The Keepers of the Stone

The sun in Dalmatia does not gentle the earth; it hammers it. It beats the ancient limestone to a blinding white, bakes the red soil to terracotta, and turns the Adriatic into a sheet of shattered sapphire. For Mara, returning to the village of her childhood after two decades in the soft, grey light of London, the intensity was a physical blow. She’d come to empty her late grandmother’s house, a task she’d approached with the brisk efficiency that defined her life as a financial auditor. It was a matter of ledgers and logistics, of sorting through memories as if they were outdated files.

The village, a cluster of stone houses clinging to a hillside above a cove, seemed smaller, quieter. The air smelled of pine, salt, and the dry, sweet scent of rosemary growing wild between rocks. The only constant from her memory was the sound: the cicadas’ relentless metallic hum, a vibration that felt embedded in the very stone.

Ivan was the village’s other constant. He ran the only bar, a shaded terrace overlooking the harbour where a handful of old men played bela and smoked as if it were their occupation. Ivan was around Mara’s age, but where she was all sharp angles and city pallor, he was weathered and comfortable, his forearms tanned and roped with muscle from maintaining his fishing boat. He had stayed, and she had left. It was the oldest story in the Balkans.

“Still no buyers?” he asked on her third day, placing a small black coffee in front of her without asking. His tone was not unkind, but it held the faintest note of challenge.

“The market is slow,” Mara said, stirring the thick, sugary dregs. “And the house… it needs more work than I remembered.”

This was an understatement. The house, built from the same stubborn limestone as the village church, was a warren of cool, dark rooms filled with the ghosts of her childhood summers—the smell of wax polish, dried figs, and mothballs. Her grandmother’s things were still there, preserved under white sheets like a museum exhibit waiting to be catalogued. It felt less like emptying a house and more like an archaeological dig.

“It’s a good house,” Ivan said, his eyes on the horizon where the islands lay like sleeping giants. “Strong stones. They remember.”

Mara offered a tight, polite smile. It was the kind of thing people said here. Poetic, but ultimately meaningless. Stones didn’t remember; they just were. Her world was built on data, on things that could be quantified and proven.

That evening, as a blood-orange sun sank into the sea, a fierce, dry wind began to blow from the east. The bura. It screamed down the mountain passes, whipping the olive trees into silver-backed frenzies and rattling the old green shutters on Mara’s windows. The house groaned in protest, its ancient joints settling and shifting. It was during the height of the storm, as she tried to secure a banging shutter in her grandmother’s bedroom, that she found it. The wind had shaken a heavy armoire a few inches from the wall, revealing a section of plaster that had crumbled away, exposing not the usual rough stone behind it, but something smoother, darker.

Curious, Mara pulled the armoire further out, her city-soft hands scraping against the rough stone. Behind it, a patch of plaster about the size of a dinner plate had fallen away, revealing not more wall, but a deep, narrow void. Her heart beat a little faster. A hiding place.

Using her phone as a torch, she peered inside. The light glinted off something metallic. Reaching in, her fingers brushed against cold, smooth glass and rough-edged paper. She pulled out a small, heavy object. It was a tin box, the kind that once held throat lozenges, now rusted shut. Beside it, tucked into a crevice, was a small, dark green bottle, sealed with wax.

The discovery felt illicit, a secret the house had been forced to surrender. She took the items to the kitchen table, the bura howling a lament outside. With a knife, she pried open the tin. Inside, protected from the damp, were a few yellowed photographs and a single sheet of paper, folded tightly. The photographs showed people she didn’t recognise—a young couple, serious-faced, dressed in the simple, worn clothing of the last century. The man had her grandmother’s defiant dark eyes. The paper was a letter, the ink faded to brown, the script a tight, elegant Cyrillic she couldn’t read.

Frustrated, she turned to the bottle. Breaking the wax seal, she pulled the cork. Inside was a single rolled page, protected from the elements. This script was different; Latin, not Cyrillic, but in a language she couldn’t place. It wasn’t Croatian, or Italian, or any of the languages she knew. The letters were archaic, looping. And at the bottom, instead of a signature, was a single, intricate drawing: a compass rose intertwined with a stylised cypress tree.

The wind died down near dawn, leaving a world scoured clean and preternaturally still. Mara had not slept. She felt the weight of the objects on the table, a weight that had nothing to do with their physical mass. They were questions without answers, echoes without a source. What is hidden does not vanish. It waits.

The next morning, she took the documents to Ivan’s bar. He was wiping down tables, his movements economical and sure. She laid the papers before him without preamble.

“Can you read this?”

He dried his hands carefully on a towel before picking up the Cyrillic letter. His brow furrowed as he scanned the text. His face, usually so open, became a closed door.

“It’s a love letter,” he said finally, his voice flat. “From a man to a woman. From my grandfather to your grandmother.”

Mara stared at him. “Your grandfather?”

“They were engaged. Before the war. Before… everything changed.” He put the letter down as if it were hot. “This is old history, Mara. It’s best left alone.”

“And this?” she pressed, pointing to the other document. “What language is that?”

Ivan glanced at it, and a flicker of something—recognition? fear?—passed behind his eyes. “It’s not for tourists. It’s not a story for you.” He turned away, a clear dismissal. “The past is a minefield here. Some things are better left buried beneath the stone.”

His words should have deterred her. They were meant to. But to Mara, a woman who solved puzzles for a living, a dismissal was just another piece of data. It meant he knew something. It meant the past wasn’t past at all.

She began her audit of history with the same rigour she applied to a company’s finances. She visited the village’s ancient, half-blind priest who kept the parish records. She spent days in the small regional archive in the next town, her eyes straining over faded ledgers and census reports. The story she pieced together was a fractured, painful mirror of the entire region’s history.

Her grandmother’s family, Catholic Croats, had owned the stone house and a small olive grove. Ivan’s family, Orthodox Serbs, had been their neighbours for generations. The love between the young couple had been a local fact, a future everyone expected. Then the Second World War tore through Dalmatia, a conflict that was not just a war of armies but a brutal civil war between partisan factions, fascist occupiers, and nationalist militias. Old neighbours became mortal enemies in the space of a whispered rumour or a misplaced allegiance.

The couple’s engagement was broken, not by them, but by their families. Fear and suspicion were the new currencies. Ivan’s grandfather’s family was forced to flee the village one night, their house confiscated. They never returned. Until Ivan, decades later, buying back a piece of his heritage with his fishing boat and his bar.

The love letter was a plea, a desperate attempt to hold onto a world that was being systematically erased. But the other document, the one with the strange script and the symbol, remained a mystery. The archivist, an elderly woman with fingers stained by old ink, had looked at it and shaken her head.

“This is not official. This is… something else. A private code. Perhaps from one of the resistance groups. The Partizani, maybe. Or something older.” She pointed a trembling finger at the symbol. “This, I have seen before. In the old monastery on the island of Šipan. On the floor of the cloister.”

It was the only thread she had. Two days later, she convinced a reluctant Ivan to take her in his boat to Šipan. The journey was made in a tense silence. The monastery was a beautiful, decaying place, its courtyard garden running wild, its stones warm under the sun. And there, in a shadowed corner of the cloister walk, she found it: the same symbol, carved into a single flagstone, almost worn away by centuries of footsteps.

Ivan stood back, his arms crossed, watching her. As she traced the carving with her fingers, she noticed one part of the design—the tip of the cypress tree—was not just worn, but deliberately chiselled to form a tiny, almost invisible arrow. It pointed to the western wall of the cloister, to a section overgrown with a venerable bougainvillea, its purple blooms a violent splash of colour against the pale stone.

“Ivan,” she called, her voice echoing in the quiet. “I need your help.”

Together, they pulled aside the thorny branches. Behind them, where the stonework met the foundation, was another void, a small, dark opening. Ivan’s resistance melted away, replaced by a dawning, fearful curiosity. He reached in, his fisherman’s hands sure and careful, and pulled out a metal cylinder, sealed with pitch.

Inside, protected from the damp, was a journal. The pages were filled with the same archaic script, but interspersed with sketches—maps of the coastline, detailed drawings of local flora, and astronomical charts. It was a record, but not of battles or politics. It was a naturalist’s journal, but one obsessed with hidden things: caves with underwater entrances, secluded coves, ancient walking paths lost to the maquis.

And on the last page, a final entry, written in a hurried, desperate scrawl that they could both understand. It spoke of a great danger, of a treasure that was not gold, but knowledge. It spoke of a hidden library, a collection of texts and artifacts salvaged from monasteries and libraries across Dalmatia, saved from the destruction of war by a secret society of scholars, priests, and farmers who believed some things were more precious than ideology. They called themselves the Keepers of the Stone, and their symbol was the compass for guidance and the cypress for eternal memory.

The journal’s author, a monk from this very monastery, had been the last Keeper. He had hidden the library as the conflict closed in around him, trusting that the stones themselves would guard it until someone with the right heart, someone who could see, would come to find it. The final words of the entry were the ones that had drawn Mara across the sea: “What is hidden does not vanish. It waits. Beneath stone, beneath silence, beneath the weight of cypress shadows—it waits for someone to see, and to tell.”

Mara looked up from the journal, her eyes meeting Ivan’s. The anger and defensiveness were gone from his face, replaced by a profound and stunned awe. The story wasn’t about his family or hers. It was bigger than both of them. It was their shared heritage, a secret history of preservation in a land so often scarred by destruction.

The journal’s maps led them to a place they both knew—a secluded cove a mile down the coast from their village, where a gnarled, ancient cypress grew sideways from a cliff, casting a long, finger-like shadow across the water at sunset. They went at dawn, Ivan diving with a torch while Mara watched from the boat, her heart in her throat.

He surfaced, gasping. “There’s an opening. A tunnel. Behind the rockfall.”

It took them a week of secret, careful dives to clear the narrow entrance. The tunnel led not to a room, but to a vast, air-filled cavern, high in the cliff face. And there, in the cool, silent darkness, safe from the sun and the wars and the passing of centuries, was the library. Wooden crates, carefully tarred, were stacked on stone shelves. Leather-bound books, ceramic jars, and metal chests filled the space, a silent, immense weight of memory.

They did not open them. They simply sat there in the beam of their torchlight, surrounded by the collective breath of generations who had chosen to save rather than destroy. The silence was no longer empty; it was full. It was the silence of waiting, finally over.

Mara never sold the house. Ivan never left his bar. But the space between them was forever changed, bridged by a secret too immense to be owned by one person. They became the new Keepers, guardians of a truth that the land itself had remembered.

Sometimes, in the evening, they would sit on his terrace or her balcony, watching the light fade on the stone houses and the sea. They rarely spoke of the cavern. They didn’t need to. The proof was in the way they now listened to the stories the old men told, hearing the hidden truths woven between the words. It was in the way Ivan looked at the land, not just as a fisherman, but as a descendant. It was in the way Mara finally understood that some ledgers could never be balanced, only honoured.

The past was not a ghost to be feared, but a patient teacher, waiting in the stone, in the silence, in the shadows, for those willing to learn its language.

For in Dalmatia, the stones remember. And sometimes, they choose who will listen.