My first novel after a long time thinking about it. Have to thank someone dear for this.
# Arc 1 — Prologue: Who Am I?
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There is a place that does not exist, and I have always lived there.
Not in the way that dreams do not exist — those at least leave traces, the ghost of warmth when you wake, a name you almost remember. No. This place was older than dreaming. It was the wound *before* the wound, the silence *after* the scream has worn itself hollow. I called it home because I had no other word for it, and because the word *home* felt like the cruelest thing I could call it.
It was cold. Not the cold of winter, not the cold that bites and reminds you that you are alive — but the cold of an absence so complete it had forgotten what warmth once was. Darkness did not fall here. Darkness simply *was*, dense and patient, threaded with the weight of grudges that had outlasted the people who bore them. Countless souls had passed through this void, had pressed their anger and their grief into its walls like handprints in wet stone. I could feel them sometimes — not hear them, not see them — only feel the residue of their suffering clinging to the black air like smoke.
And yet I was alone.
I had always been alone.
*Who am I?*
The question did not come to me gently. It rose like a tide, like something that had been waiting for the exact moment I was too exhausted to fight it. It brought others with it — *why am I here, what was I before this, did I do something unforgivable* — and they circled me the way storms circle their own eye, relentless, offering no shelter within themselves.
*I don't want to die.*
That thought arrived quieter than the rest. Smaller. And perhaps because of that — perhaps because it asked for so little — it frightened me more than any of the others.
I had no voice here. I had screamed once, in the beginning, when I still believed that screaming meant something. I had wept until the weeping felt mechanical, a motion my body performed out of habit rather than grief. No one came. No one ever came. Not because they chose not to — but because *here* was a place that could not be found unless you were already lost inside it.
So I knelt.
I am not sure when I began kneeling. It may have been always.
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Then — between one breath and the next, in the way that impossible things tend to arrive — there was light.
Not flooding. Not blinding. Just a thread of it, distant, moving. Dancing, almost, the way candlelight dances when someone carries it down a long corridor toward you. It did not illuminate the darkness so much as negotiate with it, carving a thin seam through the black.
I stared.
I had forgotten what light looked like. I did not know, until that moment, that I had forgotten. The sight of it broke something loose in my chest — something I had not realized was still intact — and I felt, to my own bewilderment, tears sliding down a face I had nearly stopped believing in.
The light drew closer. And within it: a silhouette.
A figure. Tall, unhurried, reaching one hand down toward me with the easy patience of something that had waited before and was prepared to wait longer still. Its outline was wrong in ways I could not articulate — the head too round, too still, crowned with what might have been a cluster of faint glimmers that curved upward like a question no one had thought to ask yet. It did not call out. It did not demand. It simply extended its hand into the dark, as if to say: *here. If you want it.*
I hesitated.
Every part of me that had learned to survive in that place told me to hesitate. Trust was a wound here. Hope was the thing that made the cold worse.
But my hand moved before I could decide. It reached upward — trembling, half-disbelieving — and found his.
The void dissolved.
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Not slowly. Not with ceremony.
One moment I was kneeling in the dark, and the next — the world was *loud*.
Salt air hit me like a fist. The sound of water — real water, water that moved, water that had somewhere to be — rushed in from every direction. Wood groaned beneath me. Ropes snapped taut in a wind that smelled of open sea and distant rain.
I was on a deck.
I pressed my palms against the planks just to feel them. Rough. Solid. Real in a way I had nearly stopped believing real things could be.
"𝑊ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 — " My voice cracked. I had not used it in so long it had almost forgotten its own shape. "𝑊ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑎𝑚 𝐼? 𝑊ℎ𝑜 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑦𝑜𝑢? 𝑇ℎ𝑒 𝑚𝑎𝑛 𝑖𝑛 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑙𝑖𝑔ℎ𝑡 — 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑑𝑖𝑑 ℎ𝑒 𝑔𝑜?"
I was already searching — turning, scanning — only realizing after the words had left me that I did not know what I was looking for. The man from the void. A shape made of light. Or perhaps simply some proof that I had not imagined all of it.
A laugh. Low, unhurried. The kind of laugh that had seen too many things to be surprised by any of them, and had made peace with that a long time ago.
"𝐸𝑎𝑠𝑦, 𝑒𝑎𝑠𝑦."
I turned.
He was sitting on a crate near the mast, one leg crossed over the other, mending a net with the focus of something that finds needlework deeply, genuinely satisfying. His coat hung from a frame that was slender yet carried the quiet suggestion of great strength — the kind that does not announce itself.
But it was his head that stopped me.
There was no face. No eyes, no mouth, no nose — none of the things a head is supposed to have. What rested atop his shoulders was something I could not find a word for, and I am not sure a word exists. It was round in the way that something very old and very large is round — not shaped, but *settled* into roundness over an incomprehensible span of time. Its edges did not hold. They softened, fraying outward into a dim corona of blue so dark it was almost not blue at all, more like the suggestion of blue, the last trace of it — the way a colour looks when it is in the process of becoming something else and has not quite finished. And threaded through that dimness, like smoke that had forgotten how to move, was black. Not the black of shadow, not the black of night — but a deeper black, a black that felt like it had been there before light had a name to be the absence of.
From its crown rose five shards, curving outward and slightly over, each one catching — or rather, *failing* to catch — what little light it held. They were crystalline, or had been once. Now they were weathered into something between crystal and ruin, their blue so faded it flickered at the edge of perception, dimming and half-dimming, as though each one was in the middle of a very slow goodbye it had been giving for longer than I could imagine. They did not shine. They *persisted* — the way certain things persist not because they have strength left but because they have not yet found a moment quiet enough to stop.
The whole of him emanated something. Not warmth, not cold — just a low, barely-there glow the color of deep water at the moment before it goes dark, breathing outward in pulses so slow and faint you might convince yourself you had imagined them.
I stood there and felt, beneath the confusion and the fear, something I had no name for either. The sense of standing before something that had once been so vast and so bright that the sky itself had organised around it — and was now here, on a fishing boat, mending a net, in a coat with mismatched patches. As if greatness had quietly folded itself down into something small enough to carry.
He did not glance up. He had no eyes to glance with. And yet I knew, with a certainty I could not explain, that he was watching me.
"𝐹𝑜𝑢𝑛𝑑 𝑦𝑜𝑢 𝑐𝑙𝑢𝑛𝑔𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡𝑜 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑖𝑑𝑒 𝑜𝑓 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠ℎ𝑖𝑝," he said, returning to the net, "𝑙𝑖𝑘𝑒 𝑎 𝑙𝑖𝑚𝑝𝑒𝑡 𝑤𝑖𝑡ℎ 𝑛𝑜 𝑖𝑑𝑒𝑎 𝑤ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑖𝑡'𝑠 𝑠𝑢𝑝𝑝𝑜𝑠𝑒𝑑 𝑡𝑜 𝑏𝑒. 𝑈𝑛𝑐𝑜𝑛𝑠𝑐𝑖𝑜𝑢𝑠. 𝑁𝑜𝑡 𝑑𝑒𝑎𝑑, 𝑡ℎ𝑜𝑢𝑔ℎ — 𝐼 𝑐ℎ𝑒𝑐𝑘𝑒𝑑 𝑡ℎ𝑟𝑒𝑒 𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑠, 𝑡𝑜 𝑏𝑒 𝑠𝑢𝑟𝑒." A pause. He squinted at a knot. "𝑆𝑜𝑚𝑒𝑡𝑖𝑚𝑒𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑠𝑒𝑎 𝑔𝑖𝑣𝑒𝑠 𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔𝑠 𝑏𝑎𝑐𝑘. 𝐼'𝑣𝑒 𝑙𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑛𝑒𝑑 𝑛𝑜𝑡 𝑡𝑜 𝑎𝑠𝑘 𝑤ℎ𝑦."
My heart was still racing. Cold sweat had broken across my skin — not the cold of the void, I realized, but the ordinary cold of being soaked and windswept and alive. *Alive.* The word sat strangely in my mind, tender as a bruise.
I looked out at the water. At the sky — pale at the edges, deepening overhead into something vast and unhurried. At the horizon, which existed. Which simply, generously, *existed*, in the way that horizons do, stretching away into a distance that was not darkness.
Something in me that had been clenched for a very long time began, slowly, to release.
*If I had not reached for his hand,* I thought. *If I had stayed kneeling.*
I did not finish the thought.
"𝑌𝑜𝑢 𝑐𝑎𝑛 𝑠𝑡𝑜𝑝 𝑙𝑜𝑜𝑘𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑖𝑡," the man said, without looking up. "𝑊ℎ𝑎𝑡𝑒𝑣𝑒𝑟 𝑦𝑜𝑢'𝑟𝑒 𝑠𝑒𝑎𝑟𝑐ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑓𝑜𝑟 𝑏𝑒ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑑 𝑦𝑜𝑢. 𝑇ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒'𝑠 𝑛𝑜𝑡ℎ𝑖𝑛𝑔 𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑒 𝑛𝑜𝑤."
I stared at him.
He finally turned toward me — and the five shards above his head shifted, almost imperceptibly, the way a creature's ears might turn toward a sound. Something passed through the dim light of him that I could not name. Not quite recognition. Not quite memory. Something older than both.
"𝑁𝑒𝑏𝑢𝑙𝑎," he said simply, and returned to his net. "𝑇ℎ𝑎𝑡'𝑠 𝑚𝑦 𝑛𝑎𝑚𝑒. 𝐼'𝑚 𝑎 𝑓𝑖𝑠ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑛. 𝐽𝑢𝑠𝑡 𝑎 𝑓𝑖𝑠ℎ𝑒𝑟𝑚𝑎𝑛."
He said it the way a man says something he has told himself so many times it has almost stopped feeling like a lie.
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*End of Prologue*