Love Island was a curse. Anapa was convinced of it. The island was a teeming hive of life built onto the corpses of all which had come before. Where there was an excess of life, competing for space and resources, there was invariably a high death rate.

Although not, oddly, among upright duomorphs. Or fairies, as they called themselves here.

Death may be a stranger to the people who had been plucked from their homes and thrown onto a tropical island, but danger was not. The threat of death was ever-present, the temptations to trespass against universal morals numerous, the… the very nature of a territory which snatched people away in their sleep and held them captive indefinitely. Ordinarily it was people who became territorial about their land; not land which became territorial about its people.

An ancient land, with bars and beach huts built over a thin layer of silvery sand covering a foundation of skeletons. Skeletons didn’t usually bother Anapa, but he was rarely to concerned about imminently joining them. Everything, from the fattest jaguar to the smallest insect, wanted to kill him. And he was simply not equipped for such rigorous outdoor pursuits as hunting down one’s own dinner or tramping for miles to locate a water source which was not poisoned with psychotics. A lifetime of isolation within palace walls had not prepared him for this. Anapa had not even been permitted to attend beastmoon hunts in his own kingdom. Here, even his transformations into the floppy sea-canid offered him little advantage in fishing.

Cursed he was, and cursed he would remain, until he was able to appease whichever ancestor had felt the need to punish him for some as yet unknown misdemeanour. Each evening, under the moon’s silvery glow, Anapa attempted to commune with deceased members of his family in order to seek their wisdom and support. Thus far, none had offered any useful advice or blessing.

That night’s communion had ended in failure, like every other. Anapa had failed to even connect with anyone he knew, and had abandoned further attempts in favour of an early night. He retreated from the balcony into the bedroom of the rickety treehouse he was staying in, exhaling with relief as he stepped inside and felt the wooden walls offer some small protection from the assault of the dying. This was not the same treehouse he had woken up in when he’d first arrived, with Tahl. After the events at the brook, Anapa had quietly selected new lodgings on the outer edge of Campa Grá and disengaged in further interaction with the living. He removed his vibrant shorts and hung them over the doorframe to air before slipping under the thin covers and turning onto his left so that he could stare at the canopy out of the open window. It had taken weeks, after arriving on Shaman, to get used to sleeping with a pillow instead of a wooden head-rest.

He was dozing off – certainly not asleep yet – when he was rudely jerked forward, as though waking suddenly from sleep. Anapa blinked. He was stood in a dull, greyed out room featuring endless shelves stacked floor to ceiling with thick, heavy tomes. The room seemed blurred at the edges and ever so slightly transparent, so he could just about make out the back of the shelf through the books. A man, grey from every hair follicle on his head all the way down to his toes, was sat at a desk with a scroll in front of him, staring at Anapa as though he were a ghost. A spike of adrenaline coursed through Anapa; he glanced down and felt a wave of relief to discover that, here at least, he was fully dressed in his usual loose black robes.

This was the Realm of the Dead, clearly. Anapa had ‘been’ here often enough to recognise it, although he hadn’t been here, precisely – in some sort of library. He processed this just as the spirit before him found his voice.

“No,” Anapa reassured him in a respectful tone, “I am not dead.” He studied the man’s face, shielding his internal disappointment. They didn’t look at all related, so it was unlikely that this was his mysterious curse-happy ancestor. “I am a medium, a bridge between the living and the dead. Did you summon me?”