The Awakening

Far out beyond the wide waters, where few mariners now dare to sail, there lies a place known in whispers only: the Forgotten Island. Long have the waves rolled upon its lonely shores, and longer still have the winds sung over its fields, yet no living soul of man has set foot there in ages.

The island is a realm of quiet wonder. Meadows lie unbroken, mantled in greens of every shade and hue and where flowers of many colors lift their faces to the sun. Bees drift from bloom to bloom in slow, golden industry, lading their small bodies with brightness before vanishing into comb-dark hives. Far to the east where the earth rises into long, undulating waves of volcanic green, the hills cradle one of the island’s quiet sanctuaries of forest life. Here, the air is cool and sweet, and the clouds drift low enough to brush the treetops, feeding them with mist and silence. In this enchanted place, the trees are ancient storytellers. The red-barked cedar stands like a respected noble of its community, its trunk straight and solemn, its needles whispering softly as the wind threads through them. Scattered among them, and rising even further above, are towering trees with silvered leaves shimmering in shifting light, as though dusted with moon glow. These giants anchor the forest, their roots gripping the volcanic soil with a patience learned over centuries.

Beneath their shade grow wild fig trees, each one a world unto itself. Fig roots twist down the slopes, curling like great serpents across the forest floor, while above them troops of monkeys, never seen by anyone except the species on this long-forgotten island, leap from branch to branch, their calls echoing through the canopy. The old fig trees release their sharp, clean scent into the air, and the breeze carries it gently uphill, as if to refresh every living creature that passes through the meadows nearby.

Here and there, a strangler fig slowly envelopes its host, wrapping it in a slow procession of life overtaking life. And in the open glades, trees that have never been seen before display their patchwork of gold and green leaves, each one catching the sunlight like pieces of stained glass.

Across this forgotten forest, the rhythm of life continues in serene harmony. The trees, some hundreds of years old, do not merely stand, they shape the land, shelter its creatures, and hold the memory of countless seasons. In these very hills, they remain quiet guardians, steadfast and enduring, reminding all that depends on them that the heart of this island beats not only in its vast mountain ranges and mysterious lakes, but also in the stillness of its mist-wreathed forests.

As squirrels scurry up the trunks of these incredible trees, cheeks round as teacups, mice, shrews, and voles weave secret paths among the grasses and wildflowers. Goldfinches flash like sparks over the clover, swallows stitch blue air with their wings, and, when the light grows long, owls float out of the wood like pale thoughts wandering in a dream. Eagles and kestrels keep counsel on the high stones, measuring the fields in patient circles as they wait for the stir that could lead them to their next meal.

On the ground, rabbits and hares nibble at fern and clover. Deer step softly at the edge of the glades, and foxes go silent as smoke through the bracken. Bluebells chime faintly when the wind runs its fingers through them, and tall grasses shiver with secrets told only to animals patient enough to kneel and listen.

The beaches of this forgotten landscape that no eye has marveled at for ages are strewn with stones beyond counting. They lie in their millions, spread like a jeweled harvest: black rocks with thin threads of gold, wine-dark cobbles veined with blue and white, and pebbles the color of old cherries. Here are boulders wrapped in moss and vine, and there, shells fixed like stars upon them. Some stones look as if a painter had spattered them with orange and lime, tiny sparks frozen in their grain. Opal shards wink among the sand as though pieces of a moon that had been shattered long ago washed ashore. Some stones show their secret rings of navy-blue hues when the water laps them clean, while others show their freckles, gleaming in the sun-dried sand when splashed with waves rolling along the shore. Glassy-edged, aqua colored stones and pebbles glisten in the light where the tide had rubbed them clear, while veins of green run like streams beneath the surface of others. On this beach, bright quartz stones catch shafts of light, echoing them back into the atmosphere, filling the air with its own sea of rock-reflected lights of glittering colors. Here a rib of purple, there a stretch of pink grains mixed in with tan, brawny-like waves of the sand. Further along the shore, pale lumps of grey, soft as sleeping shoulders lay all along the shore. Many stones appear smooth as river fruit and dimpled as if plucked from trees without stems; others are jagged, newly broken, the glistening embers of their hearts showing, while others still stand half-buried and strange; narrow as knives, round as loaves, split with clean seams as though the earth had tried to open them to see the interior of their granulated anatomies only to find strange strands of grey and white veins and blackened crystalized lines with tiger stripes of orange in them. Gold speckled stones of blue, smooth and sharp, large as a boar’s head, and small as a pearl lay scattered about, shining and glittering in the light as though each carried a memory of the world’s beginning.

Among them lay one stone that was not as it seemed.

It rested half-buried among the beach’s jeweled stones, a shape neither wholly like the others nor wholly unlike them, a soft, rounded form washed in the cool tones of pale slate and storm-lit ivory. At first glance it seemed merely another tide-worn relic, smoothed by centuries of sea and silence. Yet the closer one looked, the more the Stone resisted such simple understanding.

Its surface was adorned with enigmatic markings of intricate, deliberate, and impossibly precise shapes and lines. They curled and darted across the pale ground of the Stones surface, like hieroglyphs of some lost civilization, each stroke dark as ink spilled on parchment. Some marks resembled the jagged outlines of clifflike structures; others hinted at ships with sharp prows; sails furled against imagined winds. A few angled inwards in shapes like the folded wings of small, solemn birds. Others branched downward in the likeness of roots seeking soil, twisting across the Stone’s curve in patterns far too ordered to be chance.

Under the shifting light the markings changed, subtly, mysteriously. A pattern that looked like broken triangles from one angle became a row of tiny houses from another; what seemed chaotic smudging in shadow resolved into crisp, ancient ruins when the sun touched it. It was as though the Stone had been pressed with memories of fragments of structures, coastlines, and symbols from a world now sunken or forgotten. These enigmatic marks appear on the surface of this strange Stone almost as if they had been etched there slowly, layer by layer, mineral added to mineral, until, perhaps over many seasons, they became distinct markings of astonishing complexity. They look as though the sea itself, in age-long wandering, tattooed its memories upon this vessel: the shapes of towers drowned, the whispers of coastlines broken, an older geometry locked within its nature, a script of the world’s memories from a time before men kept records. The dark markings clung to it not as stains or scratches, but as part of it, fused with the mineral like ink in the grain of ancient vellum. Patterns of black charcoal, and deep earth-brown stood in elegant contrast against the pale background, shimmering faintly when the wind shifted or the tide breathed across the shore.

As the shadows of the clouds passed over these forgotten shores, dispersing rays of light sporadically against the surfaces of these marvelous, eroded fossils of forgotten beginnings, there came a subtle and strange stirring so small that even the nearest grains of sand did not notice. The neat, ink-dark sigils across the Stone’s surface began to shift. At first it was no more than the faintest tightening, like the way old leather draws in the cold. But then the lines themselves seemed to fold, bending not inward, but sideways, slipping beneath one another as though retreating into the Stone’s own grain.

Granular structures gathered and wrinkled, tiny ridges of mineral and moss puckering as if pulled by a distant thread. The etched hieroglyphs distorted as they moved: angular shapes stretched thin, runic strokes bending crooked, small towers flattening into long smudges. What had once looked entirely deliberate now twisted into strange, living geometry. A faint slime, salt-touched, greenish, smelling of tidepool stone, welled up between the shifting lines, glistening in the morning light. Near the crown of the Stone the markings parted gradually, opening like old book pages stuck together with time. The separation was delicate, almost reluctant. Moss-dark granules loosened from their resting place, sliding away in thin layers and beneath them appeared the smoothness of something hidden, something not quite stone.

An eye-lid-like shape in the face of the Stone had shifted.

The surface of the Stone was mottled with dark filaments of dried algae and flecks of blue-black grit. A bead of salted moisture clung to its lower edge. Slowly, painfully slowly, the lid began to draw back, scraping softly against the surrounding mineral like a stone hinged door that had not moved in ages. The carved lines seemed to fold and gather themselves, as if being slowly tucked away under some hidden ledge. The patterns near its crown slowly parting, ever so slightly.

From the narrow gap, a single eye opened in the face of the stone.

It was deep and dark, almost glass, with a sheen that caught the world in miniature. The sky curved across its surface; the line of the sea lay inverted in the pupil; each blade of grass in the distance became a thin green flame. It blinked once, the newly exposed lid dragging faint grains of sand downward with it. For a moment, the eye simply stared, wide and unguarded, glistening with the reflection of the spectacular environment of its surrounding world upon which it looked with a gaze of neither fear nor comprehension, but something older, like the awareness one feels upon waking from a long, dreamless sleep.

From its lower flank, where the markings swirled into a dense knot of symbols, a vine began to stir. It had been coiled tight like a dormant fern, pressed so close against the Stone that it had seemed part of the carving itself. The vine began to uncurl, its surface glossy and pale green, glinting with the faint translucence of young leaves.

Just beneath the Stone’s mossy surface, where cracked mineral met photosynthetic tissue, thin translucent veins branched outward from a single central root. They pulsed faintly, like sap being drawn up a stem. Through them, threads of color moved: soft gold, shadowed green, the pale milky white of new growth. These veins clung to the inner matrix of the Stone, as though embedded in its very structure, knitting the mineral and photosynthetic tissue into one inseparable whole.

The vine lengthened, rising from its cradle with slow confidence. Its surface bore a faint pattern, subtle ridges like the lines on a leaf, or the faint imprints of shells washed in tide. Tiny tendrils fringed its underside, brushing the air as though testing the currents around it. At its tip, a cluster of delicate filaments quivered, each one fine enough to catch glimmers of light, trembling with the slight breeze coming off the sea.

The vine turned toward the sun. Not abruptly, not with purpose, but with the gentle inevitability of plants waking at dawn to follow the arc of the rising sun across the sky. The translucent veins brightened as the vine lifted higher, the sunlight catching within them and illuminating their pathways like threads of amber.

The eye observed this movement with stillness and wonder, reflecting in its dark mirror the vine’s pale ascent toward the rising sun among the shimmering, colorful lights of the bright world laid out before it.

And upon this forgotten shore, on an island long silent in its secrets, a Rock had awakened.