Chapter Five
Asha didn't speak for three days.
Not out of fear — but reverence.
Something had shifted inside her. Something vast. As if her soul had been rearranged and she needed time for the pieces to settle. She moved through the village with quiet grace, her gaze distant, her shadow stretched longer than it should have been.
The villagers noticed.
"Has the girl gone mad?" whispered Iya Kafilat, frowning over her cassava.
"Or maybe… something holy has touched her," murmured the old fisherman, his eyes following her as she walked past the riverbank without flinching.
Children stopped playing to stare. Birds paused mid-flight.
Even the crows bowed their heads when she passed.
By the fourth day, Asha returned to Mama Tani.
The priestess greeted her not with words, but with a knowing silence.
"I saw it all," Asha said, her voice low and grounded. "The trade. The tide. The Breath Gate."
Mama Tani only nodded. "And did you look into yourself?"
"I did."
"And what did you see?"
Asha's eyes narrowed. "A bloodline soaked in salt and silence. But also a soul strong enough to break it."
The old woman finally smiled — a weary, bittersweet smile.
"You're no longer only Asha," she said. "You've become the salt-carrier. The dream-walker. The one who remembers what the ancestors forgot."
That night, Asha stood at the river's edge.
She had feared it once — feared its hunger, its pull. But now, she felt its rhythm echo in her bones. The river was not merely water. It was a vein. A memory. A tongue speaking a language of pulse and tide.
She knelt and dipped her fingers in.
The water turned cold — then red.
Not blood. Not exactly.
But saltwater mixed with grief.
From the surface, a shape began to rise — a face. Her father's face. But it no longer wept.
It watched her with eyes full of sorrow — and something else.
Pride.
"Father?" she whispered.
His image nodded.
"You were taken," she said, tears rising. "Because of me."
But the face spoke without lips.
No. I was taken because a pact was broken. You were the key they couldn't reach then. But they will try again.
"Who are they?"
The tidebound. Spirits of the drowned. The Forgotten. The ones who were denied a name, a grave, a goodbye. They want vessels. Hosts. Doorways.
Asha's jaw tightened. "And they chose me."
They always choose the ones with salt in their blood. You were born on the seventh wave, in the hour between the owl and the crow. You are not just a girl. You are a gate.
Then his face dissolved.
And in its place, a silver coin floated to the surface.
She took it.
The moment she did, pain shot up her arm — not sharp, but ancient. Like a scream echoing from another lifetime.
Etched on the coin was a spiral — the symbol of the Tide Oath.
Mama Tani had once said: "If you ever find the coin of the drowned, know this — a storm is not coming. It has already begun."
Back in her hut, Asha lay awake as the wind howled through the trees.
The coin pulsed beside her.
Suddenly, she sat up.
There was salt in her mouth.
She hadn't eaten anything.
She looked at her palm.
The spiral mark now burned into her skin.
And in her ears, she heard the sea whisper:
"The next vessel has been chosen.
You are no longer the only gate."
A chill ran through her.
Someone else had been marked.
The balance had shifted.
And the war between worlds was no longer only hers to fight.
So it begins —
Asha, the tide-born, salt-veined child of dusk,
must find the second gate before the spirits do.
For only together can the breach be sealed.
Or all realms — living and dead — will fall beneath the golden tide.