Jason opened his eyes, and the first thing he noticed was that he could see out of both of them.
He lay on his back, staring upward. The sky above him was perfectly black, with no stars anywhere in it, only a single moon hanging low and enormous over the water. It was violet, a deep, luminous violet like the heart of a bruise, and it gave off a soft light that made everything around him look slightly unreal.
He raised a hand to his right eye and touched it. There was no patch, no scar, no ruined socket. Only an eye that blinked when he touched it, and saw.
That frightened him more than anything else could have.
He sat up slowly. He was on a beach, and the sand beneath his palms was black, fine and soft as ash, and it glittered faintly wherever the moonlight touched it, as if it had been mixed with powdered metal. In front of him lay the sea. It was completely flat and completely still, and from somewhere deep inside it came a faint, cold glow, blue-green and steady, as if the whole ocean were lit from below.
There was no sound. The water didn't lap against the shore. There was no wind, no birds, no insects. The silence was so complete that he could hear his own heartbeat.
"Okay," he said, and his voice came out small and flat, swallowed by the air. "Okay. Where is this?"
Nobody answered.
He tried to remember how he had gotten here, and the memories came back to him in pieces, like things washed up by a tide.
Rain. The cliff edge under his toes. The long drop to the water, and the rocks, and the white foam.
A pale shape in the waves, rising and falling. A body.
Then cold, a hard, flat slap of cold, and water closing over his head. An arm around someone's chest, heavy and slack, and the effort of pulling it through the water, and pulling, and pulling.
Rock under his knees. Something giving way in his side, not pain exactly, but a strange, spreading numbness that bloomed out from just above his hip.
After that there was nothing at all.
He touched his side. There was no wound here, and his hand came away clean.
"So I'm dead," he said. The words sounded ridiculous out loud. "That's what this is. I died."
He waited to feel something about that. He didn't. He only felt tired, and very far away from himself.
He got to his feet and looked around properly for the first time.
The beach curved away from him in a long, gentle arc, bookended at each end by dark rocks jutting out into the water. Behind it, a line of trees rose like black paper cutouts against the violet sky. Above the trees, at the far end, stood the shape of a cliff.
Jason stared at it.
He knew this beach. He had walked it a thousand times. He knew the curve of it and the exact shape of the rocks at either end, and he knew that if he walked along the top of the sand he would find a place where he had once driven a stick into the ground every morning for years.
He walked there now. The black sand was smooth and unmarked. The sticks were gone.
"This is the island," he whispered.
It was the same place, down to the last rock, and it was completely wrong. The white sand had turned black, the sea had gone silent and luminous, and the sky had lost every star it had ever had. It was his island, turned inside out.
He didn't know whether that made it better or worse.
Something made him turn around.
He couldn't have said what. There was no sound, and nothing had moved at the edge of his vision. But he turned toward the far end of the beach, toward the rocks where the grotto opened into the cliff, and someone was walking toward him.
The figure came out of the grotto's mouth slowly, the way someone walks when there is no hurry at all. It was tall and thin and dressed in rags that hung from it in long, shapeless strips. Under one arm it carried something flat and square, like a plank of wood.
And its face was white.
Jason's breath stopped.
It was the mask. The same narrow eyes, the same fine carved lines, the same perfect, untouchable white. He had held it in his hands in the chamber beneath the pond. He had thrown it into the sea with all the strength he had left. He would have known it anywhere.
The figure kept walking toward him.
Its feet were bare, and they sank a little into the black sand with each step, and they left prints behind them. Jason looked down at the nearest ones as the figure came closer, and a cold feeling crawled slowly up his spine.
He knew those prints. The heel, the arch, and the five toes. He had crouched over them on a white beach years ago, with a leaf hat sliding over his eye, and followed them all the way to a pond in the dark.
"It was you," he said. His voice shook. "The footprints. That was you."
The figure didn't answer.
It stopped a few paces in front of him. Up close, the rags looked impossibly old, gray and brittle like cloth pulled from a tomb. The hands that held the board were long and pale, and the mask above them gave nothing away at all.
Then, without a word, it sat down.
It lowered itself onto the black sand and crossed its legs, as calmly as someone settling in at a kitchen table, and it set the board down on the sand between them. It was a single slab of dark, smooth wood, perfectly square, about as wide as Jason's forearm was long.
Jason looked at it and waited for something more to happen.
It was blank. There were no squares on it, no lines, no carvings, no pieces anywhere, not on the board or in the sand around it or in the figure's hands. It was just wood, polished smooth, gleaming faintly violet in the light of the moon.
The figure rested its pale hands on its knees and turned the white mask toward him.
It was waiting.
Slowly, not knowing why, Jason sat down on the other side of the board.