Stuck in an Island with Twelve Beautiful Women
Chapter 978

Chapter 978: Chapter 978

Jude took his time moving through them, not out of obligation, but something deeper, gratitude, desire, and the binding thread of memory. He kissed Lucy’s ink-stained fingers, tracing the curve of her wrist. He pressed his forehead to Emma’s as Laurel nestled beside them, blinking sleepily. Stella caught his hand and placed it over her heart. Susan leaned against his back, arms folded around him tightly, a quiet pillar of strength. Zoey laughed softly as he tickled behind her ear, and Natalie pulled him down by the collar to steal a long, slow kiss. Sophie lit a string of flower candles near the path and kissed the light into his mouth.

Scarlet stood slightly apart, watching with an unreadable look. But as Jude approached, she didn’t retreat. Her hands reached for his, guiding him into her gravity. "Let them watch," she murmured against his lips. "Let them see they’ll never understand this."

By the time the moon rose fully, Jude lay in the orchard’s center with his wives curled around him in woven blankets. The children were asleep nearby, tucked safe with Grace. Firelight painted soft shadows over bare limbs, peaceful breath, joined hands. The watchers lingered but didn’t move closer. Only watched.

Jude opened his eyes at some unknown hour and saw them still there, faint shapes at the edges of trees, like distant memory, like weather waiting to shift. But the air was calm. No threat. Just presence.

He rose carefully, wrapped in his shawl, and stepped quietly past the sleeping circle. Grace stirred but didn’t wake. Susan mumbled something in her sleep. The rest were still, breathing in rhythm with the island.

He walked until the mist met him, soft and rippling. He didn’t call out. He only stood, hands at his sides, and whispered softly: "This is who we are. We build. We love. We choose peace."

The mist didn’t part. But something shimmered inside it, soft and slow, like a nod.

Jude turned back to the orchard, watching the outlines of his family sleeping together. Tomorrow, they would harvest fruit, inscribe new glyphs, teach the children more names. But tonight, they had shown the island their truth.

He lay back down beside Grace, curling her closer. The night passed without shadow or scream.

When dawn broke, the watchers were gone.

But every ribbon tied the day before had been repositioned, woven together at the top of the glyph trees. A single braid.

The island had answered.

Mist curled through the orchard at dawn, slender and bluish, as if it, too, was waiting. Jude stepped outside, breathing deep the damp air, and found Grace kneeling by the fig-glyph tree, her fingers tracing the braided ribbons that had been repositioned by watchers. The ribbons wove from sapling to sapling, knotted in understated elegance. Grace looked up and offered him a small, resident smile, the kind that carried both wonder and caution.

"It’s a message," she whispered.

He nodded, scanning the arrangement. The pattern formed a spiral, one that led inward toward the old well stone. Each ribbon knot marked a pause, a moment of memory. They bent together beneath the arch of dawn, fingers brushing as they moved between the ribbons.

"We follow it," Jude said quietly. "See where it leads."

Grace squeezed his hand. "Together."

They woke the others slowly, avoiding abruptness. At breakfast, heads inclined toward each other, forks and spoons paused mid-air. Scarlet’s voice was the first clear one: "They left tracks in the ribbons. It’s deliberate."

Jude stood, rising. "We walk the spiral."

No one spoke; agreement hummed between them.

The wives formed two lines beside the orchard boundary. Families followed as far as Laurel and Raven could walk before Susan scooped them up and returned them to camp. Each wife tied a ribbon themselves, some in loops, others in braids, each knot personal. Jude led the procession, Grace beside him, the spiral winding inward, each step deliberate.

Mist thickened in the path’s center, not obscuring but softening the air. The watched strings illuminated under fingers as though electric. They reached the well stone, and Grace placed a hand on its rim, ribbons trailing into the water.

"It led us here," she said.

Jude looked down into the glyphs etched at the rim. They glowed faintly, responding to presence. He touched the water gently; ripples carried the ribbons.

"It’s asking," he whispered. "For memory... for offering."

Grace nodded. "We give."

He stepped back and gestured to the wives. One by one, they stepped forward, pausing to leave something in the water: a braid of hair, a carved token, a small painted statue, a clap of bread torn in halves, pollen scattered. Grace waited last, placing a single petal from the mountain’s high slope. Jude followed, adding the watchers’ shard and a strip of newborn wood. Together, they drew back, circle complete.

Silence thickened. The mist stilled.

Then the well stone’s glyphs glowed bright. Water spilled over the edges with bubbling force. Ribbons snapped slick between fingers. The ground trembled beneath them. Light soared upward from the water, and in it, shapes: watchers, ethereal yet sharp, coalesced, then separated, forming new patterns in the mist above the well like living art. Their forms pulsed bright, echoing heartbeat of earth.

One watcher rose upright, clearing the mist with its arm. A single figure at the well’s edge, prismatic light in its shape. It reached out, paused, then tapped rhythmically on the well rim, three taps, a pause, two taps, a pause, one.

Counted. Purposeful. Almost musical.

Grace traced the beat with her foot. "3–pause–2–pause–1," she murmured.

"It’s counting," Jude realized. "Countdown? Count of memory?"

The watcher bowed once, low, then dissolved in blooms of mist that rained outward over the water, wetting the ground until everything glistened.

Then, stillness again. The well bubbled soft. Ribbons lay limp. Only watcher presence remained beyond the saplings, shadow-light watching.

Jude exhaled. "What does the sequence mean?"

Grace closed her eyes. "Maybe: remember to accept, remember to count, remember to honor." She glanced at the wives. "Maybe it’s our next task."