Elis and the Whispering Dead
In the days following the ceremony, Elis did not sleep.
She wandered the burial grounds on the edge of Nouvo Lakay, speaking in low, forgotten tongues. The sigil carved by Maman Brigitte pulsed faintly on her skin—cool to the touch, but burning in presence.
The dead stirred where she walked.
They did not rise, but they listened.
Elders avoided her path. Children watched her with wide eyes and silence. When Elis entered the temple to pray, the flames dimmed without smoke, and insects scattered from the walls as if in recognition.
Thalia confronted Zion about it.
"She's different. Not like the others."
Zion nodded, gaze steady.
"She walks closer to the threshold. Her god is the gate of endings."
Elis began carving symbols into obsidian stones with her fingernails. These stones she placed around the graves, near wells, along the village boundaries.
Wards, she said. "To keep the wrong dead from returning."
Ayola's Network: The Shadow Hunt
Meanwhile, Ayola's network, now active in six directions, sent back word from a ruined village near the eastern forests. What they found was not war.
It was devastation.
No blood. No signs of struggle. Just homes half-sunken into the earth as if swallowed whole.
But at the center of the village was a single tree, blackened but unburned, its trunk split with a sigil not from any god of their pantheon.
Ayola herself arrived days later with three of her most trusted scouts—marked with the god's sigil and trained to sense spiritual interference.
One knelt beside the tree, placing a palm to its bark. His body convulsed instantly. Blood wept from his nose. When they pulled him back, he whispered:
"It consumed… something divine. The voice is gone. It was… singing… then screaming."
The sigil had been left behind as a marker—not to warn, but to claim.
This wasn't just destruction. It was a message.
The Missing God
Elis was called to inspect it.
When she arrived at the tree, the sigil on her chest burned cold. She placed both hands upon the bark and whispered words no one understood.
Then she opened her eyes and spoke, voice thick with duality:
"The god that once blessed this land is no more. What devoured it… was not a rival. It was a void dressed in a false face. A god-eater."
Ayola's agents, hardened and sharp, remained silent.
They had found something older than gods and hungrier than men.
Zion's Warning
Back in Nouvo Lakay, Zion took Elis's words with the weight they deserved.
He ordered all sigil bearers to meet in secret and passed down this command:
"Our enemy is not just another tribe.
It is not of this world.
Before the next battle, we must know its face, its goal, and whether it can be stopped.
Ayola, keep listening.
Elis… keep watching the dead.
The answers may come from those no longer breathing