The fire is quieter tonight.
Not smaller.
Just… no longer alone.
There are sounds now.
Faint.
Uncertain.
Something living, somewhere beyond the stone.
I have been thinking about a book.
Not one of the many we kept.
Not one of the stories passed from voice to voice.
This one was written.
I first read it when I was eight.
I did not understand most of it.
The words were too careful.
Too precise in ways I had not yet learned to follow.
But there were drawings.
One of them stayed.
A curve of bone—
long, arching, placed between stone that did not seem to belong to anything living.
I remember tracing it with my finger.
Not knowing what it was.
Only that it felt… important.
It was not kept separately.
Not hidden.
Just another book among many,
resting in a place where all stories were treated the same.
Collected.
Preserved.
Retold.
That is what we do.
In my family, stories are remembered well.
We gather them.
Shape them.
Pass them on.
They are told clearly.
Carefully.
But they are not ours.
I did not think much of it then.
Not until I was older.
Not until I began to notice the difference.
The others wrote as they spoke.
Measured.
Consistent.
The same voice, carried through different hands.
But this one—
felt like someone trying to hold something in place
before it changed.
There was detail where there did not need to be.
Silence where explanation might have been easier.
I remember asking about it once.
I was told the name,
and little else.
An ancestor.
One who did not follow the same path.
“Strange,” my uncle had said.
Not unkindly.
Just… certain.
I think I understood that word before I understood the book.
Our home was quiet.
Not empty.
Just… filled with things that did not need to be spoken aloud.
Shelves lined with pages that carried other people’s worlds.
Windows that opened to the sea.
The smell of salt that never quite left the air.
I was meant to stay there.
To listen.
To remember.
To become another voice in the chain.
But I asked too many questions.
Not about the stories themselves.
But about what was missing from them.
I wanted to know what happened
before the telling.
No one stopped me when I left.
By then, I think they understood—
I was not going to become what they had prepared me to be.
Or perhaps they had always known.
I told myself I wanted something simple.
A story that was mine.
Something I had seen,
before it was shaped by distance.
I did not think of that book again.
Not for a long time.
Until now.
The Rib stands where I remember it.
Or close enough that the difference no longer matters.
The curve is the same.
The way it rests against the stone—
as though it had not quite made it through—
is the same.
I know this place.
Not from memory.
But from something that was left behind for me to find.
For the first time—
I feel as though I am standing
inside a page I once read.
I wonder if this is what they felt.
Those who walked before me.
If they also carried something forward
without knowing who would one day recognize it.
I thought I wanted a story that was mine.
Something untouched.
Something original.
But standing here—
I am not certain that is how stories work.
Perhaps they are not meant to belong.
Perhaps they are only meant to be continued.
The fire is still burning.
The stone does not answer it.
But the world beyond it… does.
Faintly.
We will leave this place in the morning.
There are trees ahead.
And something waiting beyond them.
I will keep writing.
Not because I understand any of this.
But because I have begun to see
that understanding may not be the point.
My name is
Artemisia Reine DeLuna.
And this—
is the first story I can say
I have truly stepped into.
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