One moment, Tako was breathing the night air by the wooden stilted hut at the shore;
the next, the world didn't fade; it snapped.
It was in a viscous, airless black, heavy, like being buried in cold wet ash.
Then, the Flashes began.
They weren't scenes; they were shreds of logic thrown at his retinas.
The Slicing: A flash of a ripe, heavy breadfruit.
In the next frame, it wasn't a knife that hit it, but a Blur of Red.
The fruit didn't just cut; it exploded into a spray of thick, purple-black juice that tasted like copper.
The Movement: A tall, lanky silhouette—a shadow stretched until it looked like a structural defect—towered over a group of villagers.
It didn't punch.
It didn't grab.
It moved with a staccato, joint-locked kick.
A villager flew backward, but in mid-air, their body turned into a hollowed-out husk of dry pandanus, shattering against a tree that wasn't there a second ago.
The mind tried to build a bridge between the images, but the bridge kept collapsing.
The Eyes: Two points of sulfur-red glare burned through the black mist.
They didn't blink.
They didn't move.
They just grew larger, vibrating at a frequency that made Tako's teeth ache.
The Fingers: Suddenly, the screen of his mind was blotted out.
Five long, spindly fingers—thin as sennit rope but as rigid as iron—rose in a perfect horizontal plane.
The nails were the worst part.
They were sturdy, yellowed talons, curved and sharp, catching a light that shouldn't exist.
They hovered inches from his eyes, vibrating with a high-pitched tink-tink-tink sound, like stone striking glass.
Flash. The fingers are dragging through a pile of "fruit."
Flash. The fruit was screaming.
Flash. The tall monster was dancing the Ruoia, but its limbs were too long, its knees bending backward with a wet, wooden crack.
Tako lunged forward, his fingers straining toward the familiar silhouette of Kanka. "Kanka! Let me help you!"
The distance folded.
As Kanka neared the foreground—looming large as if pressed against a glass pane—the world glitched.
The Hair: That thick, red-loc bun evaporated.
One frame it was there, a crown of warrior pride;
the next, it was a jagged, cauterized crater.
The hole in his skull pulsed with a sickening, neon bruised light—purples and magentas that looked like deep-tissue trauma illuminated from within.
The hole inverted, twisting into a concentric ring of shark-teeth, white and serrated, gnashing in a rhythmic, mechanical hunger as his head tilted back.
looking at the trees, and the shadows were pointing toward the sun instead of away from it. the wind on the island stopped behaving like wind. The smell of the breadfruit turned into the smell of oxidizing iron.
He saw the "Kanka-object" beginning to tilt, the geometry of its shoulders and the jagged crater of its head looking "wrong" like a structural support snapping.
Tako pulled back with a violent, lung-burning gasp, his feet slapping against the sand in a panicked, retreating rhythm. Step. Step. Step.
BAM.
The body fell forward, covering twenty feet of distance in a fraction of a second, as if the air between them had simply been deleted.
The impact was absolute.
The gore hit the vision with the force of a high-pressure burst, a "volume" of heat and blood too much for one body.
It was thick, almost like paint, obscuring everything in a dark, opaque red, that felt like being submerged in a slaughterhouse tank, pinning his lungs, crushing the air out of his ribs in a claustrophobic squeeze.
He tried to run, but his legs turned into his enemies. His feet felt like lead anchors, fused to the shifting sand.
A hand—Tako reached out and performed a slow, clinical wipe. A single streak of clarity appeared in the red.
Then came the smell.
It wasn't just the copper of blood.
It was a heavy, ozone-thick scent of terror. It smelled like confined space and stagnant sweat, the odor of a man trapped in a collapsed mine.
It filled his nostrils, thick and humid, tasting of salt and ancient rot.
Behind the smear,
The Monster filled the void.
wetness
Its face features were rearranged into an absurd, geometric—perhaps an elongated jaw that opened like a rusted gate, eyes that weren't spheres, but vertical slits of burning sulfur. It simply existed.
Tako let out a wavering, low-pitched whimper.
"Mnn-iiieee..."
air vibrating with a deep, subsonic roar that makes his teeth chatter in his skull.
BUM-BUM-BUM-BUM.
KRA-KRRRACK!
The vision shattered like a sheet of stressed glass hit by a sledgehammer.
Tako's eyes snapped open with a sharp, hydraulic suddenness.
With a grunt of effort, he pushed himself up, his heart still hammering a rhythm against his ribs.
He looked around the space as if looking for a threat. He then exhaled slowly, pinching his eyes with his fingers.
Rania had shifted in her sleep. She sat up slowly, her body shadowed and leaning in toward the center of the hut. Her mouth was partially open, her brow tight with a worried crease that caught the faint, silvery light of the stars reflecting off the lagoon.
"Tako, what's wrong?" her voice was a hushed whisper, barely audible over the rhythmic scuttle of land crabs outside and the distant, low thud of the reef.
Tako turned to her. "Uhh... nothing," he muttered, his voice gravelly.
his voice carried a jagged, distracted edge. While his mouth performed the script, his eyes were fixating on a point in the dark that didn't exist.
As he spoke, a sound teared through the back of his skull—not a bang, but a
sickening, rhythmic schllrrp-tink.
It was the sound of those sturdy, horizontal nails dragging slowly across a wet, organic surface, like a metal rake being pulled over a fresh carcass.
It was high-pitched enough to vibrate his molars but deep enough to feel like a needle pressing into his eardrum.
For a microsecond, the silvery lagoon light on Rania's face was replaced by a Flash.
The image of the Shark-Toothed Kanka-object strobed in front of his retinas, but instead of red, it was a stark, blinding white against a black void.
The monsters geometric features appeared inches from his own eyes, its elongated jaw unhinging with a sound like wet timber snapping.
Rania leaned further into his space, her movements fluid and silent on the mats.
The silvery light reflecting off the lagoon caught in her amber eyes, turning them into two glowing, steady points of focus.
"Tako," she says, her voice low and resonant.
Tako's eyes finally snap to hers. "Uhh.. oh. Yeah, I'm okay. Don't worry about it."
Rania didn't blink. "Are you sure? You seem rattled."
"No. I'm fine," Tako insists, his voice tightening. "It's just a bad dream."
Rania lingered in the lean. "Do you want water? I could get you some water?"
"No need for that," Tako says, perhaps a bit too quickly. He forces a small, weary smile—the final piece of his mask. "I will be fine, promise."
Rania watched him for one more beat, her amber eyes finally softening.
"Okayy," she breathes out, the word trailing off with a hint of lingering doubt. "Well.. sleep tight."
She settled back into the shadows, her head finding the familiar cushion of the woven mat.
She layed on her side, her cheek pressed against the fine-grained fibers of the breadfruit-leaf sheet.
From this close, the rhythmic rise and fall of her chest was the only movement in the stillness.
Just beyond her, Tako remained a looming, indistinct blur. His silhouette was a jagged outline against the silvery-blue glow of the lagoon light, a smudge of tension in the corner of her vision.
Tako slowly turned his head away from her, pulling his gaze back into the void of the hut.
His profile cut a sharp, rigid line through the dim air, a high brow, a tensed jaw, and the slight, rhythmic pulse of a vein at his temple.
His eyes were wide, the pupils black holes in the starlight.
Then, his chin dipped. He lowered his gaze to the floor.
The air hung heavy and clean, scrubbed by the night's cooled breeze. Now, as the first light hit the tops of the coconut palms, the temperature began its slow, humid climb.
The village didn't wake; it engaged.
THUMP. THUMP. THUMP.
As the taro pounding continued its heavy THUMP-THUMP, the space came alive with the echoeing sounds of thousand dull, powerful vibrations of heavy wooden pestles striking the coral stone.
A group of women sat near the water's edge, their shoulders working in unison as they pounded taro root into a thick, pale starch.
Tup... tup... THWACK.
The salt-tang of the sea drifted through the village, mixing with the faint, sweet smoke of the morning cooking fires.
Tako walked past the cooking pits.
The heavy coir net slung over his shoulder, the coarse coconut fibers—Sshhh-grrit—rasping against his skin with every stride.
The smell of the work hit him first.
A heavy, damp vegetal steam rose from the pits where coconut spathes were submerged. It hung in the air like a thick, white curtain—Whu-fff—carrying the grounding, ancient scent of wet hay and smoldering woodsmoke.
Through the mist, the woman worked.
Her hands precise, moving with mechanical efficiency as she bound an unopened flower into a pale cylinder.
Zip-tugging the sennit cord, she tightened the fibers with the focus of a master weaver.
"Good morning, Mrs. Nasha. How was your sleep?" Tako waved, his voice forced into a level, calm frequency.
Nasha looked up. Her eyes sharp, scanning him like an inspector. Her crooked teeth flashed—Glint—in the morning light.
"Good morning, Tako. It went just fine. What about you?"
"It was fine as always, thank you. By the way, your cooking smells amazing."
Nasha's chest rumbled with a validating chuckle—Heh-heh-mm. "Ooh. Oh, I'm glad to hear that, Tako."
Tako swung the net off his shoulder with a heavy Thwump and raised it toward her for emphasis. "As you can see, I need to go fishing. Maybe if I get back in time, me and you could do a trade-off... maybe taste a fresh-fold of your delicious cooking."
He leaned in, his smile holding a mischievous, calculated playfulness. "We wouldn't want anybody to notice."
Nasha's face crinkled, her eyes disappearing into folds of aged skin. "Ooh. Oh. You really made my day, Tako."
Tako chuckled—Ha-ha—and gave a final, rhythmic wave. "Nice talk. I'll be going now."
He didn't slow down. He kept his momentum, his feet striking the sand with a purposeful "Flap-thud, flap-thud."
Behind him, the village sounds resumed.
But Nasha's gaze didn't return to the flower immediately. Her eyes, narrow and piercing as bone needles, lingered on the tension in his shoulder blades for a second too long.
Then, with a quiet Snip of her thumbnail against a fiber, she returned to the intricate task at hand.
panning tight across the hull of the small canoe, The wood was a patchwork of planks, stitched with sennit that groaned—Cree-ack—under the tension of the three men.
Tako remained at the edge, his feet gripping the narrow ribs of the floor. In his hands, the Te Chen (the hand-cast net), He adjusted the lead weights along the perimeter—Chink-clack—his fingers moving with clinical focus.
The water against the hull was a constant, rhythmic Slap-slush.
The smell was sharp: cold salt, crushed coral, and the faint, metallic scent of the wet net.
In the background, the two men mumble—a low, vibrating hum sounding like the buzzing of flies.
Tako's hands stood steady.
--What's been going on with me last night?--
Dropping to the surface of the
lagoon, The water was a dark, liquid mirror. Tako's reflection stared back, but it was distorted by the ripples.
--That dream was so nonsensical, but felt so real. I can't wrap my head around it. Not yet, at least.--
Tako turned his head, his eyes squinting against the glare, locking onto the Fijians.
Tantei was a study in jagged movement. He gestures to Konto—a sharp, Whi-shup motion of the arm—before climbing off the deck.
His feet hit the shallow water with a heavy, displaced Thwah-sh.
--I don't think I would've said this, but... seeing them makes me uncomfortable. Their story looked rehearsed. Their bodies...--
Tako's jaw clenches—Grrrind—the sound vibrating in his molars.
--They look dehydrated. Like a half-starved Te Biria (Coconut Crab) and a moray eel (Te Itaba) on a skull burial. And Chief Maluma still took their word for it.--
Close-up on the Drua's deckwood.
Kanka was crouched low, his body a compressed spring. His face was pointed toward their retreating forms, his brow pulling down into a hard, visible tightening, his mouth thinned into a bitter line.
Beside him, Tambo stood, his hands were flat at his sides, looking only at Kanka, his expression as featureless and opaque as a sun-bleached volcanic stone.
There was no thought behind his eyes, only a heavy, crushing patience.
The sun was no longer a guest; it has become a white-hot radiator bolted to the center of a searing, cobalt dome.
The sky was scrubbed of color, bleached into a high-frequency glare that turned the island into a high-contrast map of ink-black shadows and blinding limestone sand.
In the center of the village square, five wire-framed bodies blur into a chaotic, high-velocity machine.
Pedro moved.
His feet gripped the shifting sand with a Slap crunch like the textured skin of a gecko.
Between the other trio, the Te Bwere (the hollowed coconut ball) was a scarred, fiber-less sphere. It rattled with a dry, hollow Tchick-tchick as it tumbled across the heat-shimmering ground.
—Thwak-crunch!—Chalo's foot connected at a flawed angle. The ball took flight—a brown, rotating blur against the white-wash of the sky. It landed on an elevated balcony with a final, echoing
Clack-thud.
The shrieks and yells were replaced by a sudden, pressurized silence.
"Chalo. What did you do?"
A cold, sickening knot forms below Chalo's ribs.
A rush of shame, sharp as a small burn, crawls up his neck. He squeezes his eyes shut—Press-dark—bracing for the inevitable friction.
Stomp. Stomp. A woman emerged from the ink-black shadows of her house. She was a pillar of seasoned, mahogany-dark strength.
Her Te Ridaki (a longer, formal wrap) were bound tightly at her hips, the weave so dense it resembled hammered bark.
Her cheekbones were sharp, geometric ridges, and her eyes were recessed into dark, protective hollows, hooded by an authoritative brow.
Around her neck, the polished shell discs of her Te Nimatanin sat flat against her collarbone.
As she drawed breath, the tendons in her neck pulled taut like the sennit riggings of a deep-sea canoe.
"Hey! Who kicked it?"
Four fingers extended instantly—Point-snap—towards Chalo. "It was him, Mrs. Remi."
Mrs. Remi's voice cut through the thick, vegetal steam of the village. "Don't make me come over there, you hear me?!"
Chalo bowed his head, his posture shrinking into a curve of apology. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Remi."
She reached down, her fingers grasping the rough husk. She pointed a finger, a linear focus of pure threat. "Watch where you kids throw the coconut, or next time you will find it in the reef!"
She launched the ball. It cut a parabolic arc through the heavy air and landed beside Pedro with a dull, heavy BUM-thump.
The tension snapped
A chorus of high-pitched laughter erupted, vibrating through the dry air.
Chalo gave another a sharp, narrowed look.
He leaned forward, his lead leg positioned like a loaded spring—Tense-lock—and propeled himself toward them in a sudden jumpscare.
The kids scattered—Scurry-scuttle—their wide grins flashing white against their dark skin.
"What? Ah-ah. What did we do?" Pedro challenges, his laughter bouncing off the thatched walls.
Chalo turned away, his hand closing over the abrasive, sun-warmed husk of the coconut.
A soft, secret smile tugged at his lips.
"You will see next time." he muttered, the Te Bwere solid and light in his grip.
The sun remained a vertical weight, pinning the shadows of the palms directly beneath their trunks.
At the house elevated on wooden stilts, Tako and Tinko sat on the edge of the high floor-frame, their feet dangling over the void.
Below them, the tide hissed against the timber supports—Sss-thwash—a rhythmic, hydraulic pulse.
Tako undercut his friend, his heart rate spiking—Thump-thump—vibrating against his ribs. "Wait, wait, wait. What?"
Tinko nodded, his tone clinical. "Yes. The elders call them the most dangerous. Spirits that intentionally enter the sleep of the living—a spiritual attack designed to weaken the mind. To make the body susceptible to rot. That's what my parents used to tell me anyway, although i don't believe it."
Tako's eyes widened. He looked at the ground infront of the stilts. "That's why I felt so off this morning," he muttered.
Tinko's mouth shut—Click—like a latch. His focus was total for a moment, then he let out a long, slow breath.
Tako slowly looked up, his eyes wide as if he'd seen a structural crack in the island's foundation. "That dream might have been caused by one of those spirits. The images... they were haunting, but I can't figure out what it meant."
Tinko's eyes bore into him, Then, he spoke, his voice dropping. "You seem to stretch the nightmare a bit far, buddy. I wouldn't go that deep even experiencing one like yours. We all deal with nightmares, but to say it's a spirit? No."
He shook his head—Lateral-shift—and drifted his gaze to the side.
"What do you mean, I stretch it too far?" Tako asked, his jaw tightening.
"Because it isn't real. It's an Out-Of-True perception," Tinko replied, using the term for a beam that isn't straight. "We have to consider the fact that these things are myths, Fabrications used to explain away glitches in our reality."
Tinko gestured to Tako. "Take the stories: Na Areau (The Trickster God) for example. They say he created the world with a sense of cosmic irony. I think it's just bad math. Or Roko (The Pressure of the Void)."
Tinko continued, his tone increasingly dismissive. "Chiefs claimed ancient fishermen experienced a sensory-deprivation event where the waves just... kinda stopped, assuming It was likely just a change in the atmospheric pressure. And Te Anti, Especially the bad ones you think caused your nightmare?"
He scoffed—Hah—a sharp, percussive sound. "Parasitic frequencies that enter through the ear? Re-writing memories? No. I don't think I will ever believe the world is built that way. It's just bad sleep, Tako. A loose bolt in your head."
Tako looked at the patch of sand directly in front of Tinko's dusty feet. "Yeah," he muttered flatly, his voice devoid of the rhythmic cadence of their usual banter.
He didn't look up. His eyes remained fixed on the grey, cooling earth below. "Just a loose bolt in the head."
The phrase felt heavy, like a lead weight from his Te Chen (net) dropping into deep water.
The sun was a relentless force, reflecting a blinding, white-frequency light off the crushed limestone of the village square.
There was no wind.
Within the deep, thatched shadow of the Maneaba, the circle of the village was absent. Instead, the space was hollow, save for a high-tension cluster near the central pillars.
Only the woven mat between the Chief and the foreigners lay a Te Itoi, a traditional star navigation map.
It was made of midribs and coconut fronds lashed together with sennit, and small white shells tied at the intersections to represent the positions of the islands and the rising points of the stars.
Tantei closed the gap. He remained by the Chief's personal space.
He extended a long, calloused finger, tracing a jagged line across the wooden ribs of the map.
His eyes darted up, locking onto Maluma's with a high-intensity focus that seemed to calculate the Chief's reaction.
Beside him, the other three brothers performed a Social Screen. Their heads and backs darted between one another, creating a wall of movement and chatter.
To the side, the four Banaban men—the elders—did not join the chatter.
They He sat with rigid spines, hands resting flat on their knees, looked at the Te Itoi. Their brows were lowered into a deep furrow, like they waited for a pause in the chatter.
A muffled, frantic sound pierced through the muted atmosphere. "Chief! Chief!"
At the edge of the low thatch, the silhouette of a man appeared as a kinetic blur.
His limbs moved with a desperate, uncoordinated energy, kicking up plumes of white limestone dust.
Inside, the reaction was a series of Snap-turns.
The villager didn't wait for permission.
He crouched low, ducking under the perimeter beam—Duck-slide—and collapsed into a low crouch on the woven mats.
His breath was ragged, a series of wet, pressurized gasps.
He clutched his chest, his lungs working like a bellows as he took a quick, sharp inhale and a forceful exhale.
His face was a map of singular, terrifying focus. "Chief," he wheezed, his eyes locked onto Maluma. "Bako's missing. Tenia's father."
The other men—the observers and the brothers, darted their gazes between one another, a frantic search for a secondary explanation.
But Chief Maluma remained frozen, his face etched. The lines around his mouth and eyes deepened into a mask of immediate, cold horror.
The messenger continued, his voice thin and trembling. "We searched the lagoon, the windward cliffs, Limestone caves. Nothing."
The Chief stood up with a sudden, vertical force—Spring-lock—
The elders and the Fijians rose with him, a chaotic movement of dark limbs and rustling mats as the frame of the meeting house suddenly emptied of its calm.
A Distant settlement was held Wide.
The Maneaba loomed as a dark, angular mountain against the orange horizon, while in the foreground, the small cluster of figures—Chief Maluma, Tenia, and a few younger men, moved with a jagged, high-velocity pace toward a lone Bure nestled under a cluster of leaning palms.
Their shadows stretched thin and distorted across the white limestone sand, like long, black fingers reaching for the sea.
As they neared the low, overhanging thatch of the entrance, an old woman's voice, thin and vibrating, drifting from the interior before the group even reached the perimeter.
"I just came to check up on him as usual, and he was gone. I didn't know what was going on."
The dim interior—To one side, a neatly coiled Te Chen (fishing net) sat beside a collection of sharpened harpoons.
In the center, a small hearth of blackened stones held nothing but cold, grey ash.
Maluma's massive frame eclipsed the doorway as he crouched low to enter.
He moved with a clinical precision, his eyes scanning the placement of the water gourds and the way the sleeping mats were disturbed.
Behind him, the leaner, toned bodies of the young searchers filled the remaining space, their muscles tensed.
"Last night he showed symptoms... troubled," the old woman continued. She stood near the central support post.
Her skin was a complex map of Stress Fractures, deep, overlapping wrinkles that tracked across her face like the dried-out beds of ancient reef channels.
Her hair was the color of weathered limestone that got kept tied back with a strip of rough sennit.
She moved with a jarring, youthful elasticity.
Her Eyes were Deeply recessed into the folds of her face, they darted with a high-frequency scan.
Her arms were thin, yet the muscle beneath was ropy and tensed, capable of the sudden, tight folding gesture.
She wore a faded Te Itai wrap, stained with the salt-spray of the shore, her chest rising and falling with a rapid, shallow rhythm.
The Chief pivoted, a sharp, mechanical turn, his gaze locking onto her.
"What symptoms?" a young villager asked from the periphery. He stood with his arms stiff at his sides.
His face was perfectly round, a soft-edged circle that should have looked youthful, but was instead tightened into a mask of severe stress.
His hair was a thick, unruly mass of obsidian-black curls, saturated with the day's humidity until it looked like a dense, heavy sponge.
His eyes were wide, the iris a deep, unblinking brown that seemed to absorb light.
The woman's hands moved to her forehead.
"I'm not sure of it... symptoms. He sat alone right beside the bure." She walked over to the woven leaf wall, her finger trembling as she pointed toward the exterior.
Maluma's eyes tracked the movement of her hand, then snapped back to her face, following the frantic pulse visible in her expression.
"He crossed his arms like this," she said, folding her hands with enough force untill, her knuckles turned white . "They were shaking. I didn't want to disturb him, seeming he dealt with enough. I wouldn't lie to you, believe me."
To the side, Tenia stood in the deep shadow of the thatch. She pressed a hand hard against her mouth, the pressure whitening her lips.
Her eyes took on a high-gloss, wet texture, reflecting the dim light like polished obsidian, but the moisture remained trapped behind her lower lids.
Maluma shifted his gaze from the woman to the empty center of the room. He reached up, his large thumb and forefinger pinching his eyes with heavy, sustained pressure.
His head lowered.
"Chief, we're gonna keep looking for him," a voice rang out from just beyond the doorway. "Maybe we can still find him."
Maluma did not look up. His hands remained clamped over his eyes, his massive frame a static monument in the center of the hut.
He gave a single, slow nod—the only movement in the room.
"Come on," the voice outside commanded the others. "We will search the Caves again."
The sound of footsteps—"Scuff-crunch"—on the dry palm fronds outside filled the space. One by one, the searchers crouched low and exited through the small opening.
As they left, the air in the bure seemed to expand, a sudden draft of evening wind rushing in to fill the Space where the men had been.
The air slowly began to bleed out into the darkening evening.
The shift didn't happen with a flash, but in a slow, mechanical cooling.
The White-Heat of the afternoon was replaced by a Predatory Blue.
fixed on a Te Itatata, a pair of hand-carved wooden goggles, hanging from a sennit loop on a wall-post.
They were solid wood with tiny, horizontal slits designed to cut the glare of the sea.
They swayed in a sudden, rhythmic oscillation—Click-tap, click-tap—against the dry leaf-wall as the wind begins to pick up.
From the corner, the sound of the wind through the thatch—a persistent, dry Shhhhh-whip—is punctured by a series of jagged, wet hitches.
Tenia's cries. The sound was Muffled, the high-pitch absorbed by the thick pandanus roof.
Maluma and Tenia. They sat side-by-side on the layered mats, two distinct silhouettes against the cooling blue wash.
Maluma reached out, his large, calloused hand moving in a slow, rhythmic arc as he caressed her back.
Tenia remained leaned forward, her face buried in a piece of rough, salt-stained fabric.
The material muffled her breath, turning her sobs into a series of pressurized, wet hitches.
Maluma sat with his spine a perfect vertical, his gaze darting to the thatch at the side as if scanning for a structural defect in the wall. "It's okay," he murmured, his voice a low rumble. "Everything will be fine."
The reaction was a sharp, Kinetic Snap.
Tenia's shoulder jolted upward—Jerk-shrug—shedding his hand like a parasitic weight.
She looked up, her voice tore through the damp air. "Can you stop saying everything will be fine?!"
Maluma's hand remained suspended in mid-air, a Placating Frozen Position. "Hey, Tenia. What's gotten into you? I'm here to make you feel better."
Tenia finally pulled the fabric inches from her face, though her eyes remained hidden in the shadow of her hair.
"I don't need you to do that," she spat, the words jagged and raw. "My father just went missing, and even though they are searching for him... I might not see him again. So I don't need you to calm me right now, Please."
The dialogue died, leaving a hole in the room's atmosphere.
Tenia returned to the fabric, the rhythmic, desperate friction of her face against the cloth.
Maluma didn't retract his hand quickly, he lowered it with a slowly, until it rested on his own knee.
His eyes locked onto a singular point just beyond the frame.
He didn't blink. He sat like a stone monument.
The evening was violently disrupted by the arrival of the mob, drowned out by the heavy, rhythmic stomp-stomp-stomp of multiple feet striking the limestone path.
The Breach.
"Chief!!" A single voice tore through the thatch, followed instantly by a chorus of panicked echoes. "Chief!"
Inside the bure, the static tension broke.
Maluma and Tenia exchanged a sharp, alarmed glance.
His jaw tightened, his teeth gritting with a visible Grrr-ind of bone.
"What is it this time?" he growled, his voice vibrating with a strain.
They stood up with a sudden, vertical force—Spring-lock—and moved swiftly toward the low exit.
From behind the gathering crowd, Maluma and Tenia emerged from the low-hanging thatch.
They looked small against the backdrop of the surrounding villagers whose bodies were silhouettes against the darkening sky.
The faces of the villagers were blurred by the low light, but their eyes were wide, reflecting a deep, terror.
The man, with his elongated, skeletal geometry, seemed to vibrate against the wind. The blue light hit the hooked nasal ridge and the exposed cords of his neck, turning his pale, terrified skin into the color of weathered lead.
He gestured frantically toward the village center, his thin, trembling voice was caught by the wind. "We saw something absolutely horrifying at your house,"
Maluma's posture shifted, his shoulders squaring as if bracing for a physical blow. "At my house?!"
"Yes," the man replied, stepping back to clear a path. "You need to come take a look."
The woman stood beside him, The blue frequency of the sky scanned her broad, mahogany face.
the light was flat and clinical, it highlighted the vacuum-sealed skin over her cheekbones, exposing the hard structural bone beneath until her face resembling a skeleton.
Her voice was a Jagged-Frequency strike. "You gotta see this!"
The air seemed to leave the square.
Tenia pressed both hands over her mouth, her fingers digging into her cheeks.
Beneath her collarbone, her heart was a visible, high-velocity hammer, pumping so hard it made her chest tremble.
Maluma's reaction, his mouth remained partially open, his brow narrowed into a mask of skeptical alarm.
The wind hissed through the palms like a poisonous mist.
positioned low, near the te bwaiko (stone foundation) of the house. From here, the world was a mess of shadows and the heavy, wooden legs of the structure.
The light didn't reach down here.
It's a space of deep charcoal and cold earth.
The crowd huddled in a jagged, crescent-shaped mass around a patch of freshly disturbed soil at the side of the building.
There were series of sharp, panicked Audio Spikes.
Footsteps closed in from the darkness—heavy, frantic thuds that stop abruptly at the edge of the pit
The villagers recoiled.
Chief Maluma froze, his torso leaning over the void. Below him, a shallow, jagged trench hacked into the limestone sand.
His hand gripped into a tight fist—crack—
Behind him, Tenia.
Tenia remained in a deep, crouch. Her center of gravity pulled low as if the earth itself were dragging her down.
Her arms were double-crossed over her chest.
She held herself with a rhythmic, high-tension tremor, her elbows locked against her ribs to keep her internal organs from spilling out in a scream.
Her usual amber eyes were now vacant Orbits.
Her breath came in shallow hitches—"Hee... hee... thss."