POV: Liora
I woke to darkness and the taste of blood in my mouth, and the first thing I did was scream. The sound hit the stone and came back wrong, too close, too tight, and my hands shot out and found rock on every side, cold and wet and pressing in.
I could not sit up without my head meeting the ceiling, could not stretch my arms without my fingers scraping the wall.
My breath came fast and shallow, each one shorter than the last, and the air was thick with rot and a sweetness I did not want to name.
The fall had opened a gash across my ribs where the rock shelf caught me, and the sharp ground had torn lines along both arms. Every movement sent the cuts singing.
Then I saw light, thin and grey, filtering from above the boulder sealing the cave mouth. The walls pulled back where the cave widened, and I crawled toward it, shaking, until I could stand.
On the far side, high up where the wall curved toward the ceiling, there was an opening roughly my size, showing what looked to be sky. But the rock beneath was slick and every handhold crumbled or slipped.
I screamed for the fishermen, for anyone, and the only answer was my own echo bouncing off rock.
The ritual dress clung to me, soaked with blood and sea water, and every movement sent fresh heat through the wounds.
A click in the dark, and a creature appeared at the edge of the light. I had never seen anything close to it — round-bodied and wide-eyed, almost sweet until it opened its mouth and showed me rows of needle teeth.
I grabbed a stone from the ground, sharp-edged and heavy enough to crack bone, and the creature circled closer, hackles raised.
"Drop the stone." A man's voice, low and rough, coming from beyond the wall to my left. "Press yourself against the wall. Now."
I did not trust the voice, but the creature was lunging. My back hit a rock, and the creature retreated into a crack in the wall.
I turned toward the voice and found a narrow gap in the rock, just wide enough for a hand. I pressed my face to it, and the other side was dark at first.
Then footsteps, unhurried, and he appeared from a deeper shadow. He crouched to the gap, his face filling the space — sun-darkened skin, a scar across one cheekbone, a jaw sharp enough to cut the dim light into angles.
Even filthy and half-feral, his face was the kind that made you forget what you had been about to say. I held my breath, and it had nothing to do with fear.
"What is your name?" he asked, quieter now, rough at the edges.
"Liora," I said, and the sound of my own name felt too soft for all this stone. "Who are you?"
He said nothing, his eyes steady and unblinking. The gaze of someone who had not seen another face in a long time.
"Are you a prisoner too?" I pressed, already thinking about the opening high in the wall. "There is a gap above me, but I cannot reach it. Do you have rope?"
Nothing. "Talk to me," I said, and the words climbed before I could stop them. "I am trapped on an island, and you are the only person here. Why will you not answer me?"
His expression did not change. "Fine," I muttered, pulling back from the gap. "I will find a way out myself."
I paced the cell, muttering because silence was worse. "A man who asks my name but will not give his, a creature with too many teeth, and a way out I cannot reach. Think."
But my body had nothing left. My knees folded, and I curled against the cave wall, and the dark took me before I could fight it.
The dream pulled me under — a soft pressure curling around my ankles in black water, pulling me down and letting me surface and pulling again, almost gentle, as though whatever held me was trying not to break me.
I woke with my heart hammering and the wound throbbing worse, the edges hot and swollen. I needed to tend to it before the fever set in.
I went to the gap because he was the only help I had, and hating that did not change it. He was not there at first, and then I heard him moving, those same unhurried steps.
His face appeared from a different angle, the light catching a second scar I had not noticed, running beneath his ear.
"Have you been watching me this whole time?" I asked. His stillness told me the answer before he did not give it.
A hand reached through the opening with dark wet leaves in his palm. "Put this on the wounds," he said. "It will stop the bleeding and keep the rot out."
"Where did you get those?" I asked, because leaves did not grow in caves, and if he had access to the outside then everything changed.
"The wounds will not wait," he said. "Neither will the fever if you let them turn."
"Answer me. Where did you get them?" I kept my eyes on his through the gap. "Is there a way out on your side?"
A flinch, brief and shuttered, and then his face went still again.
I took the leaves because I needed to be alive to reach that opening. I retreated to the far wall and lowered the dress from my shoulder.
"Your skin holds light well." His voice came through the gap, quiet and certain, the way someone might describe a stretch of coastline or the color of deep water without hunger or shame. Just observation.
Every muscle in my body locked at once. I could feel his gaze on my bare back, steady and unhurried, and did not need to ask if he was watching.
I pulled the dress up and walked to the gap. His face was right there, dark eyes holding mine without apology.
"You cannot do that," I said. "You do not get to watch me without my permission."
"I watch birds," he said, and his tone carried no defensiveness, only confusion. "Fish, the sky. Why can I not watch you?"
"You said birds, fish, sky," I said slowly, because the wrongness of that list was louder than anything else in this cave. "How do you see any of those things if you are a prisoner?"
His mouth closed with the silence that was so deliberate it burned.
"You will not tell me your name," I said, and my hands were shaking. "You will not tell me where the leaves come from, or how you see the sky. What exactly will you tell me?"
He had no answer for that either. And I was done asking.
I grabbed the flat stone and shoved it into the gap hard enough that the crack echoed off every wall, then put my back against it and closed my eyes.
When I looked down I noticed the medallion had tangled with another necklace — maiden beads on a leather cord, the kind worn by girls in my village before they were promised.
The kind a girl would have been wearing when they brought her here, and my stomach turned to ice.
I stayed where I was, back against it, and spoke to myself loud enough for him to hear through the rock. "How many girls have they sent to this cave?"
He did not answer, and the silence stretched until I heard a heavy weight dragging itself away, moving through a space that sounded much larger than any cell.