The sun rose, and Idhra placed her hand on the stone.
She had waited all night. Not out of fear—the fear was there, but it had grown small, shriveled into a hard point beneath her breastbone that no longer hurt, only pressed. She had waited because she wanted to know whether the stone would change when the light came. Whether the pulling would ease. Whether it was different at dawn than it was at night.
It was not different. It was patient. It had always been patient.
When the first light crept over the hilltop and touched the granite, Idhra stood. Her legs were stiff from sitting, and the grass beneath her was damp and cold. She walked the twenty steps that had kept her apart from it all night, and each step made the pulling stronger, until it was no longer lodged in her ribs but everywhere—in her fingertips, her teeth, behind her eyes.
She stopped in front of it. It was so large she had to tip her head back to see its upper edge. The groove on the eastern side ran from top to bottom like an old scar. The shimmer was fainter in the morning light, but it was still there.
Idhra raised her hand.
The stone was warm. Not like the chamber, which had been cold and then begun to hum. The stone had been warm from the start, as though it had waited for her all night and grown hot while it did. The warmth crept through her palm, through her wrist and up her arm, and the pulling stopped.
Silence.
For the span of a breath, there was nothing. No hum, no echo, no layers. Only silence, so complete that Idhra heard her own heartbeat, loud and fast, the blood in her ears, and the wind sweeping over the hilltop and bending the grass.
Then the stone opened.
It was not an opening anyone could see. The granite remained solid beneath her hand. But something inside it gave way—like a door you cannot see because it is hidden in the wall, opening inward into a room larger than the house concealing it.
Idhra fell.
Not with her body. Her body was still standing on the hilltop, her hand on the stone, her feet in the grass. But everything else fell—inward, downward, through layers that were not layers but ages, laid over one another like skins, and each skin was a world.
She saw the ice. Not like in the chamber, where it had been a distant echo—here it was close, immense, a wall of blue-white pushing across the land and burying everything beneath it. She felt the weight. Not on her body, but on the stone lying beneath the ice and waiting for millennia, patiently, because it knew nothing but waiting.
Then the ice was gone. Water. Meltwater exposing the stone, and light touching it for the first time in ages, and the stone drinking the light, and that was the beginning.
Deeper.
Something beneath the ice. Beneath the water. Beneath the light. Something that was not memory but hunger. A hunger so old it no longer had a shape—no mouth, no stomach, only a pulling that reached for anything that came close enough. The ice had fed it. The meltwater had fed it. The light had fed it. And now, ever since people had come and laid their hands on the stone and brought their fear and hope and blood with them—
Idhra felt the grip.
It came from below, from the deepest layer, and it was not like the attention in the chamber. The attention had examined. The grip took. It closed around something inside her—not her arm, not her hand, but something nameless, something between memory and self, the place where Idhra was Idhra.
And it pulled.
It did not hurt. That was the worst part. It did not hurt; it felt like relief—like setting down a burden you had carried so long you had forgotten it was there. Something inside her wanted to let go. Wanted to fall into the hunger that was not hunger but an embrace, dark and warm and endless.
The Mother of the Elders had let go. She had left part of herself there. Afterward, she had been less.
Idhra tore her eyes open.
She saw the stone. The granite beneath her hand. The grass. The sky. The world outside, the real one, with its wind and light and smell of earth. She clung to it—to the smell, the light, the feeling of grass beneath her feet—and pulled back.
The grip held.
Idhra pulled harder. She thought of Hald. Of his hands on her shoulders, large and warm and safe. Of Asa, humming. Of Fynn, murmuring in his sleep. Of the fjord in the morning, when mist lay over the water and the world looked as though it had only just come into being.
The grip loosened. Not much. But enough.
Idhra tore her hand from the stone.
She fell backward into the grass. The sky was above her, blue and wide and empty, and she lay there breathing, each breath like the first, as though she had not breathed for minutes, and the air tasted of grass and earth and life.
Her hand burned. Not the skin—the skin was unhurt, not even reddened. But underneath, in the bones, in the tendons, something burned, as though the stone had left a trace, an imprint of itself inside her, just as she read its imprints in it.
Idhra sat up. Her hands were trembling. Her whole body trembled, fine and uncontrollable, like after a fall into cold water.
She looked at the stone.
It stood there as before. Gray, smooth, shimmering. Patient. As though nothing had happened. But Idhra knew something had happened. She felt it—a small emptiness, barely noticeable, like a missing tooth and a tongue that kept searching for the gap.
The stone had taken. Not much. Not as much as it had taken from the Mother of the Elders. But something. A memory perhaps, or a feeling, or something between the two. Something she could not name because only now, when it was missing, had it become visible at all.
But she had also received something.
She did not know what yet. It lay inside her like a seed that had fallen into the earth and had not yet sprouted. But it was there. The stone had taken, and the stone had given, and both were part of the same process, just as inhaling and exhaling are part of the same breath.
Idhra stood. Her legs held her, but only barely. She walked the twenty steps back to her place in the grass, sat down, and looked at the stone.
It looked back. But differently than before. Fuller. Calmer. As though it had drunk and, for a moment, been satisfied.
Idhra stayed all day. She did not touch the stone again. She sat and felt the emptiness inside her and the seed beside it, and she tried to understand what the stone had given her.
By evening, as the sun sank and the shadows grew long, she knew.
She could hear the bones at the foot of the stone. Not the hum of the chamber, not the layers of ice and time. Something else. Something new. She heard who they had been. The fox that had hunted here before someone killed it and gave its bones to the stone. The deer that had drunk at the stream. And the person the finger bone had belonged to—a woman, old and sick, who had sacrificed her finger so the stone would show her something.
And the stone had shown her something. Idhra saw it, dimly, as if through murky water: The woman had seen where her son was, the son who had left two winters before and never returned. He lay beneath a tree, three days' journey east, with a broken leg that had never healed. He was dead. But the woman had known, and knowing had brought her peace, and she had gone home and grieved and carried on.
The stone took. But the stone gave, too. Not for free. Not out of kindness. But because it was its nature—to drink and give back, like a spring that swallows water and spits it out again somewhere else.
Idhra stood. She looked at the stone one last time.
I'll come back, she said. Not aloud. Only inside herself, in the place where the emptiness was.
The stone did not answer. But the shimmer grew brighter for the span of a breath.
Idhra turned and went north. Home. To the fjord, to Hald, to Asa, to Fynn. To the living.
She walked for three days. On the evening of the third day, she saw the fjord, its water gleaming in the last light, and she cried without knowing why. Maybe because she was home. Maybe because she knew she would never again be entirely at home.
Hald was standing by the fence when she arrived. He said nothing. He wrapped his arms around her and held her tight, and Idhra rested her forehead against his chest and closed her eyes and listened to his heartbeat, loud and steady and alive.
Where were you? he asked at last.
In the south, Idhra said. With a stone.
Hald looked at her. For a long time. Then he nodded, as though he had understood something he could not put into words.
Come inside, he said. Asa has fish.