Chapter One – When the Desert Remembered Her Name
The desert never slept.
It murmured, it shifted, it remembered.
Every grain of red sand was a whisper of something once alive — warriors, children, even gods.
Tonight, it remembered a girl named Nakala.
Smoke clawed at the heavens above the dunes. Her village — E'balu — had become a wound upon the land, its music silenced beneath screams and crackling flame. The wind carried the scent of burnt millet, blood, and fear.
Nakala crawled through the wreckage, ribs aching, one leg dragging uselessly behind her. She no longer screamed; her throat had gone raw hours ago. Around her, the dead lay in twisted peace, their eyes staring at a sky that offered no comfort.
She should have died with them.
But something — a whisper beneath her heartbeat — urged her onward.
"Just a little further," she rasped to herself. The words came like a prayer with no god to hear it.
The sand cut her palms open. Her blood pooled, dark and slow. It soaked into the ground — and the ground stirred.
Ahead, beneath the shattered pillars of an ancient shrine, something glimmered faintly in the firelight. A stone. No — not a stone. A sliver of midnight. Obsidian, half-buried, veins of red light pulsing through it like the breath of something dreaming.
The air trembled around it.
She felt it — a hum that crawled up her spine and set her teeth on edge.
Her grandmother had once spoken of such places, sacred and forbidden. Shrines where the world itself bled through. "Some stones remember," she had said, "and some never forget."
Nakala reached for the shard.
The moment her fingers brushed the surface, the desert exhaled.
---
The world fell silent.
No wind. No crackle of flame. No heartbeat.
Then a voice — low, ancient, and female — spilled into her mind.
It did not speak words. It became them inside her.
> "Who spills blood upon my bones?"
Nakala froze. Her mouth opened, but no sound came. The voice vibrated through her skull, through her ribs, through the wound in her side.
> "Who dares wake the Black Sun?"
The air grew thick. Heat surged beneath her skin. She gasped — her blood, drawn to the stone, began to move on its own, streaming into the obsidian veins. The red glow brightened until it burned like the heart of a dying star.
> "You are fading, child of dust," said the voice, softer now, almost curious.
"And yet your will claws against the dark. Why?"
Nakala's lips trembled. She could not see the speaker, but her words came out broken, half breath, half defiance.
"Because no one should die alone."
A silence followed — the kind that listens.
Then the goddess laughed.
It was not human laughter. It was a sound that bent the air, shaking the dust from the stones. It carried grief, fury, and something older than both.
> "Brave little mortal… or foolish."
"You bleed on my grave and offer me pity?"
The ground split open.
The obsidian cracked, light spilling out like molten gold, black at its edges. Nakala tried to pull away, but her blood bound her to it — threads of red weaving from her veins into the glowing fractures.
> "You have fed me your life," said the voice. "Now you shall bear mine."
A wind roared through the ruin. The light surged into her chest.
She screamed. The sound tore the night apart.
The goddess entered her like a storm — heat, memory, voice, and pain all at once. Nakala's body arched; her eyes turned white, then black, then something in between.
Images flooded her mind — stars collapsing into fire, temples of ivory crumbling beneath a sun that devoured itself. A woman made of flame, crowned in ash, standing at the center of creation as it burned.
And the name.
The name burned deepest of all.
Esh'ra.
The Black Sun.
The Devourer and the Birthmother.
The goddess who ended the first world and sealed herself away to keep from ending another.
When Nakala awoke, the fires of her village were gone. The sky was clear — too clear. Every sound was sharper, every color alive with hidden motion. The desert shimmered as though breathing with her. She could feel the heartbeat of the land, slow and deep, echoing her own.
And then, a whisper — from within.
It came not to her ears, but from behind her thoughts.
> "Do not tremble, vessel. The world has forgotten my song, but I have not forgotten hunger."
"Rest now, Nakala. I will carry us both."
The girl fell to her knees. Her body still felt her wounds, but the pain no longer mattered. The goddess inside her heart pulsed once, twice, steady as dawn.
The Black Sun had risen again — within mortal skin.
---
Far across the dunes, unseen by either goddess or girl, shadows shifted beneath the moon. Eyes without pupils opened among them, glimmering silver in the dark.
The N'gai turned their gaze toward the awakening flame, and the desert whispered once more.
> "It begins again."