisture, hitting everything — a drying fishing net, a cat asleep on a windowsill, a gate left open — like it had been arranged on purpose. The air smelled like salt and wet jungle and the first wisps of cooking fires. The settlement woke up unhurried, the way a place does when it knows it has time.

They walked south past the docks, past boats knocking gently in the chop. A few fishers were already out, small shapes against silver water. One raised a hand without looking. Abby raised one back.

"You know him?" Eleo asked.

"Elder Miro's son. Fishes here every morning." A pause. "Since his dad died. Same spot."

"How do you know that?"

She shrugged. "Mom told me. Mom tells me a lot of things."

The settlement thinned into coastal grass, then salt-worn rock, then a stretch of dark sand curving along the sheltered southern bay, already warm underfoot. Eleo took his sandals off without thinking. Abby took hers off too.

They walked in silence for a while, which meant something, coming from him.

"Abby," he said eventually. "How old is the island?"

"Fifty years."

"That's not old."

"No. It isn't."

"But it feels old."

"That's what went into building it," she said. "Fifty years of actual living. People deciding every day it was worth continuing. That ages a place."

"What did they leave behind? The founders."

She chose her words the way she did when she was about to say something real. "A lot of bad things. Things done to them. And they came here and built something that didn't have those things in it." She stopped walking. "That's maybe the hardest thing a person can do. Leave the damage behind instead of carrying it forward."

"Did they manage it?"

"Mostly," she said. "Mostly yeah."

---

The jungle began at the treeline and then it was everything — the light changed, the air changed, the sound changed. It smelled like deep water and old wood and something green with no name. Abby moved through it without slowing, following paths Eleo couldn't see until he was on them.

"You've been in here a lot."

"Since I was small. Mom used to bring me. She knows every path on this island."

"Did she grow up here?"

"No. Came when I was a baby." A pause. "Doesn't talk much about before."

He let that sit. He was learning which questions to let sit.

The oldest trees began appearing among the younger growth — enormous past what the word could really hold, roots arching up through the jungle floor like terrain. Eleo scrambled over one that came to his chest.

"These are the old ones," Abby said, looking up.

"They move," he said, not meaning to say it. "The story. That they move when nobody's watching. My grandpa told me. He said nobody's proved it and nobody's stopped believing it."

"That's exactly right." She put her palm flat against the trunk. "I think it's true. These trees know where they want to be, and they go there eventually. Everything alive wants to go somewhere."

Eleo put his hand on the trunk too.

The bark was warm. Faintly, impossibly warm.

He pulled his hand back.

Abby smiled without looking at him. "Yeah," she said. "I know."

---

The Cold One announced itself in sound before sight — cold water over smooth stone, bright and clean. Eleo knelt and put his hand in.

"That's cold."

"Hence the name."

He followed it with his eyes. "Does it go to the grove?"

She looked at him, surprised. "You know about the grove?"

"Everybody knows about the grove. I just never went."

"Do you want to?"

"Yeah," he said. "I think I do."

She stood and headed upstream.

---

They walked the bank as the trees grew older and larger around each curve, the light greener, the world narrowing to river and footsteps and the occasional bird overhead. Abby stopped where the river curved around a knot of exposed roots.

"Here. We leave the river here."

The jungle ahead looked impenetrable. Solid wall.

"You're sure."

"Yes."

"That's a wall."

"Walk into it."

He gave her a look. She gave it back — the one that meant she wasn't joking. He walked into the wall.

The gap was there, invisible until you were in front of it. It turned, turned again, opened.

The grove stopped him before he'd taken three steps in. The trees were the largest he'd seen on an island of large trees, their canopy so dense it made its own light, green and still, separate from whatever the sky was doing above it. The roots on the floor had grown into each other over centuries, soft underfoot, moving very slightly, like it was breathing.

Sound dropped when he crossed the treeline. Not to silence. To a different kind of quiet — the kind that suggested the space was listening.

"First time it's always like this," Abby said quietly.

In the center sat a flat stone, worn smooth by decades of use. On it: dried pork, a handful of dark carrots, pale flowers he didn't recognize. Recent offerings.

"Zarukhan," Eleo said.

"Yeah."

He stood near the stone without touching it. He felt the warmth under his ribs, the S-Orb, and had the strange sense it was responding to the place, the way a compass responds to north.

"Mom brought me here when I was six," Abby said, looking up at the canopy. "She said it was the most honest place on the island. A place is honest when it doesn't need to pretend to be anything." A small smile. "I was six, I thought it smelled funny. Now I know what she meant."

"Zarukhan doesn't care if you've been obedient," she went on. "He cares if you've been true to what you are. Don't diminish yourself. Don't let anyone else diminish you." She looked at Eleo. "The founders came here because someone told them they were lesser. Zarukhan says that's wrong. Every animal is sacred. That's not small, believing that, when someone with power over you is saying the opposite."

Eleo was quiet a long time. The grove held it without difficulty.

He thought, without meaning to, of red eyes and a hand that wasn't his own closing around something precious. He didn't know why it arrived just then. He pushed it away — the kind of thing you didn't say out loud here, the way nobody said the Second Leader's name at the Table either. Some truths just went quiet on their own, root-deep and unspoken.

"Does your mom believe it?" he asked.

"She came from somewhere bad. I don't know the details. She doesn't tell them." A beat. "She makes breakfast for people. Remembers the name of your fishing spot." Another beat. "I think she believes it. I think maybe this island's what helped her believe it."

He turned and looked at her — still looking up, at the green light moving, at the oldest trees doing whatever oldest trees do when nobody's watching closely enough. Her expression didn't have a word yet. Not sad. Not happy. Something truer than either.

"Hey Abby."

"Mm."

"Why are you studying magic?"

"That's a weird pivot."

"No it isn't."

She decided he could handle the real answer. "Mom can't fight. Never learned. Strong in other ways, not that way." A pause. "And the world is what it is. I want to be someone who can stand in front of her if something tries something." She looked at her hands. "She came somewhere far to build something good. I don't want anything to reach her through me."

She didn't say the other reason. That some nights, lately, the thing she wanted to stand in front of wasn't a stranger at all.

"Okay," Eleo said.

"That's all you're going to say?"

"Yeah. I get it. Makes sense."

She laughed, short and genuine. "Sometimes you're weirdly not annoying."

"I'm great."

"Don't push it."

---

They came out of the jungle in late afternoon, dirty in the way of people who'd spent a day somewhere real — grass stains, river mud, a leaf stuck to the top of Eleo's ear without his noticing. They walked back without hurrying.

At the Iron Fang's back door, Lucy was visible through the window, working. Abby watched her a moment before going in.

"We're back."

Lucy looked at Abby first — the fast parent-sweep that confirms alive, uninjured, present, good. Then at Eleo.

"You've still got ink on your ear."

He touched it. Still there.

"Sit down. Both of you. I'll make something."

They sat. The kitchen smelled like the evening meal coming together — pork, root vegetables, something sweet in the oven. Outside, the last light touched the oldest trees gold before the dark came.

Eleo thought about warm bark under his palm, offerings on a stone, a woman who'd come from somewhere bad and made breakfast for people who walked through her door. He thought about building something good from nothing and guarding it with your life. He thought about Abby in the grove, looking at her hands.

Lucy set a bowl in front of him.

"Thank you, Miss Lucy."

She gave him the same filing-away look from that morning. "You're welcome, Eleo," she said, and it carried something more than the words, though she didn't explain what, and he didn't ask.

Some things on this island didn't need explaining. They just were what they were.

Outside, the oldest trees stood in the dark. Patient. Going wherever they were going. Still there.