I left the temple on Nusa Penida different.
Not in the metaphorical sense. Not in the poetic way we say we're changed by travel or heartbreak or dreams.
I left it *literally* changed.
The humidity no longer clung to my skin—it settled beneath it.
The sounds of the jungle didn't echo—they moved *with* me.
And my breath… didn't quite feel like it belonged to me alone.
That night, as I took the small boat back to Bali, the sea shimmered unnaturally. The moon hung like a cracked lens, magnifying everything I had tried to suppress.
I wasn't afraid anymore.
But I wasn't whole either.
---
When I got back to my villa in Ubud, the offerings on the doorstep were different.
More precise.
One was placed exactly where the guardian statue used to face me. Except now, the statue was gone.
No sign of it ever being there.
No outline in the moss.
No indent in the stone.
It was as if reality had overwritten itself—*cleaned up* now that I had stepped through the doorway.
I took a shower, hoping the water would remind my body that it was still mine.
But the mirror fogged in a pattern.
Not randomly.
Circles.
Three of them.
Then a fourth, slower, around the others—intersecting, binding them like a seal.
I didn't wipe it away.
I left it there.
Because somehow, I knew it was watching me as much as I was watching it.
---
Sleep came slowly.
I lay in bed, eyes open, counting each breath like it might be my last uncontaminated one.
And then… she came back.
Not as a shadow.
Not in the mirror.
Not as a whisper.
She sat beside me.
Visible. Full. Real.
Her hair was no longer draped in front of her face. It was braided, streaked with white ash and woven charms.
Her face, though—still blurred, not by movement or fear, but as if memory itself refused to capture her.
> "You were never meant to stop at me," she said.
> "Then who was I meant to find?" I asked.
She pointed.
Not outward. Inward.
My chest tightened.
"Inside?" I said.
She nodded.
And disappeared again.
---
The next morning, a package arrived.
No label.
Just my name—handwritten in black ink, with a symbol I had seen only once before: at the foot of the temple's basin.
Inside the box: a stack of old photographs, a notebook, and a feather.
The photos were of me.
But not from this life.
Not from this timeline.
Me in clothes I never wore.
Me in places I never visited.
Me… watching *her* from a crowd, standing at the edge of ceremonies I had no memory of.
In one photo, I held the wooden figure—the one I had given her weeks ago.
Except it was aged. Burnt on one side.
And in another… I wasn't holding it anymore.
**She was.**
---
I flipped open the notebook. The writing inside wasn't mine, but I understood every word.
It read like a memoir written by someone I hadn't met yet but who somehow remembered me.
> *"The seal broke in 1983. The first witness disappeared in the rice fields. The second one in 1999—last seen drawing symbols in chalk near the Tirta Empul springs. The third made it to Singapore, but didn't survive the burning of the clinic in Clementi."*
> *"You're the fourth. But you're not a witness anymore."*
> *"You're the link."*
---
I didn't leave the villa for three days.
I read the notebook cover to cover.
I matched every name, every date, to strange headlines from the past. Mysterious disappearances. Unexplained deaths. "Ritual misidentifications" filed under bureaucratic reports.
Each one connected to temples long forgotten or *deliberately sealed*.
They weren't hauntings.
They were *containments*.
I had thought I was helping her be seen.
But I had only helped her *connect.*
And now, the network had grown.
People were remembering. Not all at once. Not clearly. But the dreams had returned. The watchers were watching again.
---
By the seventh day, I couldn't hold it in anymore.
I opened my laptop and began writing again.
Not just the story.
Not just her voice.
*Their* voices.
Each word flowed like blood from a reopened wound.
Each sentence uncoiled from a place older than thought.
And when I uploaded the new chapter to the site, the page glitched.
Not in a digital way.
The font twisted.
The header changed.
It no longer said *The Island That Sees Through You*.
It said *You See Through the Island*.
---
I received an email the next morning.
No sender. No subject. No attachments.
Just a message:
> *"Five are awake. The sixth remembers. The seventh writes."*
I didn't know what that meant.
But I felt it.
The number seven pulsed in my body.
My heartbeat fell into a new rhythm. Three slow. Four sharp.
I counted them in the silence.
And then came the knock.
Not at the door.
Not from the wall.
But from *beneath the floorboards.*
---
I ripped them open.
Bare hands. No tools.
Splinters dug into my palms, but I didn't stop.
And under the floor… I found another notebook.
Wrapped in cloth, bound in wax.
It was older.
The pages were brittle. The ink faded.
But the words were clear.
**My name.**
Written again and again.
Sometimes spelled backwards.
Sometimes encoded in symbols.
Sometimes smeared—as if someone had written it in blood, then tried to wipe it away.
I flipped to the final page.
It read:
> *"This isn't your first body."*
> *"This isn't your first telling."*
> *"You are the breath we buried."*
---
I didn't leave the villa.
Not for food.
Not for water.
The world outside no longer held relevance.
The *Island* wasn't out there anymore.
It was *here.*
In the air I breathed.
In the cracks of the tiles.
In the edges of my reflection.
---
And then she returned.
Not beside me.
Not behind me.
Inside me.
A mirror within a mirror.
A voice layered behind my own thoughts.
She said:
> "There are two more. One knows the truth. The other will deny it."
> "What do I do?"
> "Choose. As I did."
> "What did you choose?"
> "To remember everything."
---
I took the feather from the box and lit it with incense.
The smoke swirled upward—and didn't fade.
It hung in the air, forming symbols I no longer needed to decode.
They were names.
Not of people.
But of places.
Temples.
Islands.
Silences.
All of them asking to be seen.
---
And I wrote them down.
One by one.
I didn't stop for hours.
When I finally looked up, the villa was darker, though it was midday.
Time no longer ticked in seconds.
It pulsed.
And I pulsed with it.
---
There's no climax here.
No exorcism.
No resolution.
Because this was never a haunting.
This was a *continuation*.
---
The story isn't about fear anymore.
It's about connection.
The kind of connection that spans lifetimes, languages, dimensions.
The kind of connection that can't be explained—only felt.
Like a name whispered in a dream you didn't know you were having.
---
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