Chapter 30. Islands in the sea
February 9, 2026 at 12:40 PM
He still remembered the dry, swaying grass stretching to the horizon — the Wastelands — but the memory had dimmed, faded like a dream at dawn.
It seemed, once — was it a minute, a year, or a lifetime ago? — the sun had scorched the earth, and thirst gnawed at his throat...
Now the world was water. Icy water that numbed his hands and seized his face in an unrelenting grip.
As a child, he often wondered what the edge of the world might look like. What it would mean if, in the most literal sense, there was nothing left — not even darkness. Could anyone imagine such a thing?
Perhaps it was the poverty of his imagination that kept the world from ending when the last of the little rocky islands faded behind him. The sea stretched on, gray and endless, beneath a sky as heavy and gray as the waters below, with only the fragile boat between them. The waves tossed it relentlessly, and each time they surged over the sides, the cold struck like needles into his flesh.
He rowed until his arms could no longer move, then rested, then rowed again. There were no landmarks, no signs to show the way. He had no way of knowing if he was moving forward or simply circling the same currents. Yet perhaps that didn’t matter. He knew he simply had to keep going.
In this dream-world, hunger and thirst no longer existed, but the cold and the ice-laden weight of his clothes pressed against his skin with cruel persistence. His body was so numb his hands barely obeyed him.
It would be so easy to wake up. That would end everything. But in the dream, his mother had told him — trust your instincts. And his instincts said this was how it had to be.
Hold on. Keep moving forward.
Eventually, he could no longer feel his frozen face. His fingers failed him, and the oars slipped into the bottom of the boat, beyond his grasp. The waves nudged the boat along, slowly, inexorably.
It felt like an eternity had passed — an eternity of slow, painful dying without the mercy of death. (After all, this was a dream, wasn’t it? And in dreams, you couldn’t truly die.) He had no sense of how many hours had passed in the waking world. By the end, he didn’t think about it anymore. He forgot there even was a world beyond the cold, beyond the pain, beyond this sea of icy water stretching endlessly in every direction.
“You have to cross this sea,” his mother had said. Yet his thoughts spun in circles: No, it’s not possible. It’s a lie. Even if death hadn’t separated them — what would it change? Could anyone ever truly touch another’s heart? There had been a moment when he’d almost believed, back when Yukinari was alive, that there was no sea at all. That they had shared the same faith, the same truth. But now Gerel had seen it with his own eyes — this sea, this chasm that would always lie between himself and another. And he was afraid.
Each person has their own heart-world, their own island. You could long to be close to someone, imagine you’d crossed great distances to reach them, but in truth, you never left your own shores. No one ever came closer. Each person remained alone, sealed in their shell like an oyster. And the hope of truly understanding another? It was the same cruel self-deception as the belief you could cross this sea — a lie.
The sea spread endlessly before him, stretching from one horizon to the other. No one could cross it. All you could do was turn back, retreat to your own wretched island with its dead gulls and empty skies.
And yet, his mother’s words carried a faint hope, one he didn’t fully understand.
How long had it been when the boat finally struck something solid?
When it happened, it didn’t register at first. He had to claw his way out of the fog of half-consciousness. His eyes refused to open, every motion wracked his body with pain. Slowly, he straightened, raising his head.
He saw it — a foreign, unfamiliar shore.
His heart-world was one of autumn: lonely northern cliffs and freezing sea. Here, it was winter — a black-and-white world of frost and stillness. The realm of death.
A white plain stretched out before him, and in the distance, the shadow of a city loomed.
Was this Yukinari’s dream?
Could the dead even dream?
He climbed out of the boat and moved forward. The air, biting with frozen needles, clawed at his throat and made breathing difficult.
In the city, snow was falling — or so it seemed at first. But the flakes weren’t falling down; they drifted up, spiraling so softly it took a moment to notice the wrongness.
Then he realized it wasn’t snow — it was ash.
It was as if an unimaginable fire had swept through the city. It reminded him of Shinju, though here, every structure was brittle and white, as though made of chalk or frost. It all seemed ready to crumble into dust.
And crumble it did — slowly, inevitably. Delicate flakes of ash, like scales from a fish, peeled away from walls and rooftops, rising gently into the sky. Some buildings still stood, their outlines intact; others were ruins, and many had already collapsed into heaps of dust. This world was disintegrating before his eyes.
Here and there, gnarled black trees stood bare of flowers and leaves, clawing toward the pale, sightless sky like skeletal fingers.
In the sky above the city hung a vast, inverted hourglass, as if measuring the last moments of this world.
Gerel walked silently through the dead city. Beneath his feet, the ash — no, sand? — whispered faintly with each step. He knew this wasn’t the real Shinju, the one that must already have been rebuilt, gleaming in all the colors of the rainbow. And yet, it felt as if he had returned to a place he knew. He had seen Shinju alive. He had seen it dying. And now, for the third time, he had come to witness what remained of the Dragon’s capital after death.
There were no living souls here. No animals, no birds. If they had been here, they would have seemed out of place, alien in this fragile, ghostly expanse. Just as Gerel himself felt alien — a trespasser in someone else’s solitude.
So much of the city had crumbled that he barely recognized the streets. But when the road opened onto the square before the imperial palace, he knew he had come the right way.
The palace was a skeleton, its flesh hanging in tatters. Its halls and corridors were open to the sky. It was easy to find the throne room now.
There were the familiar red steps leading to the throne — or not red, not here. In this monochrome world, they were white, cracked, half-collapsed.
Yukinari sat on the throne, his face hidden in his hands. His splendid imperial robes were gone, replaced by black clothing, just like the undead who remained in that world. Only his clothes, his hair, his whole body was dusted with gray ash, as if covered in a fine crust of white lime.
Here, in the heart-world, Yukinari seemed smaller and younger than he had been in life. Now he looked no older than twelve.
At the sound of Gerel’s footsteps, Yukinari stirred, but he didn’t lift his head or remove his hands from his face.
“Who is it?” he asked.
“It’s me,” Gerel answered after a pause. “But you were probably expecting someone else.”
Gerel’s voice startled him — it was frail, breaking like a child’s. He looked at his hands and found they, too, had shrunk. He was no longer a man but a teenager here, in the dream, like Yukinari.
Yukinari was silent for a moment before sighing and letting his hands fall from his face. His features were cracked, pale as though covered by a mask. One eye remained dark and alive; the other was a hollow void.
“No,” he said. “I was waiting for you. Thank you for coming.”
Gerel wanted to reply — to apologize? But could there be forgiveness for a guilt like his?
They sat in silence for a while before Gerel finally spoke:
“I came to take you away from here.”
Yukinari said softly, “I’m so tired. So tired — if only you could imagine…”
“You want to die for real?” Gerel guessed.
Yukinari gave a silent nod, his one eye closing briefly as pale, brittle lashes brushed against his cheek.
“It’s all I’ve ever wanted,” he murmured, his voice heavy with a sorrow so deep that Gerel felt it like a chill in his bones. “Isn’t that why you came?”
Tucked inside Gerel’s clothes was a knife, one he’d found long ago on a fishing pier in the first clear dream of his heart-world. Perhaps it would be useful now. He swallowed hard. No, he hadn’t come for this, but if Yukinari asked it of him, he would do it. He would kill him a second time.
“How can I convince you to come with me?” Gerel asked, his voice edged with desperation.
“I won’t ever be the same as before,” Yukinari said, as if it were an afterthought.
And nothing would ever be the same. Gerel knew that. So be it.
“ It doesn’t matter," Gerel replied stubbornly.
Yukinari looked at him with a mix of sadness and quiet guilt.
Gerel had prepared a speech — a plea to say it wasn’t too late, that they could start over, turn the page together... But all the words froze in his throat. Instead, he simply said:
“Would you really rather stay here, in this dead Shinju, than come back with me? There’s nothing here but winter and emptiness.”
“This isn’t Shinju,” Yukinari replied. “This is the capital of my own Dragon’s Land, the one I dreamed up as a child. I never loved the real Shinju. In truth…” He hesitated. “In truth, I hated it. The palace, the city, the courtiers, the beggars — everything, equally. Maybe you’ll despise me when I tell you this, but I have to say it. Gerel, I’m a deserter. A coward. I spent my whole life dreaming of escaping the real world into a made-up one. And when I met you…”
In that moment, you were everything I believe in. And that’s enough for me ... Gerel remembered the words Yukinari had once said to him.
Yukinari didn’t finish the thought, as if ashamed, but Gerel understood anyway: he had become Yukinari’s hope for escaping a world he loathed. Loathed with all his heart, even as he, proud and fiercely brave, had never shown it. Instead, he had become an ideal for others, a model to follow — and had done more for his wretched, unloved country than most could even dream of.
Gerel bit his lip and took out the knife, holding it out to Yukinari.
“Take it,” he said, his voice unsteady. His lips felt frozen, refusing to form the words. “But hear me out first, will you?”
In his mind, his mother’s dream-voice rang out, clear as a bell: “Golden rye fields, mossy autumn forests, the rhythm of the ocean waves, the starry night sky, and the bloom of plum trees. Life is not a punishment, even when it feels like there’s nothing but pain and emptiness.…”
He couldn’t speak like her; her words would have sounded strange and clumsy in his mouth. Instead, he said awkwardly:
“You know… I used to hate our world too. Or at least, I thought I did. And most of all, I hated the South, my home. But recently, I realized something: in spring, when the steppe blooms into this endless sea of swaying flowers, it’s so beautiful, you want to ride all the way to the horizon, reach it and then go beyond, to see what lies there.. . And the stars at night — they’re enormous, bigger than anywhere else. Like this,” he said, holding his fingers wide. “And the grasses sway in the wind and smell… like the finest wine. Our shamans brew potions from those grasses — to heal wounds, to see things that aren’t there. But even without potions, the steppe is full of visions: strange beasts, ghosts, clay-and-blood monsters that, they say, steal children from their cradles and crawl into their skins… The nomads tell so many stories like that, and I used to make up my own. But back then, blinded by grief and anger, I couldn’t see how beautiful it all was. Now I do. Imagine it: the sky like an overturned bowl full of stars, the bitterness of the grasses, the scent of horses, the nomads singing their evening prayers by firelight, drums pounding, bells ringing, strange whispers in the dark… The night steppe — it’s endless, ancient, gentle, merciless, and…” He trailed off, throwing up his hands in frustration. “I can’t explain it. You’d have to see it for yourself. Bet you’ve never seen the southern steppes.”
“I’ve seen very little outside the palace,” Yukinari said. He took the knife but didn’t look at it, his gaze fixed on Gerel. A faint smile touched his lips, and cracks spread across his pale mask-like face. “You told it well. I actually do want to see it now. You know, there are places in Shinju — the real Shinju — that I’d like to show you too. Not many, but still…”
“Shinju is a truly beautiful city,” Gerel admitted. “This past year, I hated it. I was suffocating there, losing my mind… But only because I couldn’t stop remembering how beautiful it had been, that autumn. With you.”
“I’ve remembered too,” Yukinari said shyly. Gerel felt his ears heat, embarrassed by what he was about to say. So he spoke quickly, roughly:
“I’ve always been slow to understand things. Only after you were gone did I realize how beautiful the world is. If only because it holds people like you. Too bad the person I wanted to share that beauty with — I sent him to his grave. That’s all I wanted to say.”
Yukinari looked at him for a long time, his expression unreadable. One eye a dark void, the other an empty socket.
Finally, he said, “I suppose this city in my head really does resemble the real Shinju. After all, our dreams don’t come from nowhere. We shape them from pieces of the real world. And it’s the real world we need to live in…”
He was still looking at the knife in his hand, and his voice sounded unsure, as though trying to convince himself.
Only then did Gerel remember he hadn’t said the most important thing.
“There’s one more thing. You were right: the world is so much bigger than we thought, and everything you dreamed about — it probably exists somewhere. I think I can walk between worlds. I’m not entirely sure how it works yet. But maybe I can take you somewhere new.”
It came out carelessly, almost offhand. Yukinari’s single eye widened in surprise.
“There are dozens of doors ahead of us. We can pick any one,” Gerel said quickly, feverishly. “Or we can go back to the Middle Kingdoms and try to make our ugly, broken world a little better. Or I can stay here with you. Whatever you choose, I’ll always stay with you. Always.”
“Stay here? You just said it yourself: in my world, there’s nothing but winter and emptiness,” Yukinari said bitterly.
“That’s fine,” Gerel replied. Yukinari must have seen in his face that he wasn’t lying or putting on a brave front.
In a quiet voice, Yukinari said, “When I was a child, all I ever wanted was for someone to come here, to my Dragon’s Land, and stay…”
“And now?” Gerel asked gently.
For a moment, Yukinari said nothing, his gaze downcast.
Then, like a child, he asked, “Are you really here?”
Gerel tried to answer, but his throat felt clenched in an iron grip. He could only nod.
Yukinari tucked the knife away and held out his hand.
“Where do you want to go?” Gerel asked. “Shall we go back? Or search for new horizons?”
“Let’s go back — someday. But first…” Yukinari smiled faintly. “I want — like you said — reach the horizon and then go beyond, to see what lies there...”
The boat swayed on the water where Gerel had left it. He stepped into it and helped Yukinari climb aboard. It felt strange, touching Yukinari’s fingers — so fragile, as though they might crumble like ashes or the wings of a butterfly.
In that other world, his hands would surely remain too cold, too pale, even if his soul returned to his body. And his smile would likely never regain its warmth, his gaze might forever resemble broken glass. It was true: nothing would ever be the same as before.
But none of that mattered. Because the world was full of wonders, with no islands, no walls — only endless horizons and countless doors.
“There’s one condition,” Yukinari said. “You mustn’t look back.”
Gerel nodded. He didn’t need to turn around to know that as they drifted away from the crumbling city, the figure huddled in the boat’s stern would regain flesh and color.
The boat pushed off from the shore and glided silently over the gray water.
