Embers on Stone, Ink on Water
The road to the Baka settlement didn't have milestones; it had warnings. Trees with their roots torn out and jammed back into the ground upside-down. A ditch of crushed stone still warm from some recent tantrum of earth. Bootprints that began deep and ended suddenly, like the ground grew tired of remembering.
Zed didn't speak for the first mile. He moved like a blade being carried rather than a man who chose each step. Fire licked around his knuckles without smoke. Makroz paced at his shoulder, the night rippling from his ankles with each stride, a sober current keeping pace with a river in flood.
"Say it," Makroz murmured at last.
Zed exhaled through his nose. "I'm just thinking it you know, about everything that happened."
"Thinking isn't the same as saying."
Zed's jaw flexed. "If I say it, I'll burn the sky."
Makroz nodded once. "Then we'll keep your sky unburned until we need it."
They crested a low ridge and saw the outer palisade. The Baka like their walls thick, their gatehouses squat, their guards visible—everything about them declares: we want you to try us. Tonight four guards leaned on spears as wide as fence posts, talking in those low rumbles that pass for whispers among men who wrestle boulders.
They saw two figures on the road: their silhouettes, walking straight up the middle like they owned the path.
"Bold," one guard snorted. "Or stupid."
"Both," said another. "Let's make examples."
They talked trash as they couldn't see who was approaching. As they will be in for a big surprise.
Makroz did not speed up. He raised one hand and rotated it, almost lazily, and shadows poured across the road like ink spilled on a table, sweeping over pebbles, creeping up the gate's timbers. The guards frowned and shifted, adjusting grips.
Zed's flame brightened by a single shade—nothing theatrical, just enough to color the air gold.
The first spear-thrower squinted, drew back, and never finished the motion.
Heat snapped the world flat.
A white bolt of fire lanced from Zed's palm, so hot it seared a black negative of the guard into the wall for a heartbeat before the wall itself glazed. The other three had time to feel the change in the air pressure with their mouths already opening, when Makroz's shadow, now spread like a hungry tide, folded up and over them. The dark smothered their shouts, slithered into mouths and eyes, and when it peeled back, there was no one left, only the impression of four men sketched in ash.
Makroz tipped two fingers. The ash drew a neat spiral and vanished into the cracks between stones. "No alarms," he said.
Zed's voice was flat. "No mercy for the takers."
They stepped through the open gate that swung without sound—a courtesy of shadow working the hinges. Inside, the settlement bunched around a central square. Baka towns never look finished because they're not—they're always being reconfigured by stomp, fist, whim. Houses wear new angles week to week. Massive clay ovens sat like red mouths along one street; drying racks for meat ran along another. Children's chalk marks scrawled across boulders. Laundry lines ran from pillar to pillar, shirts flapping like flags of truce.
Makroz lifted a hand. The shadows along the square bloomed, thin as lace, ready to harden. Zed's fire thinned to a glow that lived under his skin, not above it. They'd agreed without speaking: civilians were not the target. Soldiers, raiders, the ones who had dragged a girl past her own door—those were the point.
A small boy named Wowee came toddling around a corner with a wooden hammer too big for him, and he looked up at two men who looked like storms and only saw two men. Makroz winked. The boy wrinkled his nose and ran, the hammer clunking like a heartbeat.
"Why leave them unhurt?" Zed asked softly, testing himself with the question like checking a tooth for pain.
Makroz's answer was immediate. "Because we want the story of tonight to travel ahead of us in the right shape. Soldiers fear a slaughter. Villagers carry a legend. Let them say: the fire only burned what had blood on its hands; the shadow only swallowed the ones who would have swallowed us."
Zed nodded, and some pressure left the air. "That's the Right story, then."
They reached the square, and the right story began.
The first rank of Baka soldiers turned at the foot-thunder of the pair's approach. Orders were shouted. Fifteen men drew up in a wedge, earth already buckling, kneecaps bending the street's will. The frontman stomped; a stone crest rose before him like a ram's horn.
Makroz raised both hands and wrote a grid on the ground with darkness—Midnight Lattice, tight and spare, each line a tripwire. The wedge charged; the lattice shifted. Feet hit lines that suddenly weren't where they should be. Momentum pitched men forward into holes that hadn't existed a blink earlier. Zed exploited the stagger ruthlessly.
He clapped.
The clap didn't make sound; it made temperature. Heat slammed outward in a ring, searing shin first, then thigh, then chest. A Baka skin can take flame longer than most, but not when it's been tricked into fissures by chilled shadow just before. The ring bit and kept biting. Five of them dropped lifeless, then six of them stumbled, four plowed on, faces set in that grim, admirable, thick way earth-men have when they believe pain is an argument they can win with time.
Makroz slipped into their shade like a knife into the seam between bark and trunk. He reappeared behind the third, hooked both heels, and dragged him backward into a dark rectangle he'd hung in the air like a picture frame. The man vanished as if the frame had become a window to somewhere very far underground. A second simply vanished in a blink. A third left only his spear clattering to the cobbles.
Two remained, reaching Zed with lifted fists. The first plunged his hands into the street and ripped a chunk the size of a cow over his head. Zed let him lift it. Let him feel the power. Then Zed pinched his finger and thumb, and the chunk went from rock to glass in an instant. The Baka tried to throw it, found the weight wrong, even his grip felt wrong, and in that half-second of puzzled muscle memory Zed spun and kicked his heel to hit the slab. Then it exploded into glittering shrapnel that curved away from the civilians exactly where Makroz had set the lattice to bend it.
"Looks like you're still racing me, right brother?" Zed asked, breath not even up.
Makroz pointed to a tumble of dark on the roof beam above them—a shadow that shouldn't have had that angle. It detached, dropped, and tried to drive a dagger into Zed's collarbone. Makroz's hand flicked; the assassin's dagger stabbed his own shadow instead, pinning him to the ground by nothing anyone else could see. He snarled, a deep mineral growl, and spat dirt. Makroz tilted his head.
"You're one of the Generals, if my guess is right," he said.
The man stared up, and even pinned, he had that calm that lives in people who finished being afraid a long time ago.
Zed crouched. His flame dimmed to a coal's heartbeat. "I assumed you know where my daughter Annaïs is kept, right?" he said.
The general smiled—small and contemptuous. "Got something of value to trade in return for your daughter? If not, then say your last prayer," he croaked.
The general was confident that he can take on those two.
"You see, we chose not to take part in anything you guys did and you went and kidnapped my daughter."
Fire licked Zed's palm, hungry. Makroz held up a finger without looking at his friend, and the flame settled like a dog that remembered its training.
Zed's voice lost all charm. "No trades. All I need from you are only answers. Now, what would you like? The easy way or the hard way?"
The general spat again, this time at Zed's boot, and the spittle steamed. "You can't afford the answers, how about the hard way."
"Then I'll collect interest while I'm at it, since this is your choice," Zed said, and the warmth in his tone would have melted stone. He moved his face in close. "Now, I'm gonna ask one more time, Where is my daughter?"
Makroz's shadow tugged at the general's limbs. Not enough to injure; enough to squeeze. The man's eyes narrowed to pebbles. Earth-men handle pain like a kind of prayer. So Makroz lifted him up using his shadow then slammed him on the ground twice, then slammed him against the wall very hard, the general is in a lot of pain, his shoulder dislocated from all the slamming, also got some broken ribs, blood seeping in the corner of his mouth.
Makroz tightened his shadow grip on the Baka general's body. The general's mouth opened on a silent scream as his own outline contorted. The pain was the pain of a pulled tooth in a world where your silhouette is a tooth, of a dislocated shoulder in a place where the wall is your shoulder.
Zed waited a count of five. Ten. He did not interrupt. Mercy would be an insult to the truth. When he spoke again, his voice was almost gentle. "I'm being generous here, as you can see. I let my friend do all the work because I'm actually planning to slowly burn you while you're still alive. Once again, Where.. is.. my daughter?"
The general cracked. Not just from the squeeze, he felt like Zed warning is something that he doesn't want to go through, the feeling of being burned alive doesn't sound fun at all. So he has no choice but to spill the beans.
"Djab Baka took her," he ground out, the words pebbled. "She's not here, it was a request from… Natas."
The square held its breath. Even the laundry stopped flapping.
Makroz's eyes went darker—impressive, given what they already were. Zed's flame didn't leap; it simply deepened, as if the color had found a lower note.
"Natas," Zed repeated, tasting the old name. "The First Loa!? In other words, the Loa's king?"
The general nodded, teeth bared. "He wants the girl. He told Djab: fetch me a spark from the fire that thinks it's a sun. Tribute. Favor. I don't know. I don't ask. I stand where I'm told, I break what I'm pointed at."
"Why?" Zed asked, and the question wasn't rhetorical. "Why does the king of Loa want a child, my child, my only daughter?"
The general swallowed. The shadow tug eased half a grain; Makroz could be kind in increments smaller than salt. "Because… because she is not only her father's daughter." He jerked his chin at Zed. "She is her mother's too."
Zed didn't blink, but Makroz felt something in the air like a book closing.
"Her mother is gone, and she's all I have left," Zed said. It was not a correction.
The general smiled as if that confirmed a theory he'd had about the world being cruel. Not to him.
The fire rose up Zed's forearms like bracers, and Makroz said his name, just his name, a life raft tossed with a single syllable. Zed breathed.
"What will Natas do to her?" Makroz pressed, voice all craft.
"I .. I don't know, maybe making her a..a servant or ..or a disciple of his .. I.. I really don't know." The general said. "Or he just took her. Make a lesson of her. Make a message of you."
"You don't know," Zed said.
"I don't want to.. wait please , you're not gonna kill me are you?" the general answered, and there was something almost human in the honesty.
Zed stood. For a heartbeat he was a statue of a man, the way grief sometimes freezes even fire. Then he reached down, opened his hand, and for the first time since they entered the square he let the heat be what it wanted.
The general did not burn long. He didn't even have time to scream like a person. He went to ash the way paper does, quick and absolute, and if there was anything moral in the act it was that he left no stink behind for the villagers to remember when they make pork barbecue.
Makroz tipped two fingers. The ash turned into a new shadow and walked away across the stones until it found a crack to live in.
"You could have—" Makroz began.
"I did," Zed said, and the "did" meant chose.
They moved through the square as the alarm finally began in earnest—horns blowing, men stomping, the ground trying to flex into traps under their feet. Makroz un-made pits just before Zed stepped in them; Zed preheated the flagstones by a hair so earth couldn't quite decide to stand up. Where soldiers stood with arms that had pulled a girl out of her room, those arms turned useless or never got a chance to lift at all. Where villagers slept, no flame crossed a lintel; Makroz shepherded shadow away from cribs. They cut a line and left a lesson: your leaders cannot protect what they steal.
At the far side of town, at the breach that opened onto the wilder dark, they paused. The night beyond was thick with the taste of old trees and unmapped ravines.
"I can't find an explanation for the 'Natas' part in my head. Why would he go after my daughter?" Zed said, because anger can be directed, and directed anger is a map.
Makroz's voice thinned. "Oldest of us. First to wake when the world started naming things. The one who understood the cost of names and learned how to take them. Call him king, call him father, call him the one who taught the night to be serious." A grim smile. "He has also been called by a simpler word: catastrophe."
"And he wants Annaïs because… what? Because she is bright?"
"Because she is a hinge," Makroz said. "A way to move you, or me, or both. Or because of her mother."
Zed's breath hitched. "He cannot have her. No one uses my child to open doors or to keep as a slave."
Makroz looked outward where the path disappeared. "We need more than rage. We need a way in."
Zed's chin lifted. "Then we ask the water what it remembers." He finally looked at Makroz fully, the fire behind his eyes steady again. "Mèt Agwe-Djall."
Makroz nodded. "He keeps currents the way I keep shadows. If anyone knows where a king hides his hand, it will be a man who knows how to read undertow."
They ran, then. Up the old switchbacks where trees clung like stubborn old men with opinions. Down gullies smelling of damp moss. Over a stone bridge that was out of place and therefore ancient. The moon was a thin coin; their feet were the only sound for long runs.
Between strides, Makroz laid out what he knew, the way a strategist throws down bones to check a pattern. "Natas has many houses, few doors. He does not like being entered without invitation. He makes routes that require tribute—time, blood, memory. He will expect us to knock."
Zed's reply was as sharp as knife. "We will not. We will walk in."
"Walking requires a map."
"We have one."
"Which?"
"My anger and my foot up his arss."
Makroz almost smiled. "Anger is a compass, not a map. But if the compass points true, we can draw lines fast."
They cleared a ridge, and the world opened to a basin carved by a glacier that had once decided to humble mountains. In the middle of the basin, a lake lay black and flawless, the moon scraping silver along its back. On the mirror of that water sat a house.
It wasn't floating; It was seated—four stone legs like the corners of a table set into the lakebed. The building rose in clean planes of dark wood and slate, simple, inexorable, as if a carpenter had decided the water would be improved by a roof. Around the waterline, trees rose. Not trees—pillars. Trunks so wide ten men couldn't link hands around them, lifting crowns that stitched the stars to each other. The forest swallowed sound like a benevolent mother eats worry with a spoon.
Zed slowed, and the slowing itself meant respect. "He's home as usual."
Makroz sniffed the air. Brine. Pine. The copper tickle of old magic. "He is always home."
"How do you knock on a house that teaches water its manners?" Zed asked, wiping sweat with a forearm, already grinning despite everything because there are friends you can be angry around and still feel your feet under you.
"Well, the answer is that you don't," Makroz said. He stepped to the shore. The lake made room for his boot, water sinking without wetting leather. "You arrive as if you belong."
Zed stepped beside him. The surface held him. They walked. Behind them, their footprints were not ripples but darker ovals—a shadow's idea of a wake. Fish slid under them silver as secrets.
Halfway across, a voice reached them without crossing the distance. It came from everywhere at once and also from exactly inside your own left ear.
"If you drown," Mèt Agwe-Djall said, "it will not be because the water was rude. It will be because you forgot what feet are for."
Zed laughed outright, the first real laugh since the door with one hinge. "We remember," he called to the air. "We used them to kick in a Baka's teeth."
"And to stand still when standing still was the brave thing," Makroz added, because some compliments need to be delivered even to men who prefer jokes.
A lantern flared on the porch. It didn't cast light on the water; it invited the dark up to rest near it. The door opened. In the frame stood a man whose hair looked like foam frozen mid-crest, whose eyes were the exact gray of a sky that is deciding between storm and mercy. He wore a shirt the color of deep sea and trousers that had seen salt and time and didn't complain.
"Mèt," Makroz said, bowing his head by a degree reserved for old friends you owe and will owe again.
"Makroz, long time no see, old friend," said Agwe-Djall. He turned those tide eyes on Zed. "And the flame that heats his tea."
"Zed, Zed Zobop," Zed said, giving a tiny bow and an irreverent grin. "Sometimes I overboil it."
Agwe-Djall's mouth tugged like a small boat choosing an eddy. "Come in. The lake told me your feet were urgent."
They climbed the three steps. The porch boards didn't creak because nothing in that house would betray a guest to gravity without everyone agreeing it was funny. Inside smelled like smoke and salt and old wood, and there was a table with 3D magical maps spread like blankets and cups that had been warmed, not too hot, just enough to make hands remember they belonged to bodies.
Agwe-Djall poured without asking if they wanted. "You are here for a door," he said.
"We are here for a girl," Zed said, voice steady and dangerous.
"Same thing," the water lord said. He set a cup in front of Zed and another in front of Makroz. "Some doors are people."
Makroz rested both palms on the table's edge. "Natas."
Agwe-Djall didn't flinch. He somehow became calmer, which ought to be illegal. "You will not like what I tell you."
"Tell it anyway. It doesn't matter because I'm going to bring my daughter back home no matter what." Zed said. "We don't weigh truth by flavor."
Agwe-Djall nodded. He tapped a finger on a map where no island was drawn and yet a little curl of ink suggested that the cartographer's pen had trembled there once. The lake outside hushed, as if it too leaned closer.
"Then listen," he said. "And remember that even kings get wet when they walk too far without learning to swim."
The night outside pressed close to the windows, not unfriendly, simply attentive. Somewhere beneath their boots, the lake shifted, and fish that had outlived four wars turned in their sleep.
Makroz wrapped his hands around the warm cup and looked up, eyes very, very dark. "We're listening."
The door sighed shut behind them like a secret settling into a chair.
Message: " I wish I could make writing my full time work, but you know not everyone have the same luck as the one that made it. Bills kicking me arss until my significant other get a job and I will be able to post chapters every 1 or 2 days, and I also plan on making an Instagram for novels, so I can share arts of the characters, remember I'm also an artist so I will be drawing them. Wish me luck. And thank you for being patient "