I.
Ingvild
The ocean had no horizon.
It was the first thing wrong with it, and also the first thing she’d stopped caring about, somewhere over the long stretch she’d been here.
The water stretched out and out, silver-grey and alive, and where the sky should have begun there was only more sky—a pale, faded continuation of the same shade—so that she drifted in a bowl of soft sameness that should have felt like drowning but instead felt, mostly, like being embraced.
She sat on a rock at the edge of it.
Singing, quietly, because there was no one to hear and she had long since lost the self-consciousness that had once made her careful about her voice.
The song wasn’t anything in particular.
It was the kind of song that assembled itself from whatever was nearby—the rhythm of the water, the colour of the light, a fragment of something she’d once heard that she couldn’t quite place.
It moved around her like something being braided.
She had been here a long time.
She wasn’t sure exactly how long, because time in this place had the quality of thick honey—it moved, technically, but the movement was more a suggestion than a commitment.
She remembered a before.
A room.
Someone who had been worried.
But the memory was soft-edged in the way of things seen through water, and the ocean was here and the singing was here and the rock was warm under her hands, and.
Well.
It was peaceful, mostly.
She heard him before she saw him, which was unusual.
Usually the world just was—static, complete, self-contained.
Things didn’t arrive.
But there was the sound of footsteps on wet stone, unhurried, and then someone sat down on the rock approximately two meters to her left and said:
“That’s a nice song.”
She stopped singing.
She turned.
He looked to be about her age—or at least what she guessed her age to be, give or take—with dark hair in need of a trim and gray eyes fixed on the ocean, showing genuine interest rather than that tense, expectant look that usually came before trouble.
He was dressed for practicality and, oddly enough, had a small notebook tucked in his coat pocket, its corner peeking out.
“Sorry,” he said, apparently noticing she’d stopped.
“I didn’t mean to interrupt.”
“You didn’t,” she said, which was true.
“I was just—” She looked at him more carefully.
“I don’t usually have visitors.”
“I guessed so.” He said it gently.
“Yes.” She looked back at the ocean.
“It’s peaceful.”
“Mm.” He was quiet for a moment.
Then: “Does it feel like a dream to you?”
She considered this.
It was an odd question.
The rock was solid under her hands.
The water smelled real, the cold-salt specific smell of it.
The song had been real enough that she’d felt it in her chest.
“Sometimes,” she said.
“When I try to remember things.
They get—” She made a small gesture with one hand.
“Blurry.”
He nodded slowly, as if she’d just confirmed something he’d been thinking all along.
His gaze stayed on the ocean, and she realized he was looking at it the same way she did—not so much watching it as letting it watch him, a rare kind of attention she’d never seen in anyone else.
“Do you like it?” she asked.
She wasn’t sure why she asked.
It just seemed like the natural next thing.
“The ocean?” He considered.
“I think I’d like it better from a boat.
I always feel like I’m missing something from the shore.”
She almost smiled.
“That’s the point of it, though.
You’re supposed to feel like there’s more.”
“Is that why you keep watching?”
“Partly.” She pulled her knees up slightly, settling.
“And partly because it sounds different depending on what it wants to say.
Today it’s—” She tilted her head, listening.
“Considering something.
Like it can’t decide.”
He stayed silent for a moment.
When she looked over at him, his gaze held a kind of attentiveness unlike what she normally saw—not the guardedness she was used to, nor the subtle distance from those aware of her bloodline and careful around it.
Just… present.
Interested.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Lucian.” He paused.
“What’s yours?”
She opened her mouth.
And found, for a moment, that she wasn’t entirely sure.
It was there—of course it was there, it was hers—but the reaching for it had the same soft-edged quality as reaching for the memory of the room, the worried face, the before.
She frowned at the water.
“Ingvild,” she said, finally.
It came back when she stopped reaching.
“My name is Ingvild.”
“Ingvild,” Lucian said softly, his voice cutting through the quiet room as he carefully adjusted the tea tray on the small wooden table.
“It’s a good name.”
She blinked, a tiny, genuine laugh slipping past her lips before she could stop it.
It was a sound she hadn’t made in a very long time.
“Is it?”
“It is,” Lucian replied, looking over at her with a warm, unassuming smile.
“It sounds solid.
Like something that would hold up perfectly well in bad weather.”
She turned the words over in her head, her gaze drifting from his calm face down to the steaming teacup he had placed near her.
“That is a very strange compliment.”
“I suppose it is,” he chuckled softly, rubbing the back of his neck with a hint of characteristic humility.
“I tend to give strange compliments.
But I mean it.
It’s a name that feels safe.”
Ingvild felt a sudden, gentle warmth bloom in her chest, far different from the cold sickness she had carried for years.
She looked up at him through her lashes, her voice dropping to a soft murmur.
“Then…
I think I like it.”
Lucian stood there, a humble figure amidst the infinite blue, letting the silence stretch until it felt entirely safe.
Finally, the glass-like water beneath him stirred ever so slightly as he turned his gaze back to her.
“Ingvild.
Can I ask you something?”
“You’ve been asking me things already.”
“Fair.” He turned to look at her directly, then, and there was something in it—not urgency, not pressure, but a kind of careful honesty, as though he was about to say something he wanted to get exactly right.
“Does this place—this whole place, the ocean, the rock, the sky that doesn’t end—does it ever feel like too much of the same thing?
Like maybe you’ve been still for long enough?”
See you next chapter.