Chapter Two – Thresholds
The day began like any other, quiet, uneventful, pretending to be normal.
Jaka sat by the window, the morning light spilling pale across the table. A fishers net lay coiled in his lap, a half-mended tear running along the edge. His fingers moved automatically, looping twine through knots that didn't seem to end.
The house gave off its usual groans, but today they sounded deliberate.
Kai sat nearby, staring at the empty stove.
"You didn't hear it last night," he said. His voice was low, almost measured, like he'd been waiting to ask.
Jaka didn't look up. "You were dreaming again."
Kai shook his head. "No. I woke up. I heard footsteps in the hall, slow, heavy, like he used to walk."
Jaka kept threading the line, jaw tightening. "We've been alone for a month."
"Then explain the sound."
He didn't answer. He hated how easily Kai could find the cracks in his certainty. There had been sounds. There were always sounds in old houses, wood contracting, winds shifting, pipes cooling.
"Maybe it's just…" Jaka stopped, dazed and confused. He couldn't find the words as just then he heard slow, heavy, footsteps down the hall.
The look on Kais's face showed he didn't hear anything.
"Déjà vu?" Kai offered quietly. "Like it's all happened before?"
Jaka glanced at him. "You ever think you talk just to hear yourself?"
Kai smiled thinly. "Someone has to. You sit there like nothing touches you."
Jaka went back to the net, the thread biting into his calloused fingers. "That's because most things don't."
That hit deeper than either expected. Kai stood, his chair scraping loud against the floor. "You don't feel anything, do you? Grandpa disappears, I wake up screaming, and you just patch nets like it's any other morning."
Jaka's hands stilled. The net sagged.
"Because somebody has to keep things from falling apart," he said, voice rising. "You think feeling sorry for yourself brings him back?"
Kai's breath shook, anger and hurt mixing. "No. But at least I care that he's gone."
Something in Jaka's expression hardened. The air between them felt sharp.
He dropped the net, stood, and shoved the chair back so hard it hit the wall. "You don't get to say that."
For a moment he stood there, chest rising fast, staring past Kai but not really seeing him.
He saw instead that morning, the skiff rocking slow out on the open water, the empty seat where Tomas should've been, the half-filled bucket of bait already warming in the sun. The quiet had been absolute. Not a ripple on the lake.
He'd been asleep. Slept through whatever had happened. Slept while their grandfather vanished into nothing.
His jaw flexed. The memory scraped like grit behind his eyes.
With a sound between a breath and a growl, he snatched the torn net off the table and flung it aside, the weights clattering against the floorboards. "You think I don't care?" he said, voice rough. "I was right there, Kai. We were just…"
He broke off, breath catching, anger swallowing whatever softer thing that tried to follow.
He pressed both palms against the table, head down, fighting to steady the tremor in his hands. The floor felt too small beneath him, the room too loud with silence.
Kai opened his mouth, maybe to apologize, maybe to push again, but the sound never made it out.
Jaka turned sharply, chair legs screeching against the wood, and crossed the room in three long strides.
The old hinges groaned as he slammed the door on his way out. The sound echoed through the hallway like a gunshot.
Kai followed, calling after him, "Jaka, wait, I didn't mean…"
But Jaka had stopped. His anger drained in an instant. He stood perfectly still, facing the end of the hall.
The door to their grandfather's study, always locked, always off limits, was standing open.
Neither of them moved at first. The room beyond was still, lit only by a slant of morning sun cutting through the curtains. Dust drifted through the beam, slow and deliberate, every speck visible in the silence.
Jaka stepped forward.
Inside, the air smelled faintly of parchment and something older, like iron and salt. Every surface was lined with charts, sketches, and strange markings.
One wall was covered in pinned papers, maps of Theryn Lake, layered and overlapping, marked with red spirals and uneven notes:
One sings in the dark now.
Its pulse hides beneath the water.
Do not let the others answer.
Silence is safety. Sound is surrender.
The blood remembers what the mind doesn't know.
On the desk sat three things. A riddle box of dark wood, carved with a Celtic emblem and knot that seemed to twist differently each time Jaka looked at it. An old leather journal, the initials T.T. pressed into the cover. And a single folded letter, yellowed with age, sealed with wax. The handwriting was unmistakable.
To my grandsons, if the silence ever breathes.
Jaka reached for it. His fingers brushed the edge of the paper.
"Don't," Kai whispered, suddenly beside him.
Jaka looked over. Kai was trembling, clutching the journal tight to his chest.
"Don't read it," Kai said. "Not yet. He meant for us both, I am not ready."
Jaka hesitated. The wax seal looked almost fresh, soft around the edges, as if pressed only days ago. Yet the paper stained with age.
He let his hand fall away.
The floorboards creaked, slow, drawn out. The light on the desk flickered though there was no flame, the bulb glowing faintly soft orange.
Both brothers turned toward the sound.
The shadows in the corners seemed to pull inward, subtle but unmistakable, like someone was watching in the darkness but nothing was there.
Jaka stared at the letter until the wax seal blurred. He could feel Kai's breath near his shoulder, quick, uneven.
"Fine," Jaka said, barely above a whisper. "Not yet."
Kai exhaled shakily, relief and fear tangled in the sound. He adjusted his grip on the journal, hugging it closer, like it steadied him. The leather creaked.
"What's the box?" Jaka asked, nodding at the dark wood sitting off-center on the desk. The spiraled carving seemed to tilt, the lines notched so deep they caught the light and drank it.
"Puzzle box," Kai said. "I remember he used to give us puzzles. Said if we could open one, we'd earned the prize."
"This doesn't look like a prize," Jaka murmured.
They both leaned in. Along the edge of the lid, almost invisible, were small characters scratched into the grain. Not letters. Not numbers. Marks that tried to be both and were neither.
"Symbol of… something," Kai said, echoing the smeared note on the wall. "He was close to naming it."
Jaka slid the map closer. The paper crackled. Rings over the lake, clustered near the northern shallows, faded out toward the deeper center, then returned hard at the eastern banks, as though something beneath the water pushed against the shore and recoiled.
He found another note under the corner of the map, cramped script pinned with a rusted nail.
Hold at thresholds. Blood binds. Blood breaks.
"Thresholds," Jaka said. His eyes flicked to the doorframe.
Kai's did the same. "Doorways?"
"Edges," Jaka said. "Places where one thing becomes another."
The floor answered with a slow complaint. A long beam above them settled, the sound traveling left to right like a thought moving through the bones of the house. Dust loosened from the molding and fell in a thin sheet, catching light, then disappearing.
Kai swallowed. "We shouldn't be in here."
"We should've been in here a month ago," Jaka said, sharper than he meant. He softened it with, "Come on. We'll take the map for now."
Kai nodded, too quickly. "I'll keep the journal, leave the letter and the box."
Jaka paused for a second, then nodded in agreement.
They worked without speaking, Jaka rolling the marked map with careful hands, Kai watching the room like a cornered animal. As Jaka reached for a stray chart, the bulb of the light twitched again, a bead of darkened wax sliding down and stopping midway like a tear that refused to fall.
"Do you feel that?" Kai asked.
"What."
"The way the air pulls… when you take something."
Jaka paused, the chart half-lifted. He didn't want to say he felt it too. He didn't want to put a name to that small resistance, like the room's emptiness had mass.
Kai's gaze darted to the letter. He looked like he wanted to say something and couldn't decide which thing would make it worse. He settled on a nod. "Together," he said softly. "When we open it."
Jaka didn't answer. He slid the map into a canvas tube from the corner and capped it. The cap didn't fit right, too loose, or the tube had warped. He twisted until it held.
When they finally turned to go, the portrait of Tomas by the bookshelf had shifted. Not much. The frame hung at a tired angle. Jaka fixed it with a small, irritated sound and found his own face reflected in the protective glass for a second, pinched, older than he felt.
Behind his reflection, Tomas's painted mouth seemed parted, as if a word had gotten trapped there, held between bristles and varnish. Jaka reached out, then pulled his hand back, clenching it once like he could fold the impulse away.
A key fell from behind the portrait, a simple key with just two simple teeth, nothing fancy but turning he looked towards the door.
"Jaka?" Kai called from the hall.
"Coming."
He took one last look around the study, measuring. Objects returned his stare, the skewed chair leg, the cracked ink bottle with its neck stained iron brown. He closed the door carefully, easing the latch into place so it catch.
But latch refused to seat. He tried again. He pulled hard and inserted the key into the lock twisting it slowly. The tongue of metal clicked, then slid back on its own with a dry, deliberate scrape.
Jaka's jaw set. He lifted the handle and, with gentle pressure, guided it until it settled properly. There. Done. He let go.
He stepped away.
Kai was a shape at the far end of the hall, small with the journal in his arms. He had that look he got when he was trying very hard to be brave and not naming it bravery.
"Kitchen," Jaka said. "We need a plan."
"Or we need to leave," Kai said. "Find Grandpa."
"We don't even know what happened to him or where he went."
Kai lifted the journal. "Maybe we do now."
Jaka laid the map tube on the table and set his palm on it. He could feel the seam, the imperfection he hadn't fixed, and, to take only part of the truth and call it enough for today.
"Start with that," he said, nodding at the journal.
Kai didn't move.
"You just told me not to read the letter," Jaka said. "So read what you will open."
Kai eased onto the bench, the wood complaining under his weight. He set the journal down like a sleeping animal in need of careful waking and thumbed the edge. His hands shook once, twice, then steadied.
When he cracked the cover, a smell of dry glue, old ink, and the faint tang of metal rose, familiar and wrong in the same breath. He turned past a blank first page and found a name, not Tomas's, but their family name written in a hand they recognized from notes he'd left them as boys.
Theryn. And beneath it, a line, We remember what the water cannot hold.
Kai's mouth quirked. He didn't look up. "He wrote strange first lines on purpose."
"Read it."
He did. Date. Weather. A list of supplies. Notations about net weights and catch totals and then, suddenly, sentences that had nothing to do with fish. Sightings. Circles. The sensation of being tracked by something you couldn't see. He wrote of the study's door as a "gate," as if giving it that name made him bolder.
By the third page Kai's voice had gone thinner. "He says… 'If they come, go to the shallows at North Bend. If you carry my blood, the current will ease for you.'"
"The shallows," Jaka repeated. North Bend was a half day's walk around the ridge or an hour by skiff. He pictured the narrow cut of reeds. He'd always hated that stretch; it made his shoulders crawl.
Kai closed the journal, hands flattening it as if he could keep the words from fluttering away. "He wasn't just fishing. He was—"
"Looking for something," Jaka finished. "Or guarding it."
Silence laid itself across the table.
"What do you want to do?" Kai asked.
Jaka looked at his brother, at the tension sitting under his skin like another set of bones. "Work," he said. "Keep the hands moving. Then… North Bend."
Kai's eyes flicked toward the hall. "We're just… leaving then?"
"For now."
"And the letter and the box?"
"For now."
Kai nodded, though his face said he agreed only to the first of those two.
They moved through the rooms, doing small things that added up to the illusion of order, straightening a chair, banking the stove's cold ashes, setting the empty pail by the door. Jaka paused at their boots lined against the wall. He pressed his hand flat against the leather of his own and felt the warmth it had stolen from him and was slowly giving back.
At the doorway, Kai hesitated. He looked down at the plank just inside the door. The wood had lifted a hair's breadth, the seam between boards gapped where it hadn't been yesterday.
"Don't," Jaka said.
"I didn't do anything."
"Don't notice it. Not right now."
Kai huffed a laugh that wasn't one, then bent to tie his laces, tucking the journal under his shirt the way men tucked knives. When he straightened, he looked lighter and more heavily anchored all at once.
Jaka opened the door.
Outside, the day lay there, colorless, bare, honest about its emptiness. The trees at the edge of the yard stood still. No birds in the branches. No wind through the grass. The lake in the distance held itself like glass that refused a reflection.
They stepped out together. The door swung closed behind them with a softened click.
From down the hall, behind the latched study door, a sound of a hum rose and fell.
Neither brother heard it.
Jaka set the map tube under his arm and picked up the net from the bench. "We'll patch this on the skiff."
Kai touched the place where the journal pressed against his ribs and nodded. "North Bend."
At the gate, Jaka glanced back despite himself.
The study window caught the light wrong, like a silhouette shadow staring back at him.
When he blinked, it was gone.
But the feeling stayed. Someone inside the house was still looking out.
He waited for a movement that didn't come, then turned away.
They walked toward the lake that wasn't moving, holding a plan that was small enough to carry.