POV: Liora
I should have stopped reading after finding the skeleton. Any reasonable person would have closed the diary, left the room, and processed the horror at a safe distance with a locked door.
I was not a reasonable person. I turned back to the earlier pages I had skimmed past, because the woman who wrote these words had known Thalen before the curse, and I needed to see the man through her eyes before I could decide what to do with the monster through mine.
The early entries belonged to a woman still warm and capable of writing in full sentences without the ink pressing through the page.
"I have been thinking about him all day, which is useless, but my hands are idle and my mind will not be. So I will write him down. If I am going to die on this island I will at least leave a record of the man I loved, because the village will not remember him the way I do."
I set the diary down on my knee and stared at the wall for a moment. Then I picked it back up.
"He was the wealthiest man in the village who never acted wealthy. He spent every day trying to give away what fortune kept piling at his feet. He could build a boat, mend a wall, set a bone, and read philosophy in the same afternoon."
I closed my eyes and saw him. Tying knots with more precision than my own. Building a fire without thought. Skills without memory — a man's life reduced to muscle and reflex.
"He helped everyone. He could not walk past a problem without solving it. I think he simply could not bear to see a thing undone when his hands knew how to finish it."
I pressed my thumb against the page, feeling the indent of her pen strokes, the place where her hand had paused before continuing.
"He was educated, but not in the way the elders are. He read everything. He understood that ordinary villagers did not, and he explained things without ever making them feel small for not knowing."
Medicine from leaves. Navigation by stars. She was describing the source of every fragment he carried without knowing where it came from.
"Then I happened. My family had nothing, and Thalen appeared at our door one morning with timber on his shoulder and said he had extra. He had cut it that morning for us, and my father knew it, and neither of them mentioned it."
I put the heel of my hand flat against my sternum and held it there for a moment.
"He fixed the roof. He rebuilt the boat. He brought seed for our garden. He never asked for payment, and my mother said that a man who gives without measure is either a saint or a fool."
Saints and fools. The village had strong opinions about which one Thalen was, and none of them had met him.
"I decided for her. He was a man whose hands needed work, and I fell in love with what his face did when the work was finished."
I knew that stillness. I had seen it on the roof of the castle, Thalen sitting there, tentacles loose, watching the stars with the quiet of a man who had run out of tasks.
"He made a gift for me but did not show me. He said it was not finished, that his hands kept changing the design because nothing he crafted was good enough. I told him I would love it regardless. He said that was precisely the problem — he wanted me to love it because it was right, not because I was kind."
The medallion was against my collarbone. He had made it for her, and she never saw it. She never knew it existed.
"I was sure he would come for me. When they put me in the boat I looked back at the shore and I thought — he will come. He will build a raft or swim the currents or tear the village apart with his bare hands, because that is who he is. He does not leave things undone."
She had waited for him, and he had come. The curse drove him to her door night after night. When she finally saw his face through the darkness, she could not make herself cross toward it.
The handwriting contracted as the pages accumulated, the letters pressed harder into the parchment, the warmth bleeding out of every stroke.
"I saw its face in the light of the main hall. The bones are his, but everything else is gone."
Further on, the words had shrunk to almost nothing.
"I cannot look at it. I know the face beneath the darkness is his, but I cannot... Every time it comes to my door I press my hands over my ears because the breathing sounds almost human and if I listen long enough I will hear his voice in it."
She had seen Thalen inside the creature and turned away anyway. She chose the portrait on the wall over the monster in the corridor, and it killed her.
I understood her and I hated that.
The final entry was three lines. The ink had dried unevenly, as though her hand had stopped mid-stroke more than once.
"I draw his face at night. He does not answer, but the dark gets smaller when I draw."
She drew his face to keep the man alive. She barricaded her door to keep the monster out. Neither effort saved her, because they were the same person, and you cannot lock half of someone out without losing the whole.
The medallion was carrying no warmth of its own, only the weight of a man's devotion and a woman's faith and decades of grief that had traveled from his hands to a shaman's keeping to my grandmother's and to me.
I stood, and my legs held, which was more than I had expected. I needed to get off this island before my bones joined hers in a tower.
She had known him before the curse, he had loved her and he had still killed her. I had no advantage over her. I had no reason to believe the outcome would be different, and I had no intention of waiting in a locked room to find out.
I walked out of the room and closed the door on the portraits, the bones, and the love story that ended in a corner with no one left to mourn it.
I took the diary to show him. He needed to see what she wrote. He needed to understand exactly what he had done.