Chapter Text
What is it like to gaze into the darkest abyss, to see your worst terror given flesh, and know you have no choice but to follow through? And is there truly no choice? Or have your own Oaths, your own stubborn principles, already burned every bridge behind you and left only the path you dread most?
♥
The Highlands of Scotland are not known for gentle weather or forgiving skies. Yet that July evening the North Sea lay gilded and serene, as though the world itself had decided to dress in its finest for the occasion.
An immense white superyacht – half palace, half fortress – carved a slow, deliberate wake northward toward Caithness. Aboard her, the sharpest minds in neuroscience mingled with the deepest pockets in philanthropy – the sort who sign cheques with at least six zeroes before the decimal. The long weekend of symposiums and fundraising galas had begun in triumphant style: a leisurely voyage from Inverness to the Castle of Mey.
Warm dusk. Lively music drifting across the decks. Laughter bright as champagne bubbles.
Lysandra Roselyn Whiting leaned against the polished rail of the lowest passenger deck, phone in hand, waiting for a single bar of signal to resurrect itself. She had savoured every luxury the ship offered that day – except, maddeningly, reliable connection.
At last the call went through.
“Hello? Mama 1 ?”
“Lizzie, mein Schatzi 2 !” Relief flooded her mother’s voice, the long-abandoned childhood nickname slipping out like a confession. “I was beginning to imagine icebergs. Your Großmutti 3 has been praying rosaries ceaselessly for two hours; she swears this trip sits wrong in her bones.”
“I’m truly sorry, Mama. The phone signal is abysmal and the Wi-Fi… temperamental. A steward says there’s a ten-minute window every hour when the satellite deigns to notice us. Please tell Oma 4 I’m perfectly safe.”
“I will, but aren’t you at some glittering affair on a ship full of important business people? How is the internet not flawless?”
“Ah, some satellite fault they couldn’t fix before we left Inverness. Even obscene amounts of money can’t bribe the heavens on short notice – or conjure competent engineers to this neck of the woods, apparently.”
Laura 5 laughed (sharp, familiar, forgiving), and the knot of guilt in Lysandra’s chest loosened with the last of the sunlight.
“Is Inverness where you boarded?”
“Straight from the airport,” Lysandra replied. “Minibuses to the quay, and onto this floating palace. We’ve been tracing the northern coast all day. Now we’ve stopped so everyone can properly worship the twilight they’ve been extolling about since lunch.”
Predictably, a video-call request pinged. Lysandra accepted, flipped the camera, and swept the lens across the scene: molten sky, mirror-calm sea, and the great luminous bulk of the yacht rising behind her like a tiered wedding cake.
“Mein Gott 6,” Laura whispered. “It’s breath-taking.”
Lysandra smiled, hair whipping across her face in the evening breeze. “It really is.”
“I hope you have enjoyed every minute of it, Schatzi.”
“I have, Mama, truly; even if it meant talking to half the guest list. Shishō 7 has been showing me off like his prize pupil: old colleagues, new sponsors, the usual. Though the one person we actually sailed north for never even boarded.”
She tried to keep the bitterness out of her voice, but Laura’s eyes narrowed instantly; mothers always knew.
“Let me guess,” she said dryly, “our pride and joy still finds herself at a loss the moment money and small-talk are involved?”
Lysandra almost rolled her eyes; she caught herself only because Laura would somehow guess it through her all-knowing motherly senses. Instead she flipped the camera.
Mother and daughter finally met face-to-face across hundreds of miles.
“Ah, but they’re not simple gatherings, Mama. They’re ‘Please fund a decade-long project with high risk and almost no financial return’ gatherings. They’re full of strangers in need of appeasement, and you know how much I despair over such parties. It’s not exactly a conference on innovative in-human spinal surgeries using Augmented Reality; I am keener and better suited to rhapsodise on those.”
She lowered her voice to a mutter no passer-by could catch. Not that anyone was listening. She had chosen the lowest open deck precisely because it was quiet: only a dozing elderly nanny and her three young charges farther along the rail; two little girls deep in a Barbie saga and a younger boy absorbed in kicking his football against the bulkhead, the soft thump-thump-thump echoing steadily in the background.
The children belonged to one of the financiers she had spoken to earlier. Their parents were somewhere above, toasting the future of medicine with champagne older than the kids.
Lysandra sighed, the sound small against the slap of water on the hull.
“I wish I were back in the surgical theatre, doing what I love best. Or better yet, home with you, Lucian, Großmutti, and Nonno 8.”
“And your dad, Schatzi. You mustn’t leave him out,” Laura said softly. “By the time you reach Kent he’ll be here too. Charles is truly looking forward to seeing you. It’s been… what, since Lucian was in Year 7 and you started residency?”
“I haven’t forgotten him,” Lysandra mumbled, trying, and failing, to sidestep the familiar ground.
“Schatzi.”
That single word carried every lecture Laura had ever given on the subject, of which there were many.
“Mama, you know I don’t begrudge his service or his loyalty to the country. I just… I barely know him as Dad. To me he’s always been Wing Commander Whiting, somewhere far north, sending postcards from bases I could barely pronounce.”
She paused, looked toward the vast sea, blinking fast. “Lucian got the father who came home. I got the hero in the photographs.”
Laura’s eyes drifted, suddenly far away.
“I know it didn’t turn out the way we planned, Schatzi. God works in mysterious ways. Your path took you far from home, just as his took him, but Charles loves you, and he is proud, so proud. Not every twelve-year-old aces her A-levels or starts at UCL at thirteen. Even if Matsushima-sensei hadn’t carried you off to Japan, you would never have stayed in one place long. I wanted to keep you forever, but you were always meant for farther skies.”
Lysandra’s gaze drifted to the little girls playing Barbie nearby. Once, she too had been blonde and thin as a reed, only instead of dolls she had trailed Nonno Taddeo between rows of apple trees or stood on a stool beside Großmutti Elisabeth, singing Puccini while sauce simmered.
Her Italian grandfather had been an accountant by day, wedding-band trumpeter by night; her Austrian grandmother an opera soprano whose career ended almost before it began. One wedding gig, one shared stage, and they had decided on their own nuptials in quick succession. Laura arrived a year later. Years after that, on a holiday in Husum, young accountant Laura met RAF Pilot Officer Charles Whiting, stationed there with his squadron. No one expected a quiet German holiday to become a love story that crossed from the south to the north of Europe, yet it did. Distance, deployments, and too little time never managed to break them.
When Charles’s parents died and he was suddenly transferred back to the UK, he inherited the family farm in Kent. But the RAF kept him in Scotland, so a very pregnant Laura and her parents moved to the south of England to run it instead. Nonno Taddeo set aside his ledgers and trumpet, trading wedding gigs for orchards and soil; Großmutti Elisabeth exchanged piano lessons for knitting needles and bread-making. They poured everything they knew into their tiny, bright-eyed granddaughter (Taddeo the names of every tree and flower, Elisabeth every song and stitch), never guessing how swiftly, how hungrily, she would drink it all in.
Home-schooling, entrance exams, the stunned faces of secondary-school teachers, and suddenly the word prodigy was attached to her name like a second name. From that day forward, her life became a whirlwind of lecture halls, research labs, and, eventually, operating theatres half a world away.
The only constant had been family, and above all Lucian, seven years younger and fiercely adored.
Laura’s words rang true. Lysandra could not deny it. She was her father’s daughter after all: the same restless devotion, only hers poured into neurosurgery instead of the cockpit. She had been impossibly lucky to meet Toshio Matsushima so early in her UCL years. While his contemporaries (Takanori Fukushima among them) had revolutionised the field with keyhole techniques, Toshio had quietly declared that his own legacy would be measured by the student he chose to lift: a girl he believed could change the world with a scalpel.
“Ah!” Laura exclaimed, snapping Lysandra back to the deck and the salt breeze. “I almost forgot. Your father is no longer a Wing Commander. He made Group Captain last month.”
“Oh, has he?” A genuine smile curved her mouth. “I’m glad. Please congratulate him for me.”
“I will, but you should do it yourself when you’re home. He’ll want to hear it from you,” Laura’s eyes softened. “Lucian’s buried in extra-curriculars right now, but I’m hoping we can steal a few days together once you’re back; all of us, somewhere sunny.”
“Must we?” Lysandra was far too old for whining, yet the words slipped out anyway, sullen and weary.
Laura fixed her with a look that needed no translation.
“We haven’t had a proper family holiday since Lucian was two. That was over fifteen years ago, Schatzi. Of course we must.”
“Mama, I don’t mind us all being together; I miss you terribly. I’m simply… tired of travelling. Three months in China, two weeks in Japan, now the middle of nowhere in Scotland, and soon Cambridge for the conference. All I want is the farm. Quiet mornings, Großmutti’s kitchen, Nonno’s orchard. Just us.”
Laura studied her eldest with a mixture of sympathy and suspicion.
“You said you loved China, or did you say that for my benefit alone?”
“I did love it. Truly. But it was exhausting. Shishō’s son arranged a schedule that never stopped. Even without the internet blockade I wouldn’t have had a moment to call.”
“Is that so? Surely you weren’t studying acupuncture all day long?”
“Well, I did learn a great deal about acupuncture, I honestly believe we might one day combine it with post-op protocols, but we were also whisked from city to city: embroidering silk with real gold thread like court artisans of old, making paper from mulberry-bark by hand… Shishō and his son knew I was spending yet another birthday far from home and wanted to keep me too busy to feel it.”
“That was very kind of them I would think, don’t you agree?”
“It was,” Lysandra conceded, “even if their worries were misplaced. I loved every moment, and I was still overwhelmed. This time I want family, late brunches, and no departure boards. Please.”
Laura drew a long, slow breath, then let it out in surrender.
“Fine. No travelling. Your grandparents will be over the moon to keep you longer.”
“And so will I,” Lysandra said softly. “Send them my love until I’m there. Oh, did my luggage arrive?”
“Yes, yesterday evening. Everything came, and we unpacked it exactly as you asked. Those strange, beautiful papers… they’re from your workshops in China, aren’t they?”
Lysandra gave an embarrassed little laugh and nodded.
“My embroidery certainly turned out better than the paper-making. The master there said I was gifted.”
“Of course she did,” Laura huffed, fond and exasperated. “You’ve been copying everything Mutti 9 did since you could hold a needle. Only you took those steady hands and made a career of saving lives.”
“Well, it is more than just dexterity,” Lysandra said, smiling at the memory of countless evenings beside Großmutti Elisabeth, tiny fingers guided through weaving, sewing, embroidery, knitting, and crochet, “but yes… it certainly helped.”
“Busy schedule aside,” Laura said, sliding smoothly into her favourite subject, “have you met somebody yet?”
Lysandra stifled a sigh. She would sooner discuss her complicated feelings about her father than this.
“Mama, we’ve had this conversation so many times… I want love, marriage, children, et cetera, ad nauseam, ad infinitum – the whole fairy-tale – eventually. But my daily company is either unconscious patients or professors old enough to be my grandfathers.”
“So nobody older at all, I see,” Laura muttered under her breath.
Lysandra barely stopped herself from pinching the bridge of her nose; the last thing she needed was mascara smudged unbecomingly across her face.
“Age isn’t the issue. The issue is that most of them are married, or widowed, or simply not interested. And I haven’t met anyone who interests me.”
“Schatzi, you’re twenty-five and you haven’t even kissed a man. You may not be worried, but your mother is. And look at you – bella oggi, particularly beautiful!”
Lysandra answered only with a small, patient smile, the universal daughter-signal for please, not this again.
“I still say it’s the hair,” Laura declared. “Wrong shade entirely.”
Lysandra actually groaned.
“Doch! 10 For the millionth time, Mama, I love my hair.”
“In this light it looks black.”
“It is almost night-time, Mama. In sunlight, it’s a deep, lovely red.”
“Oh yes, because you spend so much time in the sunshine,” Laura shot back. “Any less and you’d look like a vampire. That dark purple-red ages you, Schatzi. You had such lovely blonde hair; why you dyed it that colour is beyond me.”
“Exactly because I’m pale like a vampire the blonde washed me out completely, made my face one big shapeless blur. Now there’s definition. It’s a colour I can wear in theatre and still look professional. And,” Lysandra added with faint triumph, “it hides any grey hairs. I’ve been doing it for over ten years. Can’t you just let it go?”
“You’ve got grey hairs? Already? Since when?”
The alarm in Laura’s voice suggested imminent medical emergency. Grey hairs, in her opinion, were clearly the most dangerous obstacle to future grandchildren.
“It’s one grey hair, Mama. One.”
Laura’s expression said she wasn’t buying it for a second.
“Just one hair, she says…” She arched a brow. “Have I ever steered you wrong? Electrolysis; you whined about the sting, then thanked me for years of smooth legs in residency. The eyeliner tattoo; saves you ten minutes every morning, doesn’t it?”
“It does, and I’m grateful,” Lysandra admitted. “Truly. But the eyeliner still could have gone terribly wrong. Eye or nerve damage isn’t something to gamble with; I’ve seen the scans.”
“But I didn’t gamble,” Laura countered, chin high. “I researched for weeks. Only the best salon, the top technician. Never a back-alley needle.”
“That’s not the point, Mama. As it is, I’m keeping the hair. No more colour discussions please; preferably ever.”
“You’re just as stubborn as your Nonno.”
“Oma says the exact same about you.”
They locked eyes for a moment, neither willing to yield, until the corners of their mouths twitched and they dissolved into laughter. Another ancient argument, another draw. Stubbornness was the family heirloom, passed down without skipping a single generation.
“Mama, I don’t know how much longer the signal will last. I should head back inside. I’ll send you my schedule for the next few days so you’ll know when to call. I’ve missed talking to you.”
Laura’s face softened into the tender, soul-deep smile only mothers can give. She blessed her daughter, wished her a beautiful night, and they traded quiet I love you’s before the call ended.
Lysandra slipped the phone into her clutch and turned toward the stairs.
A muffled splash.
For half a heartbeat she almost kept walking; then something cold and precise clicked in the back of her mind. She had never possessed true photographic memory (the debate was settled; it didn’t exist), but eidetic memory was real, and hers had never faded with childhood. She knew, without looking, exactly what she would see.
She spun.
A football bobbed on the dark water.
She didn’t even have time to shout.
The little boy was already falling, arms wind-milling, as he lunged after his toy from the open swim platform. There was no rail, no barrier, nothing to catch him.
The night swallowed his small, startled cry.
Heart hammering, Lysandra shouted at the nanny to wake up, call for help, now, as she sprinted toward the swim platform. Behind her the old woman’s panicked cries mingled with the little girls’ terrified sobs.
There was no time for modesty.
She tore off the midnight-sapphire evening gown (its stiff bardot neckline would have dragged her straight to the bottom) and let it fall like a dark wave at her feet. Silk slip, underwear, bare skin. Heels kicked away; they would be anchors in the water.
She reached the edge.
And froze.
On that moonless July night, Lysandra faced her oldest, deepest terror.
She had never almost drowned, never been lost at sea, yet somewhere along the years the dark water had become her personal abyss. It reached for her now, an invisible hand closing around her throat, squeezing until her breath rasped and her pulse roared in her ears. If she did not know better, she would have sworn she felt nodules swelling in her neck.
But a child was already gone beneath the surface.
She had sworn an Oath to save lives, and she abided by it.
Fervent, half-desperate prayer on her lips, she forced air in and out, in and out, until the ringing in her ears dulled to a single command: save him.
One last inhale, held like a promise.
She leapt.
The sea swallowed her whole.
She struck out straight for the place the boy had vanished, before the current could claim him further. Small children usually float; please, God, let him float.
Under the yacht’s cold white floodlights the sea was black glass. Lysandra scanned the darkness for any sign of the boy.
She never saw him – he found her.
A small, desperate hand clamped around her ankle. She whirled, heart lurching, and hauled him upward with all her strength. They broke the surface together.
The boy came up choking, coughing, convulsing. She pulled him close, one arm locked across his chest, the other rubbing slow circles on his back.
“You’re safe. I’ve got you.”
“It was scary, I know. But you’re safe now.”
“Breathe with me, darling. Deep breaths… in… out…”
She risked a glance back. The yacht blazed with commotion: faces lining every rail, shouts echoing across the water.
Swimming with a child in her arms was nothing like the pool. The North Sea was cruelly, viciously cold; the first shock of adrenaline was already bleeding away, leaving needles of ice in her limbs. She kicked harder, years of yoga and lap swimming the only thing keeping them afloat. Tokyo winters had never prepared her for this; she had always chosen warmth. No waves tonight, thank God for small mercies. One day, she promised herself grimly, she would finally start ice bathing. Never again would the cold own her like this.
“We’ll be back on the boat soon,” she whispered to the boy whose name she still didn’t know. “You’re safe. I have you.”
While they waited for rescue, Lysandra rubbed the boy’s arms and legs with fierce, steady strokes, trying to keep the cold from sinking into his bones. Floodlights swivelled, pinning them in harsh white cones. At last a life-ring splashed down beside them. She seized it, then realised she could not hold both child and ring. Carefully she eased the boy into the centre, locked one hand around his thin wrist so he could not slip through, and hooked her other arm over the buoy. Legs kicking hard, she steered them toward the yacht.
Hands reached down; the boy and the ring were hauled up first. She caught a glimpse of foil blankets, of the child vanishing into a swarm of worried arms and stethoscopes.
Then it was her turn.
Or it should have been.
Something cold and sinuous coiled around her right ankle.
Not a child’s hand this time.
She kicked once, twice, powerful thrusts meant to break the hold. The thing only tightened and pulled.
A strangled cry tore from her throat before the sea rushed in to silence it.
Down.
She clawed upward, lungs already burning, but the grip was iron. Salt stung her eyes when she forced them open, but there was only blackness below, endless and hungry. The lights of the yacht shrank to distant coins, then to sparks, then to nothing.
Panic, the swiftest killer of all, flooded in.
Three to five minutes, her mind recited, clinical and useless, before brain damage begins.
The thread of reason snapped, abandoned in the upper waters. She thrashed on instinct alone, a final, futile rebellion against the dark.
The burning in her chest became fire, then mercy, then nothing.
And the sea took her.
♥
In the beginning there was only Eru, the One, whom some would later name Ilúvatar.
From the thought of Eru sprang the Ainur, the Holy Ones, and He spoke to them, proposing themes of music. At first they sang alone or in small companies, but as they grew in understanding of one another, their voices joined, and the music swelled in unison and harmony until the Timeless Halls rang with wonder.
Then Eru gathered them and unfolded a mighty theme unlike any before, bidding them weave together a Great Music. Kindled with the Flame Imperishable, each Ainu adorned the theme after their own manner, pouring forth their power and will. And there arose a sound of endless, intertwining melodies that transcended hearing, filling the Void until the Void was void no longer.
Eru smiled, for the Music was fair.
Yet one among the mightiest, Melkor, sought to interweave matters of his own imagining, discordant and proud. To him Eru had given the greatest gifts of power and knowledge, and still he coveted more. Long had he wandered alone, seeking the Flame Imperishable that he might bring into being things of his own; but the Flame was with Eru alone. Where Melkor sowed discord, the music of his brethren faltered or grew dark.
Amid the storm of clashing sound, Eru rose and lifted His left hand. A new theme began – deeper, richer, clothed in beauty born of sorrow. Again Melkor struck, and the strife grew fiercer; many of the Ainur ceased singing altogether, and Melkor’s harsh voice held sway.
Then Eru rose a second time, His face stern, and lifted His right hand. A third theme took shape – soft at first, delicate as starlight on water – yet unquenchable. It gathered the very discords of Melkor and bound them into its solemn pattern, until two musics ran at once: one profound and sorrowful, its glory drawn from pain; the other vain, loud, endlessly repeated, barren of harmony. The more fiercely Melkor assailed, the more his own notes were taken and woven into the greater design.
At last Eru rose a third time, terrible in majesty, and lifted both hands. With a single chord, deeper than the Abyss and higher than the Heavens, the Music ceased.
He spoke then, and His voice was both judgement and promise: that no theme could arise which did not have its uttermost source in Him, and that even the discords of Melkor would serve His purpose in the end.
He led the trembling Ainur into the Void and said, “Behold thy Music.”
There the Vision was shown them: a globe suspended in the Void, fair and terrible, filled with light and shadow, seas and stars, and – unexpected – beings not born of their singing: the Children of Ilúvatar, Elves and Men, conceived in the thought of Eru alone.
Many of the Ainur loved the Vision and the Children foretold within it. Melkor looked upon it with hunger, already scheming to rule them.
Then the Vision was withdrawn, and Darkness fell.
Eru spoke one word: “Eä!” Let these things Be!
And the Flame Imperishable was sent forth, kindling the heart of the World. Far off, a light appeared like a cloud with a living heart of fire, and the Ainur knew it was no longer vision, but the World that Is.
Yet they were not the only ones who beheld the birth of Eä.
Far beyond the circles of the World, in the uttermost Dark before the kindling, a wisp of mist drifted – bright, yet pale beside the splendour of the Flame. It had neither name nor voice, neither eyes nor ears, and yet it perceived. When the Void blazed into being, the sudden light struck the wisp like a revelation, and it shone the brighter for it.
The Ainur chose – some to remain with Eru, some to descend and bind themselves to the World until the End.
The wisp had no choice. An unseen thread drew it downward, gentle yet inexorable, into the new-born spheres of Eä.
Formless, voiceless, unseen, it could neither speak nor shape new thought; only gather memories of all it witnessed. Yet deep within its shimmering substance lay one immutable knowledge: it must wait.
And so the long vigil of the Wisp began.