Night settled over the palace like a veil of cooling ash, muting the sounds of revelry from the lower courtyards where Sunstone Tournament celebrations still flickered. Moonlight spilled through the arched windows of Jabara's temporary chambers, painting faint silver lines across the marble floor.

  She sat cross-legged, spine tall, palms pressed together before her chest. Around her, dozens of wind-bells fashioned from jade, bone, and folded paper chimed softly with even the slightest movement of air—her small homage to Oya, Orisha of winds, change, storms, and the restless spirits of transition.

  But even their familiar harmony did little to calm her mind.

  Everything felt wrong.

  Everything.

  The kingdom she'd left for her year-long spiritual pilgrimage was gone—its heart ripped out, replaced by a careful, silent rhythm directed by a king she barely knew. A king she feared she understood all too well.

  The old king's madness. The prince's sudden ascension. The vanished witnesses. The silence every time she asked for details.

  Jabara inhaled deeply, letting her breath rise into her chest and out past her lips. The wind-bells answered, their notes whispering through the empty room.

  "Oya," she murmured, "Mother of Winds. Clearer of paths, opener of roads… hear me."

  The bells tinkled, a swirl of soft notes dancing around her.

  "I ask not for glory," she said. "Only clarity. I returned to a kingdom unrecognizable. Shadows move in the halls where truth once walked openly. And now…" Her eyes tightened. "Now I see corruption in the à?? of a fighter. The touch of a dead Orisha."

  Her heartbeat thumped once, heavy.

  "Iku," she whispered. "And the stain that follows him."

  The air shifted. Cold. Sudden. As though the room itself inhaled and held its breath.

  Jabara's eyes closed.

  She let herself fall—not physically, but inward, the way only an Aláà?? could, slipping past the conscious mind into the domain where Orisha spoke not in words but storms.

  The bells went silent.

  The wind died.

  Then—

  A crack of thunder split the quiet.

  Her meditation chamber vanished, replaced by a field of blackened trees stretching to a horizon choked with smoke. The sky howled with a storm without rain. Purple spores drifted on the wind like snow from a dying world, each one trailing a faint luminescence that made them almost beautiful before they touched the earth and killed whatever they landed on.

  Jabara's breath caught.

  She stood at the edge of that dying world and felt it pulling at her—not her body but something deeper, the part of her that was woven into living things. She felt the wrongness the way a musician feels a broken string. Not heard. Felt.

  "Oya?" she called.

  Wind tore past her, carrying voices that belonged to no human throat.

  And then she saw him.

  A shadow walking upright among mortals. A figure of pure blackness, not as absence but as presence, wearing a mask shaped like a skull as long as a horse's, trailing tendrils of dying greenery wherever he stepped. The ground beneath his feet did not simply die—it forgot it had ever lived. Grass turned to gray powder. Roots surfaced from the soil like bones rising through skin, pale and brittle and silent.

  Iku.

  But not alone.

  Another silhouette walked beside him—taller, thinner, adorned with a crown of branching horns that scraped the boiling sky. Her long dress rippled like vines in a storm, though its edges crumbled into ash with every step, shedding itself endlessly without ever diminishing. Where she walked, purple fungi bloomed in her wake like spreading wounds, each cap splitting open to release fresh clouds of spores that hung in the air long after she had passed.

  Oko.

  An Orisha whose worship had died a century ago. An Orisha whose wrath had not.

  Jabara watched, unable to look away, as they moved together across the ruined landscape. The blight pulsed in perfect rhythm with their stride—inhale, a field of wheat; exhale, ash and spore. The beauty of it was the worst part. The purple glow. The strange symmetry of the rot. As though destruction, given enough time, learned to imitate grace.

  She stumbled back, though her dream-body made no sound. The smell of fungal decay stung the back of her throat, thick and sweet in the way of things that had been alive too recently.

  A whisper curled through the wind:

  "They return."

  And another, layered beneath the first, older and colder:

  "The gates open again."

  The storm intensified, sweeping upward in a spiraling column of violet spores that blotted out the sky entirely—

  Jabara screamed—

  —and the vision snapped.

  She gasped, collapsing forward, palms hitting the cold marble floor of her chamber. Sweat dripped from her brow. Her wind-bells clattered frantically, spinning from a wind she had not conjured, their notes no longer harmonious but urgent, overlapping, wrong.

  She stayed on her hands and knees for a long moment, breathing.

  "Oya…" she whispered. "What are you warning me of?"

  But she already knew.

  Iku. Oko. Corruption. Fungal blight. And a kingdom blind to its own unraveling.

  The new king's curiosity for the corrupted fighter suddenly felt far more dangerous than political intrigue.

  It felt like prophecy.

  Or doom.

  Jabara swallowed hard. "Then I must know more."

  And when she stood, the decision was already made.

  Tonight, she would go somewhere she had once sworn never to return.

  The Forbidden Archives under the library.

  The palace at night was a breathing thing—stone lungs expanding and contracting with the march of guards and the sputter of torches. Jabara wrapped her ceremonial cloak tight around her slender frame and moved like a whisper between pillars, careful to avoid the wandering patrols.

  As a Herald of the Tournament, she was technically allowed anywhere.

  But the archives she sought were not marked on any map.

  They lived beneath the old palace, below even the old burial tunnels built during the reign of the First Dynasty.

  Few knew how to reach them. Fewer still survived doing so.

  At a recessed alcove near the Hall of Ancestors, Jabara pressed her palm against an unassuming stone tile carved with a swirl of wind. The tile glowed faintly in response.

  This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

  Good. The old locks still recognized her à??.

  The stone slid inward.

  Dusty air whooshed upward, carrying the scent of old papyrus, mold, and secrets best left forgotten.

  Jabara descended.

  The staircase spiraled deep underground, its walls marked with murals long since faded. She walked down a long tunnel with small sunstones lighting the path, but their power was fading, making the tunnel only barely visible. She passed frescoes depicting Orisha interceding in human affairs, their painted faces watching her with expressions she had never quite been able to read.

  She saw Oko's ancient visage painted here, revered and terrible. Even rendered in old pigment and crumbling plaster, something in the image made Jabara's à?? pull inward, the way a flame shrinks from wind.

  She moved faster.

  The end of the tunnel opened into a wide chamber lit by orbs of preserved sunstone. Stacks of scrolls and tablets lay piled in towering wooden shelves carved with talismans to keep insects away.

  Her footsteps echoed faintly.

  She moved to the restricted section, brushing her fingers over the shelf labels carved in old Yoruba-script:

  Pre-Ascension Dynasties… Orisha Schisms… Divine Punishments… Forbidden Cults…

  She stopped.

  There. Centurial Cataclysm Records.

  She pulled out a bound leather tome so old its spine cracked as it opened. Dust plumed into the air. The pages were not uniform—some were stiff with age, others soft as skin, covered in multiple hands, multiple inks, as though the record had been added to across decades by scribes who did not always agree with what came before. Marginal notes contradicted the main text. Passages had been scratched out and rewritten. One page had been partially burned, its testimony ending mid-sentence in a ragged black edge.

  Whatever had happened a hundred years ago, it had not been recorded cleanly.

  That alone made Jabara's stomach tighten.

  She read carefully, piecing together what she could.

  The blight began in the far western orchards. Purple fungus spreading in nights, turning fruit to poison. The speed of it confounded the healers. By the time the first field was burned, three more had already fallen.

  A marginal note in different ink: This account is incomplete. The seers knew before the orchards. No one listened.

  She turned the page.

  Some believed it was a curse placed by Oko. Others refused to name the source, as though naming it would invite its return.

  Another passage, shakier handwriting, as though written in haste:

  The king decreed all Green Aseborn suspect. Many fled north beyond human borders. Others perished. The records do not specify which outcome was more common.

  She turned again—

  And froze.

  A full-page illustration showed Oko—her crown of vines tall and sharp—whispering to Iku. The artist had drawn their shadows stretching like claws across a map of the continent. Beneath the image, two lines of text:

  Oko's command: Let life slow. Let rot grow. Iku's promise: Let mortals remember their fragility.

  Jabara's stomach turned.

  She read on.

  Oko's disciples planted growth-halt curses in sacred groves, shrines, and farmland. Their goal was not to aid Iku in death's mercy, but to strip the continent of its natural defences—to weaken the living world until Iku's blight could take root unopposed.

  And then a final passage, written in the largest and most careful hand, as though the scribe had wanted to ensure this particular line survived:

  The King's solution: exile or execute all Green Aseborn. If any worshipped Oko, their continued existence posed an existential threat to humanity. This was not a decision made lightly. It was made quickly. That is perhaps the greater sin.

  Jabara closed the book sharply.

  "No wonder the Green Orisha withdrew," she whispered. "Their children were killed."

  Her pulse hammered.

  If Iku and Oko walked again—even in influence, even in whisper—this kingdom was not prepared.

  Not with a king who distrusted seers. Not with a king chasing a Green Aseborn the way the old kings once did. Not with corruption pulsing through a fighter's veins in the arena.

  She needed more. Something direct. Something actionable.

  Jabara moved to a second shelf—scrolls bound in green thread. Records of Exiled Aseborn. Survivors. Flight to the Dark Forest.

  She reached for the topmost scroll—

  And stopped.

  Her hand hovered in the air.

  Something was wrong with the room.

  Not a sound. Not a movement. Something subtler—a shift in the quality of the air itself, the way her à?? pressed outward and met resistance it hadn't met a moment ago. A presence. Close. And deeply, fundamentally strange.

  Not threatening.

  Not human.

  Jabara turned slowly.

  A girl stepped from the shadow behind one of the far pillars. Young—maybe fourteen—slender, wearing a dark cloak over a blue shirt and white skirt. Her face was composed, her eyes sharp and watchful. She held herself very still in the way of someone accustomed to being observed.

  But there was something else.

  At the edges of the girl's silhouette, where torchlight should have simply defined her outline, the light behaved oddly—bending slightly, as though uncertain of what it was touching. And Jabara's wind-bells, which she had not brought with her but whose sensitivity she carried in her own body after decades of practice, seemed to register the girl's presence as a continuous, barely audible note—not a sound but a feeling. Like a string tuned to a pitch no instrument in this room was built to play.

  The girl's à?? was suppressed. Layered over. Hidden beneath something active and deliberate and very, very practiced.

  But it was still there, underneath.

  And it was not the à?? of anything born on land.

  "Working late, High Seer?" the girl said.

  Jabara kept her face still. "Who are you? What are you doing down here? How did you find this place?"

  "There was a hidden lever in the library." A small shrug, perfectly casual. "I'm looking for answers. Same as you."

  Her lips curved slightly—not quite a smile. The expression of someone who had learned to offer just enough to seem open without revealing anything at all.

  Jabara studied her. The wards on this archive would turn back most Aseweavers. She had known powerful practitioners struggle against them. This girl had walked through them as though they were a minor inconvenience, and she was perhaps fourteen, and she was standing here in the middle of the night as though she belonged.

  A prodigy, Jabara thought. Or something else entirely.

  She chose her next words carefully. "Answers to what?"

  "I saw your face during the tournament. You saw it too—the corrupted fighter. Silas."

  "I believe he may be a problem," Jabara said. "I cannot move against him without proof. The king's—"

  "I know." The girl's voice was dry, almost tired. "Kings love permissions. Especially kings who pretend they don't know what's happening in their own kingdom."

  "You speak boldly."

  "Someone has to." Then something shifted in her expression—a crack in the composure, genuine and unguarded for just a moment. "I have some experience with kings who won't listen. It doesn't get easier."

  Jabara waited.

  The girl continued. "Rot is spreading in the northern fields. Villagers whisper of plants slowing their growth. The blight—I've seen it with my own eyes. It's real."

  Jabara's heart lurched. "You've seen the purple mushrooms?"

  "Yes." The girl's jaw tightened. "We burned the field. But if it appeared once it'll appear again. I know that much."

  Burned it. Jabara thought of the blackened sand she had been unable to destroy, the way the fungal matter had resisted her à?? like something that did not want to die. And this girl had simply burned it. "Just who are you?"

  "Someone who can read the signs," the girl said. And then, as though deciding something: "The king won't fix this. He's using something at the Atherium Genesis Institute. A Dryad. They were experimenting on it." A pause. "Torturing it."

  Jabara's hand flew to her mouth. "A Dryad—tortured?"

  "And I've heard he has a merman now, too."

  The words landed quietly.

  Jabara went very still.

  She looked at the girl—at the too-careful stillness of her, at the light bending wrong at her edges, at the suppressed à?? thrumming underneath the surface like a current beneath ice—and felt something she could not yet name move through her chest.

  A merman.

  Said plainly. Flatly. Like a piece of information and nothing more.

  "What does he want with—" Jabara began.

  "Power," the girl said. "Maybe to fix the agriculture problem. Or maybe he's already past fixing things and into replacing them."

  The pieces locked together.

  His dismissal of divine intervention. His fascination with corrupted à??. His impatience with seers.

  He was not looking to pray to the Orisha for solutions.

  He was looking to replace them.

  Jabara stepped back, breath unsteady. "You must come with me and speak to the king."

  The girl laughed—a short, bitter sound. "He'd execute me before I finished my first sentence."

  "Execute you?" Jabara studied her face. "Just who are you?"

  The girl met her gaze steadily and said nothing.

  Jabara did not press. Whatever this girl was—and Jabara was increasingly certain she was something the archive shelves had no clean category for—she was not an enemy. Her à??, strange as it was, carried no trace of corruption. No shadow of Iku. Whatever she was hiding, it was not malice.

  "Then meet me here tomorrow night," Jabara said. "We find a path together."

  A long pause.

  The girl looked at her with those too-knowing eyes, calculating something Jabara could not see.

  "…We'll see," she said at last.

  She left without another word, disappearing into the staircase shadows. Jabara listened to her footsteps—and noticed, with a chill she could not entirely explain, that they were slightly too quiet. Not silent. But quieter than they should have been. As though some part of her was always, instinctively, trying not to disturb the water.

  Jabara stood motionless for a long moment after the girl was gone.

  She could have followed. Could have called on Oya's wind to hold her, demanded answers, used the authority of her office and the weight of her power to peel back whatever the girl was hiding. But something stopped her—not uncertainty, exactly. More like the feeling of standing before a door she was not yet meant to open.

  The girl felt aligned. That was the only word for it. Her presence had pressed against Jabara's à?? like a strange current, yes—but it had not corrupted. Had not fouled. Had simply been other, in the way that deep water was other, in the way that the ocean did not belong to the same world as the shore even when they met.

  Jabara returned to the archive shelves.

  She read until her candles burned to stubs—about the near-extinction of Green Aseborn, about Oko's cult, about the blight that had once nearly devoured the continent. She read the contradictory testimonies and the burned pages and the marginal notes written by frightened scribes who had known what was coming and been ignored.

  And when she finally left the archives, one truth weighed heavier than all the others.

  Iku and Oko were stirring. And King Rega was walking the same path as the king of a hundred years ago.

  At the top of the stairs, the night air met her face—cool and carrying the distant sound of wind moving through the palace courtyards. Jabara closed her eyes and felt it pass over her.

  "Oya…" she whispered.

  She did not finish the prayer aloud.

  The wind moved on, as it always did, indifferent and necessary.

  She followed it back into the palace, and did not sleep again that night.