Stuck in an Island with Twelve Beautiful Women
Chapter 988

Chapter 988: Chapter 988

He knelt beside the central stone, laying his palm across its weathered face. Beneath his fingers, the surface was alive, warm despite the cold air, and humming faintly, like a heartbeat buried in the rock. He closed his eyes, focusing, letting his breathing match the rhythm. Then the vision came.

It wasn’t a clear one, just fragmented impressions: a row of stones glowing under starlight, a figure standing at the edge of the island’s cliff with arms raised high, smoke coiling from the mountain’s mouth in spirals. Then whispers in the watchers’ tongue. A phrase he couldn’t translate but felt like an invitation.

He opened his eyes. Grace was watching him closely. "You saw something."

He nodded. "An old ritual. Something tied to the mountain and the smoke."

Stella frowned. "You think it’s connected to what’s affecting the others?"

"I think it’s part of what’s trying to wake up," Jude said, standing again. "And the watchers want us to remember it."

They stayed in the hollow another hour, marking the stones with newer glyphs, documenting everything they could. By the time they returned to the orchard, the sun had risen high, and the children were playing under the watchful gaze of the wives. Susan met them first, her expression tense.

"Zoey had another blackout," she said without preamble. "Right after breakfast. One moment she was feeding Laurel, the next she was gone, like looking through you."

"Did she say anything?" Jude asked.

Susan nodded. "One word. She said Ashrah . Then she started laughing."

Jude felt the name sink into his mind like a stone. Grace inhaled sharply, eyes darting to him. "That’s what the watchers whispered in the hollow. That word."

They gathered the others quickly, forming a circle under the fig tree. Zoey sat quietly near the firepit, her eyes normal now but distant, as though her body had returned but her thoughts lagged behind. The others sat around her, waiting for answers none of them yet had.

Jude stepped into the center. "I saw something in the ravine," he said. "A memory in the stone. A ritual tied to the smoke, possibly to what’s affecting all of you."

"The watchers are trying to show us," Grace added. "They’re piecing something together through us. Through memory."

"But how do we protect ourselves?" Rose asked. "It’s creeping into us. First blackouts, then words we don’t know, then voices in the dark."

"We go to the source," Jude said, voice low. "We go to the mountain. All the way this time."

A heavy silence followed.

Layla broke it. "You’ve always said that place was too dangerous."

"It is," Jude said. "But whatever is sleeping there is no longer still. We wait, and it wakes in pieces through you. We move, we might control how much it takes."

Stella stood beside him. "Then we prepare. Rations. Glyph stones. We take watchers’ shards, memory tokens, everything. We walk as a circle, and we leave no one behind."

They spent the next two days preparing. The watchers moved actively around them, glowing with a kind of quiet urgency. Each wife made a personal glyph stone, infused with tokens from her own past, locks of hair, dried petals, threads from her first garment on the island. Jude and Grace worked together to create a long tapestry of combined glyphs, stretching it between wooden poles as a banner.

On the third morning, they left. Twelve wives. Jude. Four children carried in slings. A procession flanked by watchers, moving toward the mountain for the first time with no intent to turn back.

The forest darkened as they climbed. Birds vanished from the trees. Even the wind seemed to avoid the path. The watchers glowed brighter to light the way. Jude kept to the front, his staff marked with the watchers’ spirals, his feet bare, his pace steady. Behind him, the wives whispered glyphs like prayers, grounding themselves in each other.

As they neared the outer edge of the volcano’s base, the ground shifted beneath them, soft, almost breathing. Jude paused. A watcher floated low and etched a new symbol into the dust: a pair of spirals converging, then breaking apart.

"They’re warning us," Lucy whispered. "We’re reaching a place where memory fractures."

The sky turned copper. Smoke rose in languid coils from the mountain’s lip. The watchers fanned into a circle as they reached a stone platform, an ancient altar partially overgrown, still crackling with energy. Jude raised his hands and pressed his palms to the stone. The glyphs there responded, not in light but in sound. A low thrum pulsed beneath them, deep and resonant.

Then Zoey stepped forward. Her eyes clouded again.

She raised both hands. " Ashrah seh talun. Keh vahl. "

The watchers surged inward, surrounding her in a dome of soft light. Jude lunged, grabbing her shoulders, but she didn’t resist. Her voice changed, higher, older, like someone using her body to speak.

"The seal is broken," she whispered. "Memory was meant to contain it, not destroy it."

"Who are you?" Jude asked.

Zoey’s lips moved, but the voice was not hers. "One who remembered too much. One who broke beneath the weight."

The watchers pulsed harder. Then Zoey gasped and collapsed into Jude’s arms.

She blinked rapidly, breath ragged. "What... what happened?"

"It wasn’t you," Grace whispered. "Something spoke through you."

They made camp at the edge of the altar. The watchers stayed close, flickering with strange urgency. Jude walked circles around them, trying to decipher the glyphs etched into the surrounding stones. They formed a sequence, story through memory. It told of a being born from forgotten things, of smoke that crept through cracks in remembrance, feeding on what people tried to forget.

The wives gathered around him, listening.

"We didn’t just survive the apocalypse," Jude said. "We inherited its leftover memory. This island... it remembers everything that was lost. And now the thing buried here is trying to reclaim it."

"Can we stop it?" Susan asked.

Jude shook his head. "Not stop. But we can bargain. Offer new memory in exchange. Rewrite what it consumes."