Stuck in an Island with Twelve Beautiful Women
Chapter 905 - 907

Chapter 905: Chapter 907

Lucy pressed a strip into his hand. It read: When I knelt by stone, I smelled my father’s pipe. She swallowed, tears in eyes. "Memory, but not mine."

He placed a hand over hers. "We’ll ground you."

Emma spoke quietly: "What if this thing doesn’t want us here?"

Jude looked at fire. "Then we show it we’ve already planted roots. We already named ourselves. We belong."

Grace added softly: "But we must stay vigilant."

They formally ended night watch plan: next night, three shifts, all fourteen of them including Lyla’s echo burned in their hearts.

Night fell as they retired. Jude lay awake, heart thundering. He sensed shapes at the edges of vision: deeper than watchers, presence, archaic. He heard whispering voices in footsteps that weren’t footsteps. He felt breath on his neck, but Grace slept undisturbed next to him.

He reached out for her, counted her breath. In that moment, he drew strength. They would not surrender.

He closed his eyes. Dream came.

He stood on the red river, water flowing backward toward mountain. Behind him, smoke rose in pale spirals. Ahead, the watchers advanced in lines, whispering his name. He turned back to the river, watched the current send leaves upstream, saw his reflection fade and divide into many faces.

He awoke, lungs burning, wind sighing outside. He did not tell anyone. But he made a decision. Tomorrow they would face the nodes, they would fill them with memory, with names, with offerings. They would stand defiant.

And he would confront whatever came at night again.

The island was speaking. It had named them. It had shaped them.

Now they would name it back.

Only... silence. The jungle exhaled around them, a low, steady sigh of wind through leaves, droplets trembling on fronds like waiting breaths. Jude stood near the edge of the clearing, where he and his wives had built their makeshift altar stones days before. The morning light barely touched them, low and fractured through wet canopy, casting uneven shadows that wavered like memories fading from mind. He hugged his arms tight around himself, not from cold, but from anticipation. Today they would confront the island’s puzzle in full unity, without faltering.

At his back, Grace, Lucy, Emma, Sophie, Zoey, Serena, Nefertari, Stella, Scarlett, Susan, Amelia, and Natalie stepped out one by one, forming a single file behind him. Eleven women, all named, all present, and he could feel their hearts, each pulse steady with trust and quiet fear. They didn’t know exactly what awaited, but they felt it in bone-deep ways. Light winked blue just at the edges of his vision, but he steadied himself. He would not flinch today.

They followed the narrow path to the first node: the iron stake jutting out of the ground beneath twisting vines. Sunlight filtered down, gleaning off the metal runes that spiraled the shaft. Jude walked forward and laid a hand flat against it; the runes hummed beneath his palm, echoing as though ancient machinery had creaked back to life. Around the stake, vines trembled, though no wind moved them.

He took out a clay flask of water and poured. The liquid hissed and steamed diffusely into steam that rose in fine coils. Around him, his wives watched, hands folded at their fronts, eyes bright.

He spoke: "We are here. We are named. We remember. We ask to remain ourselves."

Grace knelt and offered a root from the garden, placing it at the stake’s base. Lucy cast a handful of seeds. Emma laid a shard of carved bone. Natalie tied an azure ribbon to a nearby branch. Over the offerings a hush fell. Their breath carried a tremulous prayer: We choose ourselves.

Silence answered. Then the earth throbbed beneath them. Not violently, but like a heartbeat. Strong. Steady. The stake moaned. The vines stillled. The forest exhaled.

Jude touched Grace’s shoulder: "They heard."

She nodded. They backed away respectfully as the stake’s metal shimmered and the runes glowed faintly, then faded.

Next they moved to the dried-mushroom clearing. No plants inside. A ring in the ground, black and barren. Stones were arranged clockwise, small and plain. Prehistoric altar, a ring of memory that starved.

They knelt in the damp soil. Jude touched the earth in the center. The forest woke around them, birds called, insects droned. He poured water slowly on the central stone. Grace laid a white stone they’d found near the volcano. Lucy pressed pressed herbs into the soil. Emma touched their shoulders, humming a remembering vow: We are here. We anchor ourselves in earth and truth.

The clearing responded: green shoots appeared at edges, ferns uncurled four inches within seconds. Light brightened as though dawn found it first. The stones warmed beneath their palms. The enzyme of life returned when they spoke their vow.

They moved on then, steady with hearts emboldened. Each felt a shimmering safety but knew it wouldn’t hold. The island would test.

Climbing toward the arch again, they carried simple tools: handfuls of earth, small bowls of water, carved markers. Jude felt the weight of it all in his pocket, a piece of Lysander’s skull they’d found in a cave, cruel relic of another memory node. He held it in his palm during the walk, wanting to bury it, want to defy anything the island used as bones.

Traces of blue wavered at edges. Jude blinked twice. They passed.

At the arch, they paused, this sacred gateway they had crossed so many times. He took a piece of chalk and drew, between the stones, the spiral symbol they’d used in memory rituals. Each wife added her own spirals next to his, small and personal. Lucy’s curly waves. Grace’s twisting vines. Emma’s petals and roots.

Then Jude read aloud from a scroll:

We cross here not as outsiders, but as named. We cross as selves. Let any shape in the shadow see our faces, know our names. Here we choose to stay.

They stepped together through the stones, holding hands, eleven minds, eleven hearts amid shifting reality.