The shrine sat like a forgotten mouth in the earth, half-swallowed by vines and silence. Hidden at the foot of the cliffs, just beyond the mangrove line, it had once been a sacred place,now it was nothing but a ruin. But ruins remember. They breathe. They wait.
He moved through the overgrown path like a man retracing a dream—slow, deliberate, haunted.
Tall, broad-shouldered, his trench coat heavy with sea-damp and ash. The moon caught on the faint scar running from his temple to the corner of his jaw. He'd earned that scar in a place where names weren't spoken. Only blood remembered.
He stepped over fallen offerings: broken calabashes, rotted flowers, faded cloth.
Inside, the air shifted.
Still. Sacred.
The stone altar loomed ahead—cracked, moss-covered, but intact. He approached it reverently, as if the stones could still judge him. As if she could still hear.
"She's close," he murmured. His voice was deep, worn from years of silence. "And when she remembers everything... the blood tide begins."
From his coat, he pulled a weathered photograph creased, scorched at one edge. He held it like a relic.
Three girls stood smiling in the frame. Their youth was soft around the eyes, unaware of the war written in their blood.
One was unmistakably Zubeida bold, eyes fierce even in childhood.
The second, softer, with laughter curling in the corners of her mouth—that was Amani.
The third girl?
Her half of the photograph had been scratched out completely. Nails had clawed through the paper, leaving a violent absence.
Naima.
He exhaled slowly, placing the photo on the altar. Beside it, he unwrapped a talisman wrapped in red-dyed goatskin.
Inside was a carved obsidian pendant, glowing faintly with a sigil that pulsed—*inverted*. It was Sasha's mark… twisted. Reversed. Unbound.
He stared at it for a long moment. "Forgive me, Naima," he said. "But she has to finish what you started."
Then he knelt and began to chant—not words of power, but remembrance.
Not summoning... but awakening.
Miles away, Sasha shot upright in bed, her sheets twisted around her legs. Her breathing was ragged, eyes wide, heart pounding.
The pendant around her neck was hot—burning against her chest like it wanted to burrow into her skin.
She touched it with trembling fingers.
Flashes slammed into her like waves
—Naima in a ceremonial robe, her face streaked with sacred paint, leading a circle of women in a moonlit grove.
—Misha beside her, hesitant but strong.
—A third woman entering the circle… a face flickering, changing. Familiar, yet wrong.
Sasha clutched her chest.
It wasn't just a dream.
It was a memory. One that didn't belong to her,yet did.
The whispers came back, curling in her ears like smoke.
"One of you was never meant to remember."
She stumbled out of bed and splashed water on her face. But even the cold couldn't stop the truth unraveling behind her eyes.
The sigil wasn't a mark of protection.
It was a seal.
A binding.
And now… someone was trying to unlock it.
From the shadows.
And if that happened,
She didn't know who she'd become.
Or who she'd lose.