The island was not named anywhere on any map Kael Ashwood could find, and he had tried.
He’d drawn his own charts of the island, using bark and driftwood and charcoal from the fishing vessel wrecked in the rocks many years before his own time.
There were drawings of the bay, and the cliff lines, and the stream flowing down from the mountains.
What he did not know—beyond the bay, beyond the cliff line, whether or not the island appeared in any other records and what this meant—he could only conclude from that absence.
He had been on the island for months.
During those months he’d fallen into the rhythm of it.
He woke early because the gulls woke, and the gulls woke because the tide shifted, in a pattern that had little to do with the motions of the moon.
He would swim in the cold waters of morning, until he knew again who he was in his body.
He ate from the bounty of the island—a fruit he’d never found on any other tree, some kind of mussel that had to be pulled off the bottom rocks during low tide, and the occasional fish that wandered in from the deeper waters.
In the afternoons he meditated, memorizing the silhouette of the mountains.
And in those months he had learned the natural energy of this land.
That was what mattered.
Sage Mode was inherited, and earned through labor—it was something he’d brought from his old life through the storm—but the natural energy of this place was different.
It was older, thicker.
It flowed through the earth like blood, and with a power Sage Mode had no hope of understanding; like rain against a mountain compared to the chakra that sang through his veins.
The first time he had tried to grasp it—second morning on the island, meditating cross-legged in the sand—he had almost been overwhelmed.
He’d felt the power rising underneath him, surrounding him in a circle around him as he tried to swim through the natural energy.
Only his training had saved him from that experience.
Afterwards, he spent all of that day and most others after trying to learn how to take it in slowly.
He was adept at it now.
Sage Mode had long ceased to surprise him; he could enter it whenever he chose without flinching and hold it all day without effort, letting the marks over his eyes settle down on him like a second skin.
What that granted him, in this place, was a much wider range of sense than he’d known in his old life.
He could perceive a Sea King sleeping three miles away.
He could perceive weather forming, higher in the atmosphere than any human eye could ever discern.
He could sense the island itself as a living thing—one not alive in the way a tree is, but a creature, patient and old and aware.
Sea Kings started arriving in his third week.
The first time had nearly cost him his life through shock.
He was wading in the shallow waters, in the late afternoon, studying a piece of stone that he’d found in the mountains.
At the periphery of his vision the water turned black in a way it shouldn’t have, and he raised his head to see that the bay was no longer bay at all.
It was the mouth of something else altogether, and there, swimming towards him, the greatest living thing he had ever seen.
But somehow he survived, and the Sea King stopped twenty feet away, looking at him with an eye larger than the boat he’d once lived in, and he understood the situation through his Sage Mode without needing to.
There was no Devil Fruit in him, and no malice; the creature was ancient, and he’d perceived strange chakra in the waters that were his home, and he wanted to know what it was.
Slowly, he reached out with his own chakra.
He touched the consciousness of the great Sea King.
The Sea King replied—without words, because Sea Kings have no words.
With weight, like the creature itself was a great question being asked.
He answered as best he could.
I am a stranger, here.
I am not your enemy.
After a time, the Sea King subsumed again into the depths, with the dignity of one who knows he has nothing further to say, and will wait for another opportunity.
Kael sat in the wet sand, laughing with tears of relief.
Three Sea Kings came to the island during the following weeks, and Kael got to know them.
He knew the difference between them—they were as individual in their minds as humans are, and he recognized the first one (she, because one thinks of mountains in such a way).
The second was a large one, with a long body and much movement; and the third one was younger, with greater curiosity.
Sometimes they would come just to watch him, and sit for a while in silence.
He would sit beside them, and they would study him with their minds, teaching him the very basics of the language that did not use words.
Kael had been in this new world for several months when he had a morning that changed everything.
As always he woke before the gulls, as the dawn approached.
This time, however, he did not wake for the reason of shifting tides, but rather because his Sage Mode had picked something from the horizon, something that could not possibly be weather or a Sea King.
He climbed from the sandy ground of his makeshift shelter, listening carefully to the whispers in his mind.
There was—very far out—humming of human chakra.
Three, four, five…they were crowded together, traveling rapidly toward the island, a ship moving swiftly under sail.
He climbed the cliff path, even before the sun broke over the horizon.
At the top of the cliff there was a view of the whole bay.
He could see, with eyes and Sage Mode both—the dark waters of the channel, the lighter colors of the bay itself, and the gulls beginning their ascent.
Very far out, in a position where the eye cannot see anything so well as his chakra can perceive—there was a ship.
He sat on the edge of the cliff, reaching with his Sage Mode.
The ship was constructed in the normal fashion—in human design, built by human hands, under sails and in a hull.
Yet everything about it was otherworldly.
It pulsed with chakra like a forest fire made by hands that had never known that forest fires should be small and controlled.
It was powerful; it was bright.
Most of all, it radiated a center of gravity unlike anything he’d ever encountered in this world—or the other.
During those first months, he had not known what he had waited for.
He’d been sure that he had waited, though, and the island had proved it.
The Log Pose readings had demonstrated quite clearly that there was something drawing the island to itself, pulling two ships in opposite directions away from it after having passed each other in distant seas.
He had understood the place was special, in a way that meant things would meet there that needed to meet.
Sage Mode had shown him that he was waiting for this.
Without moving from his perch on the cliff, he studied the approach of the ship, grateful in his own way to whatever powers had placed him in this place, allowing him solitude on its shore to learn the skills necessary to wait for this moment.
The first thing he could recognize was the figurehead.
It was a ram, carved lovingly by a craftsman in love with the ship.
The second was the flag.
Black, with a skull on it and a straw hat over the skull, as if it had been painted honestly, rather than professionally.
The third was the boy standing on the figurehead’s head, his arms behind his back and his legs spread wide over the ram’s neck.
He was wearing a straw hat, covering his eyes and shading his face from the sun.
He was singing, with an open mouth that spoke more of contentment than pride in his voice.
Kael smiled, amazed at how easily it occurred.
He climbed from the cliff, to go down and meet them.