The vision of the scarred man in the water had walled Lio off from his family. He moved with them, ate with them, and slept beside them, but he felt a universe away, trapped with the ghost of his own future. His despair was a cold, heavy thing, and it must have shown on his face more than he realized.
They had made a meager camp in the hollow of a windswept rock formation. Ira was asleep, his arms wrapped around the bundled, bleeding map as if it were an infant. Mina was a few feet away, silently tracing patterns in the dirt. Lio was staring into the dying embers of their small fire when his mother sat down beside him.
For a long time, she said nothing, simply watching the fire with him. The silence from her was normal, but this time it felt different—less like a wall and more like a gathering of thoughts. When she finally spoke, her voice was low and rusty from disuse, yet it commanded his absolute attention.
"I want to tell you a story," she said, not looking at him. "About a woman. A woman who looked very much like me."
Lio turned to her, his heart beginning to beat a little faster. She had never offered anything like this before.
"This woman," Sera began, her eyes fixed on the glowing embers, "she also had a husband who was a mapmaker. And she had two children, a curious boy and a little girl who spoke to things no one else could see. Their house was sinking, just like ours. Every day, the water came closer."
She paused, and Lio knew she was not just telling a story. She was opening a door to a room he had never known existed.
"Her husband, the mapmaker, was terrified of the water. He was a man who believed in solid ground and clear lines. He insisted they had to leave, that their only hope was to find the Rising Lands. He packed his maps and gathered the children, ready to run."
Sera's voice grew quieter, more intimate. "But the woman… she refused to go. She was tired. So tired of running from a world that was only breathing. She told her husband that home wasn't a place on a map you could run to. It was a place you had to hold, a place you had to be, even if it was sinking into the sea. She believed the real trap wasn't the house; it was the journey. The endless walking."
The fire crackled, spitting a red spark into the darkness.
"They argued," Sera continued, a deep sadness in her voice. "He could not understand her. He thought she had given up. In the end, his fear was stronger than his love for the home they had built. He took the children, and he left. He promised he would find a new, safe place for them, and one day, he would come back. The woman stood in the doorway and watched them walk away until they disappeared into the fog."
Lio was barely breathing, hanging on every word. This was the divergence. The other path.
"And what happened to the woman?" Lio asked, his voice a whisper. "The one who stayed?"
"She did not drown," Sera said, a faint, sad smile touching her lips for a moment. "Not in the way you think. She went back inside her house. She sat at her kitchen table and waited. The water came in, cool and quiet around her ankles. It rose to her knees, then her waist. It filled the rooms, lifting the chairs and the tables. It was not violent. It was a slow embrace."
Sera finally turned to look at Lio, her eyes dark pools of ancient memory. "As the house was consumed, so was she. Her memories soaked into the floorboards. Her final breath became the mist in the halls. Her sorrow became the salt in the water. She did not die. She became the house. She became the memory of home, a fixed point in the shifting world, waiting for a family that would never return."
The story settled over Lio, a heavy, suffocating blanket of understanding. This wasn't a fairytale. It was a memory. A version. A choice.
"The… the father and the children," Lio stammered, his throat tight. "The ones who left… what happened to them?"
Sera looked away, back toward the horizon, toward the path that lay ahead of them in the darkness.
"They walked for a very long time," she said softly. "They saw terrible and wonderful things. And they are probably walking still."
The unspoken truth hung between them. They were the father and children who left. His mother was not just haunted by the horrors of this journey, but by the ghost of the mother she had been, the one who had made a different choice. Lio now understood. Their endless journey wasn't fate. It was a decision, made long ago by a version of his father, and they were trapped inside the consequences of a choice his mother, this version of his mother, had disagreed with from the very start.