Waiting was not silence.
It was tension stretched thin enough to sing.
Across Tark Island, restraint settled like a second atmosphere—heavy, deliberate, exhausting. Watchfires burned lower than usual, their flames fed sparingly, as though even fire had been ordered to conserve itself. Patrols moved in wider arcs but fewer numbers, overlapping lines of sight instead of tightening them. Nothing advanced. Nothing retreated.
To outsiders, it might have looked like fear.
To those inside the Resistance, it felt like standing barefoot on the edge of a blade, trusting that balance alone would keep flesh from splitting.
Imade had not slept.
She stood in the central hall long after the night rotation had changed, hands clasped behind her back, eyes fixed on the tactical lattice projected faintly above the stone floor. Lines of probability shimmered and faded as new reports filtered in. None of them resolved into certainty.
That was the problem.
Wars, Imade had learned, were survivable when danger was obvious. What eroded people was ambiguity—the sense that something terrible was coming, paired with the inability to justify action.
Behind her, boots scuffed stone.
Kola paced, restless as a storm denied release. "Every instinct says strike," he muttered for the third time that hour. "They're baiting us, yes—but waiting only gives them time to sharpen the knife."
Imade did not turn. "And charging gives them exactly what the prophecy expects."
"The prophecy," Kola snapped, "has already taken one of ours."
That landed harder than he intended. He knew it. She heard it anyway.
Before Imade could respond, Seyi spoke from the eastern parapet. "Instinct isn't wrong," he said. "It's just incomplete."
He stood with his palms resting lightly on the stone, eyes unfocused—not inward, but outward, tracking movements beyond the visible spectrum. Since returning from the abyss, he seemed perpetually attuned to currents no one else could sense.
Imade joined him. "You're certain they won't strike directly?"
Seyi hesitated, then answered honestly. "I'm certain they won't strike where we're looking."
That was as close to reassurance as he could give.
The loss came quietly.
No horns sounded. No alarms fractured the air.
There was only a sudden thinning—like breath leaving the world too quickly—followed by a single scream that cut short, severed mid-syllable as though reality itself had swallowed it.
By the time the guards reached the lower terraces, it was already over.
Ayo lay near the outer sigil stones, eyes wide, body untouched by blade or burn. His limbs rested as if he had simply lain down, exhausted. The symbols beneath him glowed faintly, then dimmed, their light receding in shame.
"No signs of force," a scout whispered, voice shaking. "No struggle. It's like he just… stepped out of the world."
Imade knelt beside the body.
Ayo had been one of the first to join the Resistance when it was still little more than a rumor and a shared refusal. Too young. Too curious. Always asking why instead of how. He had asked once if the twins knew what everyone was becoming for them.
Imade had not known how to answer.
She closed his eyes herself, fingers steady despite the tremor in her chest. Around her, grief gathered—not loud, not explosive, but sharp enough to cut through discipline.
Kola slammed his fist into the stone wall. "This is on us," he said. "On waiting."
No one contradicted him immediately.
Seyi felt the weight of it like pressure behind his sternum. The abyss stirred faintly—not urging violence, but offering something worse: justification. A clean narrative where action erased guilt.
He rejected it.
"No," Seyi said quietly. "This is on them. And it's deliberate."
Kola rounded on him. "Deliberate?"
"Yes," Seyi replied. "A message."
"A message written in blood," Kola shot back.
Imade stood then, slowly, deliberately placing herself between them—not as a barrier, but as an axis. "Enough," she said. Her voice did not rise. It did not need to.
She looked at the gathered fighters, the scholars, the scouts whose hands were clenched white-knuckled at their sides. "Ayo was not taken because we waited," she said. "He was taken because we didn't break."
That stopped them.
"They couldn't force us to move," Imade continued. "So they removed someone who mattered. Someone human. Someone whose absence would echo."
Silence answered her.
Then she added, more quietly, "This is not punishment. It's instruction."
Kola's voice cracked. "Instruction for what?"
"For where they can reach us," Imade said. "And for whom this war is actually about."
Her gaze lifted—not to the ceiling, but inward, toward the protected quarters deep within the stronghold.
"The twins," she said.
The word settled like a held breath.
Seyi knelt beside the sigils, placing his palm against the cooling stone. He closed his eyes, letting the abyss whisper—not in riddles, but in impressions layered with grief.
"Yes," he said after a long moment. "I can trace it. The method, not the hand."
Kola scoffed bitterly. "Meaning?"
"Meaning they didn't kill him," Seyi replied. "They displaced him. Folded him sideways out of sequence. It's cleaner. Quieter. And meant to terrify."
Imade absorbed that without flinching. "And you can follow it?"
"I can feel where the world thinned," Seyi said. "Which means they miscalculated."
"How?" Kola demanded.
"They think grief will rush us," Seyi said. "It won't."
Imade nodded. "It will focus us."
Thunder rolled again—closer this time, not violent, but deliberate. Outside, the sky's strange alignment completed itself, clouds locking into geometry too precise to be natural.
A strategist approached Imade quietly. "If they can do this without triggering our wards—"
"—then the wards are not meant to stop them," Imade finished. "They're meant to make us feel safe."
She straightened, the weight of command settling fully onto her shoulders. "We mourn," she said. "Publicly. Fully. No suppression."
Kola frowned. "And after?"
"And after," Imade said, "we adjust. We protect the twins more tightly than ever. We stop treating restraint as absence of action."
She looked to Seyi. "You'll map the thinning points."
He nodded.
She looked to Kola. "You'll keep the fighters from turning this grief into recklessness."
His jaw tightened. He nodded anyway.
As Ayo's body was carried away, the Resistance did not shatter.
But something hardened.
Above Tark Island, the sky held its shape.
The enemy had drawn first blood.
And learned—too late—that patience, once wounded, did not weaken.
It sharpened.