Forgotten island

The blinding tropical sun of Nakali burns through your eyelids before you even fully open them. Your head is pounding with a vicious, inexplicable hangover, and your mouth tastes like stale karaoke-bar junk food. As you push yourself up from the neon-pink sand, the memories of last night are a complete, terrifying blank. You remember jumping into the sun-shaped portal with your best friends, Jo and Raissa—but after that? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. "I'm telling you, Raissa, he's a spy! Or a demon! Look at the vest!" Jo's frantic voice snaps you into focus. You blink past the glare to see Jo aggressively pacing around a nearby palm tree, her face flushed with panic. Tied securely to that palm tree—smack-dab in the middle of a beautiful, mythological paradise—is a literal talking weredog. He's wearing a red vest and a yellow headband, and he is absolutely cocooned in heavy-duty gray duct tape. Raissa stands over him, adjusting her oversized red glasses, holding a makeshift interrogation folder made out of a large tropical leaf. "Listen, Raww—if that even is your real name," Raissa interrogates, pointing a finger at him. "We woke up twelve hours late, we have no idea how we got here, and you're the only local around. What did you do to our memories?!" From behind the thick layers of duct tape, the hapless, well-meaning weredog lets out a muffled, desperate whimper. "Mphhh! Mmm-phhh! (I didn't do anything! We literally hung out last night!)" Raww strains against his sticky prison, his big brown eyes locked onto you like you're his absolute last hope.

Raww manages to wiggle his snout free from the tape for just a split second. "Please! I'm just a guy who wants friends! Get these things off me, they're pulling my fur! You guys know me! We are the wild pack- also, your friend is being poked by a Sarimanok" Raww said sheepishly.

Jo's first sensation was sand in her mouth.

She spat, coughed, and rolled onto her back, blinking against a white-hot sun that hung directly overhead like it had something to prove. Her head throbbed in time with her pulse. Every muscle in her body felt like it had been wrung out and left to dry.

"Raissa," she rasped. Her voice came out cracked, unfamiliar. "Raissa!"

A groan answered her, a few feet away in the tree line. Raissa was half-buried in a drift of dead palm fronds, one arm flung over her face, dark hair fanned out across the sand like she'd been dropped from a great height and simply stayed where she landed.

"Don't yell," Raissa mumbled. "My brain is trying to leave my skull and I'd like to let it."

"Where are we?"

That got her moving. Raissa peeled the fronds off herself and sat up, squinting first at the water — endless, turquoise, cheerfully indifferent — and then at the wall of green jungle behind them, and finally at Jo, as if Jo might have the answer written somewhere on her face.

"I don't know," Raissa said slowly. "I don't — Jo, I don't remember anything. Do you remember anything?"

Jo tried. She reached for the last thing she knew for certain and came up with nothing but a blank, ringing static, like a radio tuned between stations. "No," she admitted. "Last thing I've got is—" She frowned. "Nothing. There's nothing there."

"That's not okay. That is not an okay amount of nothing."

"I know."

They got up together, unsteady, using each other as ballast. The beach curved away in both directions, empty of any dock, any wreckage, any sign that another human being had ever set foot on it. Just sand, and water, and behind them, a jungle so dense and dark green it looked almost black in its shadows.

"Okay," Jo said, in the voice she used when she needed to sound calmer than she felt. "Okay. We find high ground, we find water, we find out if this is actually an island or if there's a road forty feet past those trees and we're both idiots."

Raissa let out a breath that was almost a laugh. "I would take the road."

"Me too. Come on."

They made it maybe thirty yards into the jungle before Jo heard it — a snap, deliberate and heavy, the kind of sound a foot makes when it's trying very hard not to make a sound and failing.

She threw an arm out, and Raissa froze beside her.

"Tell me that was you," Raissa whispered.

"That was not me."

The undergrowth ahead of them shuddered. Something large was moving through it, low and fast, parallel to them, and then not parallel to them, cutting an angle straight toward where they stood rooted to the spot. Jo's hand closed around the nearest thing that might pass for a weapon — a fallen branch, rotten at one end, better than nothing — and she had just enough time to plant her feet before the ferns exploded apart and a shape came crashing through them at head height.

Fur the color of caramel, a long doglike snout, one ear droopy, the size of a frown man if it had been standing instead of bounding on all fours — and it was standing, suddenly, rearing up onto two legs not two feet from Raissa with its mouth already open —

"WAIT, I'M FRIENDLY, I'M FRIEND—"

Both girls screamed. Raissa screamed loud enough to startle a flock of birds out of the canopy above them, and Jo screamed and swung the branch in the same motion, catching the creature across the shoulder with a crack that shuddered up her arms.

"OW — okay, fair, that's fair, I'd hit me too—"

"IT TALKS," Raissa shrieked. "JO IT TALKS—"

"I NOTICED, RAISSA, RUN—"

They ran. The creature did not chase them so much as trip over itself trying to stop chasing them, all four paws skidding in the leaf litter, and its voice chased them instead, high and apologetic and entirely too human to be coming out of that snout.

"Please don't run, I wasn't gonna hurt you, I just haven't seen a person in so long and I got excited and I forgot the whole 'walking up slow' thing, I'm really sorry, I'm SORRY—"

Jo hit the beach first, spun around with the branch up, and found the creature had stopped at the tree line, both huge paws raised in front of it like a man showing off empty pockets. Up close, in daylight, it looked less like a monster out of a nightmare and more like something that had wandered out of one and gotten profoundly lost — patchy fur, one notched ear, a long pink tongue that lolled out sideways when it panted, which it was doing now, hard, from the run.

"See?" it said. "Not chasing. Not chasing anymore. Chasing's over."

"What," Raissa said, flat and airless, "are you."

"Raww," said the creature, and then, when that clearly didn't land, added, "That's — that's my name. Raww. I'm a person. Were-dog person. It's a whole thing."

"A were-dog," Jo repeated.

"Yeah, like a werewolf, but — look, it's a long story and you both look like you're about to hit me with that stick again, which, respect, but can we talk about it?"

"No," Jo said.

It took both of them, four zigzagging tackle attempts, and — humiliatingly, for all three of them — a scavenged roll of duct tape from the wreck of a dry-bag half-buried near the waterline, but twenty minutes later, Raww was sitting upright against the trunk of a broad-boled fig tree with his forepaws bound behind the trunk and three loops of tape wound over his chest, looking less like a captured monster and more like a very large, very put-upon dog who'd been left at the groomer's too long.

"This is undignified," he said.

"You almost took Raissa's head off," Jo said, crouching in front of him with the roll still in her hand, turning it slowly like a threat.

"I did not, I was excited, there's a difference—"

"Where are we," Raissa cut in. She'd found her voice again, low and hard, arms crossed tight over her chest like she was holding herself together by main force. "What is this island. Why don't we remember getting here. And why is there a talking dog on it."

Raww's ears drooped. Something in his face — and it was expressive, far more expressive than fur and teeth had any right to be — folded inward, like a door quietly closing.

"You guys don't remember me..?" He said

The village of Nakali unfolded before them like a fever dream painted by someone who'd never been told "no." Huts woven from living vines spiraled up the trunks of colossal trees, their roofs thatched with leaves that shimmered from emerald to violet depending on how the light hit them. Bridges of braided rope and glowing fiber connected the canopy, swaying gently in a breeze that smelled of roasted coconut and something sweet and unfamiliar. Creatures of every impossible shape wandered the mossy paths—small round spirits bouncing like rubber balls, a vendor with six arms selling skewers of fruit that pulsed faintly with their own inner light, a winged lizard lounging on a barrel and smoking what appeared to be a tiny pipe.

And the noise. The village hummed with life—laughter, music from instruments that looked grown rather than built, the chatter of beings that spoke in clicks and whistles and tongues older than any human language.

"That's where we got Halo-halo" Raww points at a dessert vendor. "Oh yeah!" He then points at the leftover barrels from last night's performance. "That's where we saw a barrel show. Oh yeah!" He said with more enthusiasm before continuing and pointing at a vampire. "That vampire came onto me. Oh yeah.." the last 'oh yeah' sounded more exaggerated and sultry. "AND THAT!- ahh no!" He quickly pivoted away until he was hiding behind a lamp post. "You see that area behind me?" He said with emberssment and mild dread. He points at a yantok vendor with his clawed thumb. "Well..we went by that shop last night and, well.. when I get too close to sticks I go full dog mode.."

"Full dog?" Raissa said with confusion