I stand on the jetty gazing out over the loch. Scotland in winter is beautiful. The water lies so still it becomes a mirror, reflecting the sweep of pine along its banks, the brilliant sky trembling across its dark surface.
Snow-covered hills glitter like scattered jewels, yet I cannot feel their brightness. Cold has sunk too deep in me, as if ice has seeped into my marrow. I do not know how I came to be here. All I can truly recall is this gnawing frost inside me, and the sense that something happened—something I cannot name, cannot place. Each thought strikes an invisible barrier.
Still, I hear everything: the honking of geese stranded on a floating island miles out, the toll of church bells pulling in Christmas worshippers, the sharp crack of a twig too close, the rustle of something moving through the trees.
My hand rises, as always, to my throat. A reflex. A fixation. Yet there is nothing there—only smooth, taut skin beneath my fingers, cold as marble, polished like the statues I once saw in Athens.
The sun sinks behind the hills, flooding them in pink. The pines ignite, each needle glowing in a shade of green I never knew existed. It feels as if I have woken from a hibernation deeper than a bear’s. Everything is new. The loch is a shifting mosaic of colour, inks bleeding together on water.
And the smells—God, the smells. Lemon water left on my kitchen counter. Sap bleeding from trees across the loch. Damp earth. The stench of the rubbish dump eighteen miles north. And beneath it all, piercing through everything else, a sweet metallic tang that will not let me go.
Darkness creeps in. The skeletal limbs of dead trees claw at the sky. I shiver, clutching my coat. I should go inside, but the night beckons, wrapping me in its cloak. Hunger twists through me—unnatural, agonising, urgent. Not in my stomach, but deeper. Everywhere.
I turn, and freeze. A figure waits at the end of the jetty. Tall, so thin he seems half-translucent. Dark hair brushes the collar of an ankle-length coat. His face is all angles, shadow pooled in the hollows of his eyes, less flesh than absence.
My first thought is to run. But I do not. A pull stronger than fear, stronger than love, binds me to him.
And suddenly—I am before him. I do not know how I crossed the space. My body betrayed me, carrying me willingly into his presence, into whatever fate awaits.
I lift my eyes to his pale, unchanging face. Memory floods back in fragments—sounds, scents, truths I had buried. And in that instant, I understand.
I am home.
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