I am Ryn.
Just Ryn.
At least for tonight.
Tomorrow will be different.
Tonight is my final night on this island.
According to Miss DeLuna, we have been here for one month.
Only one month?
That thought genuinely startled me.
It feels much longer.
Days stopped feeling important here.
There were no schedules.
No cargo manifests.
No emergency negotiations.
No meetings waiting to devour the morning.
At first I thought time itself behaved strangely on this island.
Now I suspect the problem was my own mind.
I remember one child here casually telling me that time is relative.
At the time I assumed he was simply another terrifying miniature scholar.
Now I think he may have been correct.
I never asked Miss DeLuna why she decided to leave again.
Even until now.
And honestly…
I do not think I will ask.
Strangely, she seems more excited to depart than I am.
Meanwhile I find myself reluctant.
Which is absurd.
When I first arrived here I was one stressful afternoon away from spiritual collapse.
But now…
After thinking about it carefully…
A surprising amount happened here.
Being terrified by Master Root.
Experiencing emotional damage from discovering daily necessities are free.
Which, unfortunately, now makes the concept of paying for basic goods feel slightly strange.
That realization alone should probably concern me deeply as a merchant heir.
Accompanying Miss DeLuna while she read stories beside the lake to the Undines.
The cursed papers.
The increasingly specific hallucinations involving the Spoon-Headed Menace.
Even those somehow feel nostalgic now.
Then there were Lady Deluna’s stories.
Cold coffee abandoned because everyone became distracted listening to strange family conversations.
The warmth of this household still feels unfamiliar to me somehow.
Not loud.
Not dramatic.
Just…
present.
And Miss DeLuna refusing to go near the ocean because she still hates the color blue.
Honestly, that part still makes me laugh.
The smell of old books.
Miss DeLuna’s horrifying bedroom.
Which, for the record, became even worse after I organized it.
Apparently her system only functions through advanced chaos.
Eventually she politely asked me not to help anymore because she could no longer find anything.
I genuinely believed I was improving the situation.
I was not.
Earlier tonight, I finally admitted something honestly to her.
I told her I felt strangely heavy about leaving this island.
Miss DeLuna attempted to comfort me the only way she apparently knows how.
By reading me a random story from a random page of a random book while we sat in her room.
I did not fully understand it.
But somehow it hurt emotionally in a way I cannot explain.
So I copied it into this journal.
The title was:
Tunnel, Goldfish and Peony
---
There was once an old man, digging a tunnel beneath the earth.
An oil lamp hung behind his back, swaying gently with every strike.
Its light stretched forward, but never reached the darkness ahead.
Instead, it cast his shadow long across the wall—
and with every swing of his worn, damaged pickaxe,
he struck not only the stone… but his own shadow.
He kept digging.
And digging.
Before his hands grew too weak to continue,
he told his son only this:
“Keep digging. North.”
The son grew old enough.
He took the same broken pickaxe,
and another tool, already cracked from years of use.
He stepped into the tunnel his father left behind.
An oil lamp was lit…
but he did not carry it with him.
He hung it on the wall, just as his father once did—
and left it there.
Behind him, the path remained lit.
Ahead of him, there was only darkness.
Still, he dug.
Again and again,
his strikes echoing through the hollow earth,
his shadow dancing on the walls behind him—
always just out of reach,
yet always there.
And when his time came,
he told his son the same words:
“Keep digging. North.”
Generations passed.
Each son entered the tunnel.
Each one carried the same worn tools.
Each one hung an oil lamp behind them—
never to take it back.
The deeper they went,
the brighter the past became,
and the darker the path ahead.
The lamps they left behind remained—
a quiet proof that someone had been there before,
that the path was not born from emptiness,
but from countless unseen hands.
And still…
they dug.
Until one day—
far above the earth,
where a desert once stretched endlessly beneath the sun,
something changed.
The dry land softened.
From beneath, water found its way upward,
threading through the hidden veins carved by forgotten hands.
The desert began to bloom.
A vast field of peonies spread across the land,
soft and endless, moving like waves under the wind.
In a line across that field,
strange wells stood—
perfectly aligned, reaching down into the unseen depths below.
And beside them,
red flowers grew quietly
Lycoris, blooming where no one remained to see them.
Then, a small goldfish appeared.
It swam gently through the shallow water that now covered the land,
its body catching the light as it moved—
unaware of the tunnels beneath,
unaware of the hands that made this world possible.
It kept swimming.
Through the field of flowers.
Past the silent wells.
Across a land that was once empty.
Swimming—
and swimming—
as if it had always been this way.
---
I still do not understand it.
But somehow it feels important.
Or sad.
Possibly both.
Tomorrow we leave.
Tomorrow I return to the mainland.
Tomorrow responsibilities return.
Negotiations.
Trade routes.
Politics.
Expectations.
The name Aeryn Valeria Roderick.
And strangely…
I think I am afraid.
Because here, for a little while…
I was allowed to simply be Ryn.
Just Ryn.
Tomorrow I will become Aeryn Valeria Roderick again.
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