GRAYSON
The water aroundDeepwatchglows with the soft luminescence that only appears in the sacred places, and the woman standing at my rail has no idea what it means.
Isla's hand rises to the pendant at her throat, her fingers pressing against the metal like she can feel its heat through her skin. She can. The old blood always responds to the old places, even when the carrier doesn't understand why. The pendant at her throat is most likely her grandmother's, and unless I miss my guess, it isn't just a keepsake. It's a key, and the door it opens leads to truths that could shatter everything she thinks she knows about the world.
My bear prowls the corners of my mind, restless and alert. He recognized her the moment she stepped onto my dock yesterday morning, saw what her scientific mind refuses to accept. The sea is calling to her because the sea knows its own, and Isla carries selkie blood in her veins whether she believes in such things or not.
"The water." Her voice comes out breathless, wonder replacing the suspicion that had hardened her features moments ago. "It's bioluminescent. Some kind of dinoflagellate bloom,maybe, or a species of phosphorescent plankton that hasn't been documented in these latitudes."
Always searching for rational explanations. Part of me respects it, that fierce commitment to understanding the world through evidence and observation. The rest of me knows that some truths can't be measured with instruments or published in academic journals.
"This cove has always glowed," I tell her. "My grandfather brought me here when I was young. His father brought him. The light has been here longer than anyone can remember."
She turns to look at me, and the luminescence reflects in her eyes like captured starlight. Beautiful. She's beautiful in a way that has nothing to do with conventional standards and everything to do with the way she stands at the edge of impossible things and refuses to look away.
"That's not a scientific explanation."
"No." I move to the bow and begin preparing the small skiff we'll need to reach the beach. "It isn't."
The storm still rages beyond the cliff walls, but inside this pocket of calm water, the only sounds are the gentle lap of waves against the hull and the distant crash of surf against stone. Isla watches me work, her laptop forgotten in her hands, that pendant still pulsing with warmth she's probably convincing herself is body heat.
"Where are we going?" she asks when I lower the skiff into the glowing water.
"You wanted answers. There's something on that beach you need to see."
She hesitates for only a moment before setting her laptop aside and accepting my hand to help her down into the smaller boat. The contact sends that familiar electric current racing through my palm, and from the sharp intake of her breath, shefeels it too. Neither of us acknowledges it. Some things are easier to ignore than to explain.
The row to shore takes only minutes, but the silence between us feels weighted with questions she hasn't asked yet and answers I'm not sure I'm ready to give. The skiff's hull scrapes against dark sand. I swing my legs over the side, boots splashing into the shallows, and pull us far enough up the beach that the tide won't claim the boat before we return.
Isla climbs out and stands at the water's edge, her boots leaving clear prints in sand that sparkles with the same faint luminescence as the cove itself. She bends to examine it, fingers trailing through the grains like she's searching for the source of the light, and my bear makes a sound in my chest that's almost a growl of approval.
"This way." I lead her up the beach toward the ruins I pointed out from the boat, the tumbled stones that once formed walls and archways now claimed by centuries of salt and weather. Beyond them, the cliff face rises dark and imposing, but I know every handhold, every hidden entrance, every secret these rocks have kept since before the first Celtic settlers arrived on these shores.
The entrance to the sea caves sits behind the largest ruin, a crack in the stone that looks too narrow to admit a man but opens into a passage wide enough to walk comfortably once you slip through. I go first, showing Isla where to place her hands, how to angle her shoulders to avoid scraping against the rough surface. She follows without complaint, her scientific curiosity overriding whatever reservations she might have about following a near-stranger into a dark cave.
The passage opens after twenty feet into a chamber that makes Isla stop breathing entirely.
Faint light filters through cracks high above, enough to illuminate walls covered in carvings that predate everycivilization she's studied. Spirals and waves, figures that might be human or might be something else entirely, patterns that seem to shift and move in the uncertain illumination. The stone itself holds a trace of the same luminescence as the water outside, casting everything in a pale blue glow that makes the chamber feel like the inside of a living thing.
"My God." The words escape her in a whisper that echoes off the ancient walls. She moves forward slowly, reverently, her hand rising toward the nearest carving but stopping just short of touching it. "These are pre-Celtic. Maybe even pre-Neolithic. The spiral patterns are similar to what we see at Newgrange, but this style, these figures, I've never seen anything like them in any archaeological record."
"Few people have." I lean against the chamber wall and watch her trace the air above the carvings, close enough to feel their contours but not quite making contact. "This place isn't on any map. Hasn't been for a very long time."
"How is that possible?" She finally allows her fingers to touch the stone, and I see her shiver at the contact. "Something this significant, this unprecedented, should have been discovered and studied decades ago. Centuries ago. The scientific community would have documented every inch of these walls."
"The people who lived here before didn't want it found. They went to great lengths to ensure it stayed hidden." I push off from the wall and move closer, drawn by something I don't want to examine too carefully. "This was a holy place for them. A place where they came to commune with the sea."
Isla's hand stills against the carved spiral beneath her palm. "Commune with the sea? What does that mean?"
The pendant at her throat catches the dim light, and recognition finally clicks into place. The symbols etched into that silver disc match the oldest carvings on these walls, patterns I've seen nowhere else except in the records my grandfatherkept of the island's founding families. After she left my dock yesterday, I asked Tavish at the harbor about the mainland scientist asking questions. He remembered a Drummond girl who left Skara decades ago, remembered the scandal when she married a mainlander and never came back. Calder isn't a Skara name, but Drummond is. One of the oldest.
The question hangs in the air between us, and my bear surges against my ribs with an urgency that makes my skin prickle. She deserves truth, or at least as much of it as I can safely give her. But the full truth would send her running back to the mainland, convinced I'm mad, and I can't afford to lose her now. Not when the corporate surveyors are circling like sharks, not when the sacred waters need every ally they can find.
"They believed the ocean was alive," I say carefully, choosing each word like stones laid across a stream. "Not just full of living things, but alive itself. Aware. They believed they could speak to it, and that it would speak back if they came to the right places with the right intentions. These caves were one of those places. The trenches you've been mapping were another."
She turns to face me, her back to the ancient carvings, her eyes searching my face for signs of mockery or madness. "You're talking about animism. Spiritual practices. Folklore."
"I'm talking about what the people who carved these walls believed. Whether you call it folklore or religion or something else doesn't change the fact that they came here for generations, maybe millennia, and they found something worth coming back for."
