Min’s Record

I wasn't meant to see the coffin.

I was meant to be mending nets down by the south stream, the one where the minnows would flash like little knives in the sun.

Something pulled me uphill that morning—an itch in my legs, a hum under the ground, call it what you will. The kind of hunch that warns bad weather or misfortunes.

I crept into the clearing and saw it—that metal coffin thing, gaped open like a yawning mouth: I knew I wasn’t supposed to be there.

From the first moment, it had been sealed. I'd watched them rope it off. Crowe had painted one of his angry symbols on a plank and called it “precaution.” But the lid was off now, and the earth around it looked torn up like something had pushed from the inside.

There was no corpse inside. Not a body in sight; just a puddle of water. Clear. Still. Too still.

It’s too late to regret that I didn’t tell anyone.

I just didn’t want to cause trouble. I didn’t want to disturb the calm waters.

So I just stared. I drew what I saw in my notebook—symbols on the inner lid, foam that shimmered like fish scales, the shape of the puddle—and left. Quietly.

Later, I saw Sequencia run past the edge of the meadow, face pale, breath ragged. She didn’t see me. She never does. But I knew where she’d been.

Something changed that day.

Something in the way Crowe walked, the way he lost his leisurely strut told me enough. I watched him sharpening his blade in front of the longhouse, checking its edge against the light. Lee started sleeping less, eyebags an apparent indicator of stress as much as his darting eyes revealed. Sequencia wrote and wrote and wrote in that little book of hers, the one she never shared. No one said it out loud, but I could feel it: the fear had cracked open.

And still, the water ran. Smooth. Flowing. Beautiful.

I thought about the other coffin—the first one, the one that boy dug up. I’d snuck a look when they first unearthed it. Even then, something in me whispered, don’t touch.

And now there was a second– empty.

I started drawing more, collecting the strange things I saw: patterns of dying moss, fish flopping with glassy eyes, the way shadows gathered thicker near the glacial lake. I didn’t understand it, not really; I still felt like someone should be writing it down.

The others were always busy making decisions. Voting, arguing, discussing alliances and coups and exiles. I just kept watching like it was what I was written to do.

One night, while they debated what to do with the envoy and the hunter’s failed revolt, I saw a light move through the woods. Not a torch. Not a lantern. A shimmer, like moonlight walking.

I followed.

It led me down toward the streambeds, where the water murmured with something like memory. I crouched behind a boulder and waited.

Someone—no, something—stepped out from behind a tree. Human-shaped, but not right. Too still. Too smooth. It stood at the stream’s edge and stared at the water. Then it turned its head—just a tilt, just enough for me to see its eyes. Or where its eyes should’ve been.

No lids. No pupils.

Just glass.

I didn’t scream. I held my breath and stayed very, very still.

The figure stepped into the stream. The water didn’t ripple.

It dissipates, and doesn’t take a second to do it either.

I waited until dawn to move again.

In the weeks that followed, I said nothing. But I drew everything. I added it all to my journal: the glass-eyed watcher, the open coffin, the changed fish, the spiral symbol etched into the dirt near the coffin, the one Sequencia said matched the envoy’s pack.

I still don’t know what any of it meant.

It’s all but a feeling I had, that someone would need to know. After we’re gone. After the stream takes what it wants again.

So I keep writing.

I’m not part of the Council. I don’t lead expeditions or vote on alliances. I only see what others miss, and I remember.

Someday, when they ask what happened to our village—when the water runs red or flows to silence— all that is left will be the story of my own scribing.

Signed,

Min

Recorder of what was ignored