Chapter Text
The wight walked at a fast pace, Alma expected to be taken out of the loop for a quick escape through the present, but that didn't happen, Wight preferred to leave in the middle of 1940 in a rain of bombs. That didn't sound good, for him to risk himself like that someone would probably come find him inside the loop, in the past of 1940.
He walked to one of the island's beaches, curiously far from the docks, even trapped and crushed in that cage, Alma recognized every inch of her island. Her spirit nurtured a false hope that maybe she could escape from the Wight, that he would knock the cage down and break the padlock, that she and Miss Avocet could fly away from him. She felt a little stupid for thinking about it, there's no escape, she'll be taken wherever the wight wants.
Another thing that worried Alma was the fact that she knew that Millard was following the Wight. She felt his presence, and she was hoping that the Wight wouldn't realize that he was being followed.
The Wight seemed to be heading somewhere. He arrived at a hidden beach. Alma had known the place for a long time. It was Emma's favorite hiding place since they moved to the island. As a good ymbryne, Alma always knew where her children were and that beach was Emma Bloom's main whereabouts. Unfortunately, Emma hid a small boat among the rocks, something the wight soon noticed and picked up.
He threw the cage into the boat, dragged it into the water, and got in. The man rowed in circles for a long time. The sea seemed to refuse to let that guy escape from the island, taking the ymbrynes with him. That rekindled the flame of hope in the ymbrynes' hearts. Maybe there would be time for them to be saved.
This situation was torturous. It is ymbryne who save peculiar children, not the other way around. Alma couldn't imagine her children fighting a wight. Or worse, she couldn't imagine her children winning a battle against a Wight, much less against a hollowgast. Knowing that possibly 4 of her children were dead at this very moment made her even more agitated. The pain she felt was inexpressible.
Apparently the Wight got tired of trying to fight the tide and decided to take the boat to the rocks of the lighthouse. Alma couldn't understand what was going to happen. Was he expecting a boat? Or a zeppelin? Maybe a plane like the ones that dropped bombs on the island on the 3rd? He was waiting for someone to pick them up, that was undeniable.
When they arrived at the islet, the Wight took the cage and took it to the lighthouse. He wouldn't let go of the cage and stared at it for long minutes. He seemed to be focused on the blinking red light in the bird cage. They tried to peck or scratch him, but they couldn't. And irritated by the ymbrynes' rebellion, he shook the cage violently. Alma was sure that when her returned to human form, her body would be covered in bruises.
They stayed on the island and waited for what seemed like an eternity. That's when someone showed up, and unfortunately for the wight, it wasn't his ride.
The man pulled out his gun and started shooting towards the sea.
“Your stupid children followed me, Alma! I’m going to turn their bodies into sieves!” The Wight shouted furiously at the birds and the sea.
He used up a lot of ammunition and stopped periodically to reload. He held the cage tightly and the birds chirped non-stop. Soon a noise was heard and was getting closer, the Wight was shooting at a metal door that was approaching the lighthouse islet. Alma’s children were coming to save her, and this filled her with hope and morbid fear. The Wight screamed, threatening the lives of the ymbrynes.
When the door with the children hidden behind it reached the island, the Wight was already nervous, cursing and shooting non-stop. Suddenly the child carrying the door started screaming and running towards the Wight and the birds, by the sound of it that person could only be Bronwyn, she was alive after all. Bronwyn threw the door at Wight and he knocked the cage to the ground.
That left him stunned for a very short time. The door hurt his head and he was bleeding, but that didn't stop him from picking up the birds again and seeking shelter in the lighthouse. He was clearly dizzy and weak, and he climbed the stairs in a stumbling manner. The birds were afraid of him knocking down the cage. A fall from there would be certain death.
Soon Wight started shooting again. The children had returned and entered the lighthouse. From the angle Wight was at, he had the advantage. The intelligence of Alma's children was surprising. They hid and somehow managed to shake the ladder so violently that Wight could no longer stay stable enough to aim and shoot. But that was also worrying. If he knocked down the cage, the two ymbrynes would be mortally wounded.
The Wight held on to the cage so that they wouldn't fall when the ladder shook too hard. In his efforts to protect the cage, Wight dropped his gun. He lost his greatest asset, and without that gun, Alma's children would finally have a real chance of saving the women.
The Wight let out an obscene sequence of curses and climbed as quickly as possible to the top of the lighthouse, being briefly blinded by the light of the lighthouse, he walked towards the railing and looked out at the endless ocean for a brief while as if waiting for something, when he saw nothing, he crouched down, supporting the cage between his knees, he continued to look at the cage without stopping. as if he was waiting for something important to happen.
Then Jacob arrived, another relief, he was alive, this could only mean that Wight lied about there being a hollow on the island. Jacob and Wight stared at each other and Wight got up and dodged Jacob, running away from him, but he ran into Emma and was burned by her. Desperate, he ran back, cornered.
He argued with the children, shook the cage hard, made threats against the lives of the ymbrynes. Emma said she didn't care if he killed Alma, and that hurt even though she knew Emma was bluffing. The Wight obviously didn't believe any of that. When asked what he would do with the ymbrynes, he finally revealed his terrible plan: to use more ymbrynes to replicate the experiment that went wrong in 1908. That left Alma and Esmerelda in a panic. They would be blown up, turned into hollowgasts, and later into empty-minded Wights if that experiment happened and failed again. The Wight threatened them again, he kept up his sadistic, eugenicist and genocidal speech, he shook the cage harder and screamed over the ymbrynes' squawks in despair. He began to spin the cage evilly.
Then the light in the cage began to blink a lot, without stopping, the wight changed his expression when he saw it, he had the look of someone who had won.
“Do you want this?” he said to Emma. “Take it!” And he spun the cage like a discus thrower until he threw it far away from the lighthouse, making the cage dive into the dark night towards the raging sea.
The cold and cutting wind of the night gave way to the freezing embrace of the dark and cold waters of the sea. It was the end, they were going to drown. Each time the rough waves brought the cage to the surface they breathed for brief seconds, the death was sadistic and it prolonged the moments of agony of the two.
At a certain point the cage collided with something at the bottom of the sea, the door of the cage broke and the force of the tide threw Alma out, even though she was almost out of air, a last stimulus made her transform into a human, her tenuous thread of consciousness made her swim frantically, she needed to reach the surface and breathe so she could dive again and save poor Miss Avocet.
She was going to die. She didn't have the strength to reach the surface, her lungs were hurting. The world around her was starting to become a blur. She wasn't going to make it.
Then, as if by magic, something huge hit her. She was sitting underwater on top of a giant thing. She was seeing what looked like a giant fin. She could only be dying, and her last delusion was a sea monster saving her from drowning.
But that wasn't a delusion. Luckily, and to the relief of her battered lungs, something similar to a sea monster emerged. It was probably where the cage hit and freed her. But that couldn't be a monster. Monsters don't exist... She was breathing hard and vomiting seawater that she had swallowed. Her mind tried to reason what had happened, what had saved her from drowning.
She was in the shadow of the monster's fin. Sitting, naked and soaked, taking in air to try to go after the cage. Then the pain came. Someone was pulling her by the hair. She didn't have the strength to scream or even struggle much.
She was dragged close to the hatch, now she could distinguish reality from confusion, she was sitting on the cold steel of a submarine. And smiling at her like in her worst nightmares was Jack, her damned brother, how long had it been since she had seen him? He was much older, but she would recognize that cruel smile anywhere in the world. There really was a monster in that ocean, he was smiling at Alma at that very moment.
From the top of the hatch someone shouted and then they heard a hail of bullets.
“Your children are so insistent... Well, I guess not for long...” He smiled at the sound of the shots. That left Alma stunned.
Another Wight came down from the tower, he picked up Alma and threw her over his shoulder, she found the strength to struggle, but her brother gave her a strong slap to make her stop.
“Your children are desperate to save their mother, so I'm going to give them what they want so much.” Jack gave her one last wicked, enigmatic smile, then ran and transformed into a peregrine falcon and flew towards the sea. She couldn't understand what was happening. What atrocity was Jack planning?
The Wight that had carried her to the top of the tower finally reached the top and opened the hatch and pushed her inside. The last thing Alma saw from the outside world was another Wight walking through the submarine towards the cage with Miss Avocet still inside.
Alma was forced to go down into the submarine. She heard the Wight that had brought her shouting for his companion to come quickly because she had already been captured. Within minutes, the other Wight arrived at the tower and entered with his feathered trophy in his hands.
Alma and Esmerelda (who had already returned to human form) were chained up and thrown into a dark cell. Alma couldn't get what Jack had said out of her head. He hadn't returned to the submarine and that worried her a lot. What the hell was he doing?
Looking around, observing her own misfortune, she finally realized that her life was over, she would never see her children again, she was going to be used in a suicide experiment and she had no choice, no solution, no escape or no hope. Desolate Alma rested her head on Miss Avocet's shoulder and began to cry like she did as a child.