He turned on his scanner, adjusted the light for an oblique angle, and studied the next section of the wall. The carvings weren’t etched in a straight line, but spiraled inward along a narrowing tunnel that followed what appeared to be an old lava tube’s path toward the island’s core.
He crouched in front of the next symbol and compared it to his photocopy of the pages from the copybook he’d used for the impressions in The Comeraghs. The same three-spoked swirl. The same hash through the stem. The same tick at the base.
Impossible.
This is impossible.
It has to be.
He traced the ridges with one finger, gentle, reverent. There was no soot, no carbon residue, and just like in Ireland, no tool marks. It was as if the stone had accepted the symbols willingly—as if it had grown them.
This isn’t decoration.
He considered the possibilities as his brain rushed into overdrive. Behind his eyes, as if it were a holograph that existed only in his mind, the symbols jumped and moved as he sought patterns to make it make sense.
It’s language.
It had to be a language. There was no other reason to have these symbols alongside Triskeles.
No, not just language. It’s a statement of some kind.
None of this makes any sense.
No sense at all.
He latched onto that idea, and in his head, moved the symbols he’d already found into a different sequence.
A warning.
It’s a fucking warning.
But for what?
Had some ancient seafarer gotten blown off course in a storm and somehow ended up here? While not likely, that idea at least had a tiny—no, not tiny—a minuscule iota of possibility attached to it. He pulled out a graphite pencil and carefully copied the symbol into his field journal. He flipped through the photocopies of the old impressions to match their place in the sequence. Then he stopped, his gaze going from the wall to the pages and back again.
Five of the symbols in this cave appeared in his notes from Ireland. The same structure and the same orientation. He’d thought they were isolated glyphs—outliers of an undocumented tradition in southern Munster. But this? This appeared to be a complete set.
A phrase.
Maybe even a spell.
He laughed at himself.
Jesus, Ward. You’ve been on the island less than twelve hours, and already you’re talking like some fantasy role-player game dropout.
But his laughter died fast, and the cave’s silence swallowed its echo as he moved deeper into the system. He paused long enough to dig his emergency light sweater out of his Indy-pack before moving to the next symbol. The sound of each step he took bounced off the curved basalt in strange ways. As he moved deeper into the tunnel, he knelt to match each symbol against the ones from Ireland.
We are five for five.
He stopped at the next symbol and frowned as it looked different from the rest. Its lines were sharper, less organic. It almost felt like a boundary marker or a line drawn in the sand.
He whispered as he wrote: “We bind your power to the bones of the earth…”
The phrase had been tumbling in his mind for the last ten minutes. It came in pieces, like something whispered across time. He really didn’t think the symbols were just writing. Were they functions? Or maybe ancient commands, meant to be spoken aloud or memorized. The Irish language was born in the oral tradition of druids, not the written language of the monks. He translated another. “With the wind’s voice…” And another. “And the tears of stone…”
Each translation felt more oppressive than the last. He paused to track the images of the symbols in his journal, then glanced up and down the tunnel. Realization struck, and excitement unfurled in his stomach. The symbols weren’t scattered ashe’d first thought. They formed a path. He raced back to the beginning of the tunnel and once more walked the path that pulled him deeper, past sense and safety and any remaining logic. He read each full line he’d written in his journal as he paused at each symbol.
“Behold, son of Cumhaill, true king.
