They’re not coming back for you. You’re on your own now.
The singular line that drags out across the horizon isn't offering any hand. You could try to reach the mainland, but survival is unlikely. At least you have the illusion of choice. Your ship is wrecked and the smoke sends signals to nobody. The plumes merge with the cloud that rushes across the sky like an incoming tide.
Get to a vantage point and take in this limbo. There are no secrets on the island. The entire rock is barren, scalped by the wind and dulled by the drift. But it is full of noises. Creatures scuttle in and out of the briney rockpools. Giant trees of driftwood brought in by a storm splinter and crack in the wind. The breeze plays songs as it blows through the thousand instruments formed by the erratic structures that surround you.
Walk towards the middle. Away from the frayed edges losing ground to the waves. Take the pathways smothered by blankets of sand. Step through brackish puddles in the tunnels. Dunes that have piled up against smooth stairways. Take shelter in the windbreaker, give your ears a rest from the din.
Climb the ancient structures collapsed by time and weighed down by rust. Tattooed metal with cracked corners. The shadows from these sundials count the hours you have left. It will continue to creep across the beach long after you are gone. Appreciate the angles as you contemplate your own deliverance. Let every other thought be your grave.
But the marker is respite from this. Built following lost blueprints written in a language we can’t read. Its lack of peers makes it loom twice as large, the head of a buried giant in the sand. Everything else shrinks in comparison, kneeling in quiet respect to this relentless achievement.
It has a cogency that can be appreciated among the chaos. It hasn’t heard of you, it hasn’t seen your glory. But despite this stoic indifference, when you press your ear to the side you hear a faint hum. A noise calibrated for a frequency we can no longer understand.
But there is a solution in its chamber. A chance for a message to be sent through the heavens. This monument is in fact a sanctuary of divine intervention.
Press the button. Light the beacon.
Hope that someone sees it.
Then pray they are friendly.
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