The salt had faces.

  Kazeem didn’t know when he first noticed, but now he couldn’t unsee them. Crystallized expressions, screaming, twisted, blank, glimmered faintly in the collapsed caravan crates and open graves of ruined salt vats. The corpses had hardened like statues, some preserved mid-crawl, others half-consumed by vines or buried in salt crust.

  One looked like Toma. Another one, like himself.

  He shut his eyes. Opened them again. Gone.

  The air buzzed, as if the past was breathing through the cracks.

  “You still with me?” Toma asked, without turning.

  Kazeem nodded. “Yeah. Just tired.”

  They didn’t speak again. Voices carried too far in places like this.

  Other scavengers were spread across the trench, working in near silence. The living moved with reverence or discomfort, never too loud, never too long in one spot. Nobody laughed here. Even the bravest kept one hand near their knife, the other near the salt they carried for protection.

  Kazeem moved alone toward a collapsed section of wagon debris, led by a pressure in his gut he couldn’t name. A magnetic pull. Not to treasure, but to something heavier.

  That’s when he saw it.

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  Half-buried beneath a charred banner and an overturned jar of ash sat a mask. And not a plain one.

  The wood was aged and cracked but carried unmistakable marks. Spirals along the temple. Painted lines beneath hollow cheek ridges. A narrow mouth carved in sharp crimson. Along its crown, faded feathers clung like dried tongues.

  Kazeem’s heart paused.

  He’d heard of masks like this. His mother once whispered of them while grinding dried bark into poultices. Dust-Dancer masks, worn in the old rites to keep the spirits of the dead from following the mourners home. Each one carved to hold a single spirit’s breath.

  Those dances hadn’t been seen in Zaruma for generations.

  Kazeem looked around carefully.

  The other scavengers kept their eyes down. Most avoided looking at the corpses too long. No one had noticed the mask, except maybe one man. An older scavenger stood higher on the ridge, hand on the hilt of his machete, not working. Just watching. His gaze flicked toward Kazeem briefly. Then he turned his back and walked away.

  Kazeem crouched. He didn’t touch the mask.

  Not yet.

  It wasn’t just ornament. The air around it felt… denser. Not cursed, exactly, but not clean. He could feel the memory soaked into it, like smoke lingering in cloth long after fire.

  Still, he reached out.

  His fingers grazed the edge. And the world shifted.

  He stood in a ring of pale fire. Towering obelisks of salt surrounded him. A circle of dancers moved in silence, wearing masks just like the one in his hand. But their feet left no tracks. They moved through sand as if the sand bowed to them.

  And in the center of the circle, something knelt. Faceless. Breathing.

  Its breath sounded like his heartbeat.

  The vision shattered.

  Kazeem staggered back. He had fallen to one knee without realizing it.

  “Move it,” a scavenger hissed behind him, keeping his distance. “You’re blocking the path.”

  Kazeem didn’t answer. He reached out again, but this time, he didn’t touch. He wrapped the mask in a rag and slid it into his satchel, careful not to make a sound.

  No one stopped him.

  That night, back in the barracks, Kazeem sat cross-legged on his mat. The satchel rested at his side, sealed tight.

  He hadn’t told anyone.

  His mother paused at the door once. Her eyes flicked to the bag. Then to him.

  “You bring something strange back today?”

  “!”

  ”… no mama , why ?”

  She held his gaze a moment longer, then gave the smallest nod. Not of approval. Of understanding.

  She left without a word.

  today is my last day off