The river was behind him, its roar reduced to a faint growl carried on the wind. Before him, the mountains rose like ancient titans, their shoulders cloaked in mist, their crowns lost to the sky. Ahayue trudged forward, each step heavy with weariness but also with something new: a strange certainty, as if the mountains themselves had been waiting for him.
The air was different here—sharp, thin, and dry, so unlike the wet heaviness of the jungle. It bit into his lungs, each breath rasping against his chest. He wrapped the boar-hide tighter around himself, shivering despite the morning sun. Silence pressed around him. No insects hummed. No monkeys chattered. Only the whistling of wind between crags and the occasional cry of some unseen bird.
Yet amid that silence, the world felt alive. Stones jutted in strange shapes, almost deliberate. At times, he passed piles of rocks stacked into crude towers, as though hands long dead had left them as markers. On one slope, he stumbled across a spiral scratched into the cliff face—weathered nearly smooth, but still recognizable, the same spiral carved into his bone amulet.
He touched it, and the stone felt warmer than it should.
"This place knows me," he thought uneasily. "Or I belong to it."
The Shrine in the Mountain
By late afternoon, his legs burned from climbing. He found himself following a faint path—not a trail of men, but something older, as if the mountain itself guided his steps. It led him around a ridge where the rock face bulged outward, carved and cracked with age.
There, half-buried in scree, stood the remnants of a shrine.
Its form was simple yet uncanny: two pillars flanking a recessed hollow in the cliff, each pillar etched with spirals and figures. The figures were not entirely human—tall shapes with elongated limbs, faces hidden behind masks of animals: jaguars, owls, serpents. Some raised their arms toward the sky; others knelt before a darkened form at the center, a shadow figure carved so deeply into the stone that its edges blurred with the cliff itself.
Ahayue's throat tightened. He recognized that silhouette. It was the same shape that had haunted his dreams, the same shadow that had stalked him in the jungle of his mind.
The hollow between the pillars formed a kind of alcove, black with shadow. The air there was colder, heavy with a scent like old ash.
Against his better judgment, Ahayue stepped closer. His fingers brushed one of the carvings—and the mountain seemed to exhale.
The Vision
He staggered as dizziness swept over him. The stone beneath his hand grew hot, then blindingly cold. The world around him dissolved.
When his sight cleared, he was no longer standing in silence.
He saw a gathering of people—not his tribe, but taller, leaner, their bodies daubed with ash and blood. They chanted in a language he could not understand, voices rising and falling like waves. They stood around the very shrine he now touched, but in their time it was whole, its stones sharp and new.
At the shrine's center, a man was dragged forward. His body was twisted, bent, much like Ahayue's own, his limbs crooked, his spine warped. He struggled, but the others held him fast, pressing him before the shadow-carving.
The chanting grew louder. The shadow seemed to swell, its form writhing like smoke. And then—Ahayue felt it. A curse. Words too ancient to grasp, but heavy with intent, poured into the twisted man. He screamed, his body convulsing, until the shadows seeped into his skin.
Ahayue's chest burned. His limbs throbbed as though the curse was being poured into him anew. He fell to his knees in the vision, gasping.
The scene shifted. The man with the twisted body was gone, and in his place stood a line of figures—generations of them, each marked, each bent, each carrying the same curse in their flesh. Their eyes glowed faintly, hollow with suffering.
At the end of the line, Ahayue saw himself.
"No," he whispered, though the word was swallowed by the chanting. "Not me. I will not—"
The shadow turned. It had no face, no mouth, but Ahayue felt its gaze pierce him.
"You are mine," a voice echoed in his skull, deeper than thunder, colder than stone. "Your suffering feeds me. Your body bears my mark. You cannot run."
Ahayue clutched the amulet around his neck. It seared against his palm, glowing faintly, a defiance against the crushing voice.
"I am not yours," he rasped.
The shadow laughed—a sound like rocks grinding in the dark.
The Curse Awakens
Ahayue's body convulsed. Heat flared beneath his skin, as if fire burned in his blood. He staggered out of the vision, collapsing at the shrine's base. His breath came ragged, his eyes blurred. Every bone in his body screamed, twisting against itself.
He clawed at the dirt, rolling onto his back. The sky above spun, stars already emerging though night had barely begun. His heart pounded as if it would burst. For one terrible moment, he thought the shadow was right—that his curse would consume him entirely, that he would die shrieking at the foot of the mountain shrine.
But then—faint as a whisper—another presence stirred.
It was not the shadow. It was something gentler, yet vast. Like the mountain's own voice, speaking not in words but in silence.
And in that silence, Ahayue felt something shift within him. The curse did not vanish, but it… adjusted. The fire in his blood dulled to embers. The pain in his limbs lessened, though his spine still ached, still crooked. Yet for the first time, he felt as though the curse was not only destruction—it was connection. A chain, yes, but one that tethered him to something larger, older than even his tribe's oldest myths.
He gasped, tears streaking his face. "Why me?" he whispered to the dark sky.
No answer came. Only the wind howled through the shrine's hollow, carrying ash and memory.
Night of Ash
He drifted in and out of fevered dreams. Shadows danced around him, but they no longer threatened. Instead, they hovered, watchful, like vultures circling above. He dreamt of rivers of fire, of mountains crumbling into sea, of voices chanting in endless spirals. And always, the bone amulet glowed like a small flame in his chest, refusing to extinguish.
When dawn finally broke, Ahayue woke curled at the shrine's base. His body trembled with weakness, his lips cracked, but he was alive. The fever had broken, leaving him wrung out and hollow, as though some part of his essence had been burned away in the night.
He rose unsteadily. The shrine loomed behind him, silent once more. The carvings were still there, the shadow still etched deep into stone, but it no longer seemed to leer. Instead, it waited.
Ahayue touched his amulet, feeling its warmth, and whispered: "I will not feed you. Not willingly."
His voice was thin, but it did not waver.
Ahead, the mountain path climbed higher, disappearing into veils of mist. His journey was no longer just about survival, nor simply about finding a cure. The vision had shown him something he had not wanted to believe: that his curse was part of a story older than himself, older than his tribe.
And if that was true—then walking forward meant stepping into the heart of that story.
With staff in hand and amulet against his chest, Ahayue left the shrine behind, each step echoing in the silence of the mountain, each breath carrying him closer to the place where earth touched sky.