An island can be the most isolated place in the world. It can develop civilizations of its own, entire mythologies and histories, moralities and ethicalities so strange yet, in accordance to the island’s own nature, appropriate. All on a piece of land too large not to grow but too small to look beyond the uncaring endless liquid sky it finds itself in the middle of. For the islanders, this home is all any of them will ever know. A broken piece of coloured glass washed by waves is all that remains of it now. Such a small thing, but so detailed. It can only be guessed as to what it was really like from the rich imagery still clinging to it.

“But we are not here to guess,” said the old voice from behind the waterfall of blue light which streaked the darkness. “Divinations, reconstructions, simulations, all it takes. We must learn the truth of what happened. I am not letting even the thinnest thread of history be forgotten ever again. There is too much to know and see, too much to remember and to feel...”

---

The rain stung, its pelting needles drilling holes inside her twisted body, making her bleed sand and oil. She was forced to hold the urn in front of her against the coming torrent. The stony shore ended at the swaying pier, a long platform of wood and crystal bound by metal. With her last barefoot steps she had made it, just as the last ship was leaving. She shouted something that was drowned by the wind and the falling needles of cold. No one answered, no one came out to see her. They were all dead, she thought. But the ship was untied and the waves were starting to carry it away. She gathered what breath she had left, and screamed against the wind and gloom until her throat raked. “I have the Urn!”. A man came into view at a window.

“Keeper of the Herrlodule!” he said with startled surprise. “We thought you were dead.”

“Take the Urn,” she begged as the last of her steps were failing her. “Leave me. Take it to the lighthouse, it will be safe.”

“Come to the ledge then, quick! The storm is rising.”

As she creeped closer, she saw the man better now. The long hair and beard of algae like white sand, the sunken eyes of pearls from the deep, and the lavish clothing marked him as the Old Portage of Hemall Hofnad. She waited at the edge until the swaying calmed down just enough, leaving the old man with his hands stretched out to receive the artefact. She reached out with the carved bronze vessel across the water, his hands steady and reliable, as it were hers that faltered. Soft and weak like rotten wood they dropped the urn. Her heart shrieked out, her mind raged, her voice cried out despairingly against the tumult of the storm, her words deaf even to her. Before it hit the water, she caught just a glimpse of the Old Portage’s shining beady eyes nestled among the purple dark circles around them, in the shadows. She saw doubt. The one thing she was relying on not to fail, for his expression was not a reaction to this epic sin. Fear or surprise or maybe even disappointment might have been appropriate to frame the wrinkled portrait of his visage, but this was doubt that had lingered since she had decided to give him the Urn. They had all felt it, and shied away from his grasp. The old fool had no fault in it. It was her failure that had let this inevitability occur. When the Urn struck the water, the sea started boiling. So focused on the result, by the time she looked up again, the ship was being carried away by a large wave, being struck against every single cliff at shore, shattered like an empty shell. She thought she glimpsed one last view of the old man’s eyes before the conscious waves erased every trace of the ship. And in the distance, lightning struck the crooked lighthouse on its lonely islet. They were all cursed now.

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But the thunder didn’t come.

“I’m sorry, Laquo,” said a voice she thought she would never hear again.

Horrified again, she turned and saw the moving pile of bones and rotting flesh that had once been her friend. Even though her pure body of glass had turned to that writhing meat and naked bone, her royal outfit of purple and green robes still clung to the plague-ridden thing. They were all sodden now, just like the flesh that had sloughed off the skeleton. The rain filled her eye sockets with the tears she was unable to weep.

“What have you done to her?” she said through pangs of pain from the lashing rain in what was now a strange silence.

“What I will now do to you.” Her mouth moved as easily as if she had lips, her eye sockets frowning in sorrow. Even though it was her friend’s voice that Laquo could hear, she could tell it was not her that spoke; it was him, the Accursed who had brought this plight on her people, and even on himself. “I can’t stop... I don’t want to. But they feel you must pay, all those souls, all those memories... Time and time–”

The thunder came at last, deafening her to the skeleton’s words and knocking her down. The pier tilted, and the Accursed came at her. She scurried backwards and sprang to her feet, but his claws had already torn her chest open. Yet it didn’t matter, for what she felt could not have even been in the same dream with what she saw. Like a ghost, a figure in the fog, a slender mountain far away, she could see the tower, once fallen, now floating. Pieces of it were scattered across the sky where it had once been, filled with holes that had once been filled, like a broken thing trapped in suspended time. Behind her attacker, she saw the great tower which marked the passing of the ages, and like time itself, it too stopped.

---

The hooded people with their thick flowing robes of sky blue were divining the piece of glass, raising their arms in motions of power and will. But they sank again, shoulders stooped. “Our divinations have failed” they said in mournful tones. “This glass, it is cursed.”

“I have no time for your failures,” said the old voice of the ancient creature. “Out. Call in the next ones.”

“How did you sleep?” asked the caretaker once the diviners were gone.

“Unintentionally,” replied the same wheezing voice. “I dreamed it again. I don’t even remember closing my eyes, but I still can see the dulled sky, the looming lighthouse, that tower... Why are these memories haunting me when I can’t even remember my own life? I don’t know what I am and who, nor you. I look at you and don’t remember what I am seeing right now. All I see that’s not in my memories is black and blue.”

“Is that all you see?”

“Sometimes I see a buried garden, other times a cave as large and beautiful as the world must be, sad faces, a bulky figure determined beyond death, but then I forget them again. But this... the woman, the urn, I never forget it.”

“Why one moment in such a sprawling selection?”

“It must mean something, doesn’t it? It must be important.”

“No. It is as meaningless as the pattern of crackling flames. You were born at sea, that is why you see that one instead of any other.”

“How do you know where I was born?”

“Of course I know.”

“Who are you?”

“A friend. Always a friend...”