The ruins were located inland and took about two hours’ walk from the campsite.
Kael had visited them regularly over the course of most of his stay on the island.
They weren’t big.
The ruins fit in a clearing of perhaps eighty feet in diameter, and although what could be observed from the outside was only three walls, half-broken pillars, and a flat piece of rock, which might have been either an altar or a table, or possibly neither, they were weathered to such an extent that you could walk straight through and never know there had been any building here.
You had to know to look, and even if you knew to look for it, you had to know how.
Kael had known from the start that there was something here that he’d be interested in.
There was a resonance in the stone that Sage Mode registered as ancient but in no way matching with any other place on the island.
The island had endured throughout the history, as much as the ocean itself, but these walls were too old for that but too recent to be considered as prehistorical.
Whatever had been built on top of these walls had been repeatedly rebuilt, and destroyed, and lost memory in the ages of navigation.
On the fourth day since arrival, Kael went to visit the ruins.
This time he was accompanied by the Straw Hats, but he left them shortly after and went there alone.
It was one of the rare mornings he had left for himself.
While Nami busily drew charts in solitude, and Luffy explored the beach area, Zoro continued to sleep like he hadn’t done in days, Kael walked in the direction of the ruins, letting his Sage Mode to work on the lowest possible level – enough to detect the movement of the deer, birds nesting by the river, and general activity of the forest creatures.
At some point on the way, he felt her coming.
Not actually coming – he couldn’t sense her directly since her chakra was too carefully suppressed, and she moved very silently.
But there was something else in the field he couldn’t ignore and which clearly belonged to her.
He noted it, and continued to walk.
He didn’t hasten, nor he did anything to show that he’d noticed her presence.
Once he arrived to the ruins, Kael sat in front of the flat rock and put his hand on one of the walls, closing his eyes and letting Sage Mode scan the stone in the same way as if he was touching it.
One hour was required.
During one hour, Kael read the stone of the ruins.
He felt the hands, three hands of three different workers in a technique, unknown for him, that had used for cutting them.
Then he read the room where these stones stood once.
He detected the presence of a ceiling there and a window in the eastern wall of it, selected for its position during particular sunrise.
He read the people who had used this room.
Although he couldn’t recognize the language of theirs, he still got a feeling of the conversations, choices, sorrow, and grief, knowing that something in their world was ending soon.
By the time he opened his eyes, Kael already knew what he had been thinking of the first time he had read this stone – whatever had been built on these walls, there were something more extensive than this building, and these bigger things had been systematically eradicated.
A woman, whose presence had been known to him, sat on the opposite side of the wall.
She hadn’t been there a moment ago – well, to be honest, she had but didn’t allow Kael to notice her because she hadn’t revealed herself yet.
Now she had stopped doing so and looked at him openly.
She was a tall, well-built woman in a long coat, with dark hair and soft blue eyes, older than her chakra suggested – late twenties, probably.
A book was lying in her lap, but she hadn’t been reading it.
Instead, she watched him.
Kael nodded towards her, showing that he recognized her presence without having to be introduced formally.
She nodded back.
“You’ve read the stone.”
Her tone was low, calm, and completely non-alarmist.
She had been observing him for the past hour – sitting perfectly still against the wall – but still didn’t seem bored.
“Got it.”
“Not the inscription.”
“There is no inscription on this wall.”
“No, it isn’t.
But you touched a wall with no inscriptions, and you didn’t care to examine the stones on the floor which have some.”
“Yes, there were no inscriptions.
Then what have I been reading.”
It wasn’t hard to answer.
He gave the best answer he could.
“What the stone remembers.”
Silence came, but she didn’t move, didn’t change expression – she seemed to wait, resting on the wall and leaning her arms with folded fingers in her closed book.
Her chakra, previously silent, changed in a particular way Kael recognized – as if she held a breath.
“What does it remember.”
“The room it stood in.
The people who used the room.
Their sorrow.”
“Whose sorrow.”
“People’s.
They had known that it was ending.
They had known that their world would be erased.”
She remained silent.
He waited patiently, listening the wind blowing through the clearing and brushing leaves over the ruined stone that had been standing here for centuries.
Birds flew overheard, calling each other twice, and disappeared from hearing.
“Have you ever read a Poneglyph?”
“Not yet.”
“Why not.”
“I haven’t found one of them, and Poneglyphs were never in the places I visited.”
“Where have you been.”
Kael smiled at the question.
She had already been wondering for some time, and this time, without even a slightest hint of being forced to answer, he answered it.
“Somewhere else.”
She seemed to accept it, noting to herself what it meant to be returned to another time.
Whoever she was, it seemed, she collected pieces bit by bit and didn’t force the ones that didn’t want to fall in place.
“If you find one.” She kept her gaze locked with his one.
“If you touch the wall next to it, like you’ve just touched this wall, what will the stone remember?
The inscription, hands that carved it, and the room it was in?”
“You’re right.”
“All of it.”
She fell into silence once again, and Kael knew that he would never forget the question she asked.
For her, this was a question of her whole life.
She had asked it without even a smallest doubt that the answer would be given, and Kael, for once, had given it in two syllables.
Its consequences still had not arrived fully.
“I have spent twenty years reading Poneglyphs,” she said in the peculiarly distant tone, as if the words were coming from a place very far away.
“I have read each of them.
I have copied and transported all of them.
I have learned what was written on each stone, and despite the fact that there have always been more Poneglyphs to learn, there had always been an impression – an impression I never could test until today – that there was something in addition to what was written.”
“You’re the first one I’ve met that could read whatever lies next to the words.”
“I know.”
“How do you know.”
“I have watched you for the past hour.
Your caution comes from a very old era.”
She smiled in silence for a moment, understanding the feeling of being recognized for her solitude.
The tolling of the bell came from below.
It was Sanji’s noonbell – an iron pot hanging on a hook in the kitchen, with the three strong sounds whenever the meal was prepared.
The noise passed through the forest easily and loudly.
She rose.
He did it along with her.
“You should go,” she said.
“You should come down.”
“Not now.”
“You’ll come eventually.”
Kael agreed silently.
He didn’t try to make her change her mind.
She walked away, leaving without turning a glance at him, and her chakra immediately turned back to the previous cautious mode.
By the time he arrived to the edge of the clearing, she had disappeared from his sense.
He went back to the camp.
He didn’t tell the others what had happened in the ruins.
Sitting between Usopp and Luffy, eating rice from Sanji’s hands, he listened to Nami arguing with Usopp about the technical possibility of some of his stories to occur, and let his Sage Mode run quietly at the background.
Eating, he tried to imagine what a woman who spent twenty years learning something that no one else could ever learn had thought in all that time.
How many Poneglyphs had she read so far?
Had she thought about what was next to the text of the stones?
Could anyone except him know the answer?
She had probably known it from the very beginning.
And now he saw her.
Sitting perfectly still and looking at a man she didn’t know reading something that she hadn’t known that existed.
He saw her smile, and he knew that he would see her again.
He didn’t speak, eating quietly and listening to the talk in the group.