As the ten seconds passed, Almond and Lily blanked out, their consciousness greeting complete darkness.
Almond opened his eyes.
Warm sand pressed against his palm. The air smelled of salt and something faintly metallic, like distant rain over iron. Waves lapped gently against the atoll's edge, rhythmic and calm, yet beneath that calm he felt it. A pressure. Not on the body, but on awareness itself.
Lily stirred beside him, silver-blue hair spread across the sand like spilled starlight. Her eyes opened, instantly clear.
The sky looked wrong.
It was blue, but too deep, and layered like stacked glass. Thin fractures of light drifted slowly across it, as if reality itself was breathing. Far above, something massive moved behind the sky, its outline never fully forming.
A pulse rippled through the lagoon.
The water darkened near the center, spiraling inward. Something rose slowly, deliberately, as if answering a summons rather than surfacing by chance.
