The second island announced itself, long before the Zephyrine actually reached it.
There was no smoke or obvious wreckage visible from a distance. But instead, there was a quiet that felt heavier than the empty sky around it should have allowed, and a silence from Vidora that lasted the entire approach, her usual brisk composure gone somewhere private Xavier didn't feel he had the right to follow.
What came into view as they descended was a town. Or had been one, once — rooftops caved in on themselves at strange, uniform angles, streets scorched black in long, sweeping arcs like something enormous had passed directly overhead, a market square reduced to blackened foundation stones with nothing growing back through them even now, years later, which struck Xavier as somehow the most unsettling detail of all. Whatever had happened here was making sure the place would never recover.
"...Lady Vidora," Bruce said carefully, as the Zephyrine settled onto a scorched clearing near the shrine. "What happened here?"
Vidora didn't answer immediately. She stood at the rail a long moment, looking out over the dead town with an expression Xavier couldn't fully read — grief, maybe, or something colder and more complicated sitting right alongside it.
"A great deal, once," she said finally. "None of which is mine to explain to you."
"That's not really an answer," Stephan said, quieter than his usual bluntness, like even he could feel this wasn't a place for his normal volume.
"No," Vidora agreed. "It isn't." She descended the gangplank without offering anything further, cane striking the scorched ground with the same steady rhythm as always, though Xavier thought that her hand trembled slightly around the handle in a way it hadn't at the first shrine.
Stephan, hobbling along at the back of the group with his bandaged foot, kept unusually close to Bruce's side, eyes darting over the ruined rooftops with none of his usual restless energy. "This place feels bad," he said, quietly, to nobody in particular. "Like, worse than bandits-bad. Worse than lightning-bad."
"It's the quiet," Bruce said. "Bandits and lightning are loud. This is just... empty. It's harder to ignore absence."
Xavier found himself agreeing without wanting to. There was something about the way the ruined streets swallowed the sound of their own footsteps, no birds, no wind through what should have been rustling grass, not even the faint creak of settling wreckage that old ruins usually managed. It felt less like a place that had died and more like a place that had been deliberately silenced, and left that way on purpose as a kind of warning.
Desmond lingered a step behind the party as they picked their way through the ruins, his voice dropped low. "I've served this family for four years, and I've been to every shrine on this route at least twice. I've never once heard her discuss what happened at the second island. I stopped asking after my first year." He glanced toward the Duke's crest, faintly visible on a half-collapsed archway they passed beneath, weathered but unmistakable. "Draw your own conclusions. I certainly have mine, but I don't share them."
Xavier looked up at that archway a beat longer than he meant to, House Windstrom's sigil scorched at the edges but still legible, and thought, uncomfortably, of a warm manor and a kind-eyed Duke and a butler named Gerald who'd once made him breakfast like it was the easiest thing in the world.
They passed what might have once been a schoolhouse, small desks still visible in neat, blackened rows through a collapsed wall, and a well at the town's center gone dry and choked with ash. Nothing about the destruction looked like ordinary war damage — no arrow scatter, no siege marks, no evidence of a fight having happened here at all. Just total, sweeping, deliberate ruin, applied evenly across the whole town like God himself had simply decided it shouldn't exist anymore and made that decision a reality without a second thought.
"I don't like this," Bruce said quietly, crouching to examine a scorch mark on the schoolhouse wall, tracing its edge with two fingers. "This isn't fire damage. Not normal fire, anyway. Look at the pattern... It's too even. Too controlled, you know? A real fire spreads unevenly, catches on some things and skips others depending on what'll burn. This just... swept through. Everything the same depth of scorch. It was intentional."
"Intended by what?" Stephan asked.
Bruce didn't answer that, which was its own kind of answer.
The shrine itself had survived, somehow, untouched at the center of all that ruin — the same ring of weathered pillars, the same shallow basin, entirely unmarked by whatever had scoured the town around it to bare stone. Vidora knelt before it in silence, performed the same rite as before, word for word as far as Xavier could tell, and poured the same measure of water into the basin.
This time, when the wind stirred, it didn't feel gentle at all. It moved through the ruined streets first, kicking up ash that had no business still being loose after however many years had passed, before finally circling the shrine itself in the same slow, deliberate pattern.
"Thank you," Vidora said again, quieter this time, and something in her voice cracked just slightly around the edges of the word.
Nobody spoke as they made their way back to the Zephyrine. Even Stephan, still moving carefully around his bandaged foot, kept his usual commentary to himself, and Xavier found he didn't have anything useful to fill the silence with either. Whatever had happened on this island, it clearly wasn't finished happening to the woman who kept coming back to it, year after year, alone with whatever she knew and refused to say.
"One more," Desmond said eventually, breaking the quiet as gently as he could manage, checking his ledger with hands that weren't quite steady. "One more, and we're done."
Xavier took one last look back at the ruined town as the Zephyrine lifted off. Peering at the schoolhouse desks and the dry well and the scorched market square nothing had ever grown back through, and found himself hoping, quietly and without much real conviction, that whatever answers existed for this place stayed buried a while longer. Some mysteries, he was starting to suspect, existed for a reason. Not every reason was a kind one.