For two weeks I sailed and was joined by Asherah swimming along beside me.

“Incubus,” she called.

“My name is Namir,” I said.

“Namir,” Asherah repeated, rolling the taste of it around her mouth. “How did you come out of Eden? Why are you here?”

“I’m looking for my people,” I replied. “You know them?”

“I haven’t seen them for years,” she said. “Centuries ago they taught the nereids to sing. We sirens owe our songs to them, but we stay away from their island now. Ardjanna is a place of fear and few who venture there return.” We sailed in silence for a time before she changed the subject. “Did you really sail all the way from Eden?”

“Yes,” I said, “though I have been searching for this island for years.”

She looked troubled by that. “How long will it be before the men of Eden fill the ocean with their ships? How long will it be before they aren’t content with Eden? How long before they take my world because theirs isn’t enough?”

It made me think of what atlantean technology could do. It brought to mind Lamech’s ambitions and Eve’s warnings and prophecies. “We have a say in that, don’t we?” I asked.

Asherah looked at me as if I was a whale convinced it could fly. “You can not change what has been fated,” she said.

“Why not?” I asked. “Why can’t we change the future? I can change the present. Why not the future?”

“It has been written,” Asherah explained as if to a child. “It has been foretold and seen, not as it may be, but as it will be.”

“I don’t believe that,” I said. “I can’t believe it. I have seen the future be rewritten.” I thought of Elara. “I should have been dead twice, yet I am very much alive. There is no certainty in fate, just like there is no certainty in the present.”

“You are odd,” Asherah mused. “Yet, I believe you. Perhaps you were intended to die, But I do not know how you denied your fate.”

I didn’t tell her about Elara. Those secrets were not mine to tell, but we did talk that way for days, always coming back to that same exchange. I could not convince her and my stubbornness could not be overcome. It didn’t help that I was right. It helped even less that she was too.

In the night I hadn’t seen it, so I was almost on top of it before I saw Ardjanna for the first time. My homeland. The island had a small strait through its arms into a large bay. The west side of the strait had a city built on the cape and a large tower guarding the island’s gate. I sailed beneath it seeing no sign of another soul. Sailing into that bay was like walking straight into the open maw of a crocodile, and had nearly the same result. For all of its creepy emptiness the island was beautiful with trees lining the white sand beaches and clear blue water that shimmered with myriad fish. A city waited on the far side with white cement buildings rising in towers up the slope of the land. All of it was dead. The gulls called above me, but no bell rang on the quay, no other ships sailed the harbor. The entire island was still and quiet.

I found a dock that seemed to be holding up better than the sunken rotten ones that surrounded it and picked my way to it through the graveyard of masts that stuck from the water. The bay itself took me two days to cross if that gives any indication of the magnitude of the emptiness around me. There were no bodies, only empty buildings. I ventured into the city but found no one. It was like Asherah had said. Everything had been abandoned for years. As the wind echoed in the streets I had to remind myself that it was only bricks and concrete. Emptiness held no danger. I was still unnerved. The homes, docks, and warehouses were built for people. Cities were made to be lived in. Where was everybody?

I made a thorough search of the city but found nothing but birds and insects. Once a jackal looked up at me and stared for a long moment before skittering into a dark alley. As the sun sank and the shadows lengthened to darkness I left the town to its ghosts and returned to my ship casting out into the harbor. I wasn’t about to stay in the empty city alone. Asherah had left me as soon as the land was visible so I passed the night in quiet solitude jumping at every sound and shadow until finally sleep found me.