The gleaming gold Poneglyph lay in the deep underground ruins of Shandora, in a chamber that had lain underground and lost to the jungle for four hundred years, save for the night Kael held the sky overhead.
Its chamber was surrounded by a precipice of a thousand feet in every direction.
They made their way down to see it the following morning.
The rest of the crew stayed on Angel Island, recovering from the night.
Sanji stood at the stove on Pagaya, coaxing them all into eating.
Chopper was patching up the bruises Luffy insisted on refusing.
Usopp was spinning a story of last night’s adventure that had already tripled in size by mid-morning and would become something involving the personal combat of Kael against a god of lightning atop a pillar of pure energy by dinner.
Nami was at her charts, redrawing Skypiea based on the information they collected in the past few days, in a space of her logbook that he knew she had marked off and labeled somewhere, in neat letters.
Robin and Kael made their way to the ruins alone.
They journeyed through the jungle, guided by a path they had heard of thanks to a Shandorian warrior who had come to speak with them the morning after the battle at the Ark—approaching them as they left the pier, with gratitude written openly in his frank manner.
He had informed them of the existence of the Poneglyph in the ruins, and then had allowed them to visit, for everything.
The stone was carved by his ancestors, and it was fine with them to let two strangers from the outside world take a look.
It was a journey they took quietly, largely.
The jungle was alive with birds he had never seen before and insects he couldn’t detect through chakra signatures, which were unfamiliar to him from what he knew at ground level.
But this was a silence he understood after Alabasta.
He had learned how to share a silence with her that could contain meaning even without sound.
And the chamber itself was open to the sky.
Its ceiling had fallen away in antiquity during some sort of natural disaster, allowing the sunlight of the late morning hours to fall upon its interior.
The Poneglyph was standing in its middle, towering above the one in the desert and gleaming with the light that seemed as if its creators had shaped the stone with a specific purpose.
Robin stopped at the entrance of the stone.
She took the time to observe it before stepping inside—studying the inscribed stone for a full minute, giving it the courtesy of recognition before touching its surface.
Then, she entered.
He followed to the wall behind the Poneglyph and touched its stone with his own hand.
The chamber unlocked itself to him.
This was the furthest stone-memory that he had ever accessed.
Its memory stretched further in age from Alabasta than he could comprehend in years, and had been worked upon by people different from all those he knew.
It was carved by a third civilization, using a different technique he knew.
The chamber itself had been built by Shandian artisans at a time when Shandoria was part of a much greater civilization than he had been able to learn about from Robin—ancient kingdom that Robin spent her entire career reconstructing in her notebooks.
Its memory held all the information regarding the Poneglyphs.
Not just their exact locations, but the carver, the day, and most importantly, the relative positions among all the Poneglyphs in the world.
Each of these stones contained fragments of a whole argument—a set of ideas that had been dispersed around the globe in such a manner that no single erasure would allow anyone to destroy the message entirely.
He contemplated this for a long time.
And then, when he finally stepped away from his contemplation, Robin started reading.
Reading the inscription written on the face of the stone, which would later become her report that this place marked nothing but a route toward yet another stone in the new world.
There was no hidden weapon here, no secret knowledge kept locked inside.
Then, she moved around the stone to sit beside him, and he took his hand away from the wall.
“Tell me.”
And he did.
He told her about the appearance of the chamber with the roof on, about the carver—a young woman from the village that had ceased existing.
And he told her about the day the stone had been brought up from underground—transported in separate pieces, then assembled to lie inside the chamber, about the feast the workers had afterwards on Shandoria’s clouds.
He told her about the ceremony sealing the chamber, the high priest performing it and the prayer he had pronounced in a language that he was incapable of transcribing, but able to shape.
She listened to everything he told her.
Then, very carefully, she reached for her notebook and started writing.
She was writing for an hour.
He sat against the wall and watched her.
Her writing produced the noise of scraping of pencil and pen in the silence, while morning light fell upon her, transforming into afternoon light in the process.
Only in this moment did he realize how rarely he ever saw her still.
Twenty years spent running from her pursuers made every movement economical for her.
Watching her write was, for an hour, watching her simply be herself.
And when she put the pencil down after completing her writing, she closed the notebook and placed it onto her knees.
“This is the third one.”
“How so?”
“In a year of normal research, I read perhaps one.
With you, in a season, three.
If you stay with me the rest of your life—”
She paused in her speech.
He waited for her to finish.
“All of them.
We can do it.”
“All the Poneglyphs.
All the sites.
Rio Poneglyph and everything it tells us.
One after another.”
“I think so.”
She looked at him.
The sun that shone from the sky through the open ceiling highlighted her profile.
In this split second she wasn’t the careful researcher from the ranks of Crocodile’s organization or the hunted woman spending decades on the run.
In this split second she looked like a woman who for the first time in her life could see herself finishing her task.
“What shall we do with it all.
Once we read everything?”
“That will depend on what’s inside.” Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
“It will be… unpleasant, at the very least.
The world has been going to great lengths to hide this information for centuries.
Whatever is concealed in the stone is going to be difficult.”
“What can we do with something difficult that the world hides from everyone?”
He had pondered the question many times in the days after the tomb in Alabasta.
“We can share it.
When we gather all the Poneglyphs, we will make our way to their locations.
Then we will share everything.
The world should be the one deciding what to do with it.
Our job is merely to protect the message for long enough that it returns to those who created it.”
She was silent.
“That is going to take a long time.”
“It is.”
“A lot of work needs to be done before then.”
“Will you stay with me for it?”
He turned to look into her eyes.
“You have.”
She pondered his words in silence, holding her closed notebook in her hands.
The muscles of her shoulders relaxed for the first time since their meeting—the feeling that she was letting herself off the hook.
“Then it’s decided.”
Her words sounded the same as those she had once uttered in the tomb.
But this time they didn’t carry the weight of hesitation anymore.
She no longer hesitated with regard to what was coming next—her life.
He reached out and placed his palm over hers.
After a moment, she laid her own hand on top of his.
And they both sat silently in the open chamber beneath the rays of the sun of Skypiea, with a Poneglyph behind them and a long path ahead of them, not speaking a word to each other.
But a little while later, Robin rose.
She gathered her notebook and took him with her, extending her hand to help him stand.
And then they walked back up to the Angel Island in silence, finding Wyper waiting for them in the outskirts of the jungle and nodding at each other.
No one had the courage to ask them about their findings in the ruins.
The road stretching in front of them was long.
And they took it slowly, walking shoulder to shoulder when the path widened.
It took them some time to break the silence again.
It broke softly and easily, when talking about other things.
Sanji had prepared lunch.