The wind did not howl. It sang.
In the farthest reaches of Kir Amari, where the veil between the living and the remembered thinned like old cloth, morning broke in silence. Not the peaceful hush of serenity—but the weighted stillness of expectation, as if the very earth paused to exhale.
Atop the high plateau, Seyna, now seventeen, stood barefoot in the dewy grass, her shadow long and strange beneath the violet-tinged light. Around her neck hung the spiral pendant, gifted in secret by her aunt, inherited through bloodlines older than truth. She had come alone, just as the old woman instructed.
"Go before the eighth rising. The sky will speak."
The wind shifted. She heard it—not with her ears, but with something older. It was a name.
Amira.
The name slid like silk through Seyna's bones, vibrating her spine. She had never met Amira, not in flesh. But her stories—those whispered around fires, etched into cloth, carried in lullabies—had always been more than myth to her. They were pieces of herself.
Seyna knelt and pressed her fingers to the soil. The shrine stone was warm.
And then it happened.
A rift opened in the sky—not torn, but unzipped like an old seam, letting down soft light that shimmered like indigo mist. In its center floated a single note—a sound shaped like a memory, echoing from a time when the worlds still danced together.
From that note, images bloomed:
Amira beneath the lighthouse, holding Elias as the sea swallowed the stars.
Kemi on a dusty road, watching Tunde vanish behind the red bus bound for the city.
Ebele kneeling beneath the Baobab tree, her hand on her stomach, whispering promises to a child yet born.
Ayoola staring at a letter that would change everything, trembling with both hope and fear.
And Elias… alone, aging, waiting by the sea for a promise he never dared hope would return.
It was a reckoning. Not of judgment, but of restoration.