CHAPTER FIFTEEN:
The lagoon was calm. Too calm.
After everything—the heartbeat, the voice of Nara, the compass gone mad—Kairo stood at the edge of the water, feeling its stillness stretch across his nerves like a thread pulled taut. The moonlight shimmered across the surface, silver and glassy, unnaturally perfect. Lewin and Ember stood behind him, silent.
"It's there," Kairo said quietly, pointing to a darkened crevice beneath the lagoon's far wall. "It matches the markings on the map. The Hollow Tides."
Ember stepped forward, arms crossed. "You're saying there's a whole cavern system... beneath this?"
Kairo nodded. "Not just a system. A city. Or what's left of one. The drifter who gave me the map called it the memory of the drowned. Said the water down there remembers everything."
Lewin glanced nervously at the still surface. "Even memories shouldn't live forever."
Kairo tightened the straps on his gear, flicked on the waterproof light strapped to his shoulder, and took a breath. "I'm going."
---
The plunge was like falling into silence.
The water embraced him coldly, muting every sound but his own breath and heartbeat. The deeper he swam, the darker it grew—until only the beam from his shoulder light pierced the gloom.
Shapes emerged.
Ruins.
Columns encrusted with coral. Archways wrapped in seaweed. Statues of figures with hollow eyes, half-eroded, their faces stretched in frozen expressions of awe or agony. Walls lined with barnacle-covered pictographs—spirals, tears, eclipses. Some of the symbols matched those inside the living temple.
It wasn't a ruin. It was a tomb of memory.
As Kairo swam deeper into the hollow tides, something shifted. The current didn't move like natural water—it coiled. It pulled. It watched.
At the center of the cavern, a dome of stone jutted from the silt. A spire, broken in two, marked the heart of this drowned place. He kicked forward, ignoring the pressure building in his ears, the distant echoes vibrating through the liquid.
He reached the base of the spire.
A door.
Or something like it. Covered in glyphs that shimmered slightly even underwater. As his fingers grazed them, the symbols pulsed—and the water vibrated with a low hum.
Suddenly, memories flooded him.
Not his own.
Visions of people in robes gathered in the temple above, singing in low tones. Sacrifices. Rituals. A civilization desperate to preserve itself by placing its collective memory into the island. The water had taken it all in. Like ink in paper, it soaked into the tides.
Kairo jerked away—but the glyphs clung to his thoughts. Flashes of his memories twisted into theirs. He saw himself back in his childhood bed, except the sky above was made of water. He saw Lewin and Ember fighting, except they were ancient beings, repeating a cycle older than language.
Then he heard Nara again.
"You cannot take without giving."
He turned. A shape moved behind him. A pale figure in the dark—watching. Unmoving.
He kicked upward, the pressure closing in around him.
---
Kairo broke the surface with a gasp, coughing, eyes wide. Ember and Lewin pulled him to the shore. He lay there, trembling, soaked and cold.
"What did you see?" Lewin asked.
Kairo looked at the sky, the stars now spinning slightly, as if disoriented.
"The island remembers everything," he said. "And it remembers us now."
Ember looked toward the water. It was still again. But somehow darker.
Lewin spoke softly. "You left something down there, didn't you?"
Kairo didn't answer.
He only stared at the lagoon, and whispered, "Or maybe something followed me up."
Behind them, the trees swayed without wind. And somewhere deep in the jungle, the heartbeat began again.
K-thum. K-thum. K-thum.
The Hollow Tides had opened. And they were never truly meant to close.