The ship sailed into its third day as the midnight sun began to fold away its white curtain. At two in the morning, the sky held the hues of dusk, a veil of pale violet draped over the ice fields. Samira bundled Karim in two layers of blankets and carried him onto the deck. The wind cut like knives, yet carried a cold sweetness—the scent of Arctic lichen, like the very smell of time.
The captain stood at the helm, pouring hot tea from a brass pot into his palm; the steam was instantly shredded by the wind. He pointed northeast. "Aurora's coming. Don't blink."
Karim tilted his head back. The first streak of green light reflected in his pupils—as if drawn with a fine brush across the ink-blue canvas. The green slowly bled out, forming arcs, then curtains, finally spreading into a whole ocean of flowing light. Pink seeped from the green, like a faded rose watermark on old stationery. Then came purple, gold, turquoise—colors bleeding into each other yet distinct, as if the sky was writing an untranslatable letter for the earth.
Samira drew the wooden bird shard from her inner pocket and placed it on the deck railing. The aurora light striking the charred wood grain cast tiny, prismatic flecks. Karim reached out to touch it; his fingertip caught a speck of green light, like stealing a living star.
"Sis, it's writing," the boy whispered.
Samira looked down. The river pattern within the wood grain, once blurred, now glowed—not orange, but the aurora's cool colors. Like a silver thread reanimated, it wound from one end of the shard to the other, finally coalescing at the broken wingtip into a minuscule postmark: *60°N, 30°E*.
The captain approached, handing her a folding knife and a fountain pen. The knife handle was wrapped in red thread, identical to the one from the signal box. "Carve your names into the ice," he said. "The aurora only recognizes hand-written addresses."
A half-person-high slab of drift ice was tethered to the deck edge. Samira knelt, using the knife as a pen. She carved "Samira" into the ice, then "Karim". Ice shavings flew like shattered stardust. As the final stroke was etched, the aurora flared violently, a cascade of green light pouring down, plating the names in phosphorescent white. Karim placed the apple blossom petal in the center of the carving. It instantly froze transparent, a shard of preserved time.
The captain took out the unlit kerosene lamp, unscrewed the glass shade, placed Karim's frozen petal inside, and added a drop of whale oil. The flame *snapped* alight, glowing with the aurora's green, as if the entire sky had been folded into the glass. Words slowly formed on the inside of the shade: *Northward. Further North.*
The wind abruptly shifted. The mail boat's bow nudged off course. The captain looked up, his expression tightening. "Ice cracking. Need to land." A low, booming groan echoed in the distance, like a giant beast stirring. A black fissure tore across the ice field. Seawater surged up, instantly freezing again into new ridges in the biting wind.
The boat nudged against a natural dock formed by drift ice. The captain handed the kerosene lamp to Samira and pressed a tightly folded nautical chart into her hand. "Follow the ice ridge three kilometers. An old weather station. They've waited long for you."
The ice surface was treacherous. Each step required testing with a toe before committing weight. Karim clung to Samira's back, arms looped around her neck, his breath warm against her ear like a tiny current. The aurora flowed overhead, a silent river. Their footprints, left behind, were slowly smoothed away by the wind, as if no one had ever passed.
The weather station was a log cabin half-buried in snow. Its roof anemometer flag was faded, but the mast pointed stubbornly at the Pole Star. A wooden sign stuck in a snowdrift by the door read in charcoal: *Welcome Home. Stove Lit.*
The door opened. Warmth, thick with the scent of pine, washed over them. A fire roared in the hearth. Faded postcards hung on the wall, each stamped with the same postmark: *60°N, 30°E*. An old man sat at the table, round spectacles perched on his nose, filling out a weather log. At the sound, he looked up. His gaze lingered on Samira's collarbone for a moment, then settled on the green-glowing lamp.
"Ilyas's lamp," the old man murmured. "He promised me someone would come to light the third."
He stood, pulling a metal postmark stamp from a drawer. It was shaped like a tiny Pole Star, its edge engraved with minute script: *Aurora Postman. Never Looks Back.* He pressed the stamp onto Samira's blank postcard. A soft *click*. The ink, still wet, left a glowing white trace on the ice floor.
"Next stop," he said, tucking the postcard into the mailbag, "the end of the aurora. Ice with a name."
Karim slept by the fire, cheeks flushed. Samira placed the wooden bird shard into the old man's hand. The aurora light still flowed within its grain. The old man ran a fingertip lightly over it. The crack in the shard seemed