Ahus

Albin took a shuddering breath. “I don’t want to be alone.”

Eira realized this at 8:47 PM, when she went to bring him a piece of the dark rye bread she had baked with rowan berries and a pinch of her own dried heather. His bed was made. His glass floats were arranged in a perfect spiral on the floor. A note, written in wobbly capitals, said: Gone to see the stones before they go away.

And the bell in the stone church, for the first time in forty years, rang once. Albin took a shuddering breath

“I know.”

Albin was not in his cottage.

“Your father is wise. But wisdom and possibility are different things.” Eira knelt, her knees cracking. “Ahus does not force anyone to stay. The gate has no lock. But if you leave during the nameless tide, you will not remember how to come back.”

He took it.

People who found Ahus by accident—lost hikers, fog-drifted sailors, children chasing lost kites—never found it again. They would later speak of a place where the air tasted of cold rosemary and old honey, where every window faced the water, and where an old woman named Eira always left a kettle on the stove.