When she bled for the first time, her aunts wrapped her in black cloth and told her: Now you belong to your future husband. Keep your head bowed, and your legs closed. Your value sits between your thighs.
She tried to scrub herself clean in the river that night. But no matter how cold the water, it could not wash away the shame she was taught to carry.
The men spoke of the Kanun — the ancient code that governed everything in their land: from honor, to blood, to breath itself. Under the Kanun, a man could kill another over pride. A woman could be bartered like a goat.
Ajkuna began to write her own laws. In the dirt. On stones. On the inside of her arm.
Kanuni im:
My body is not a promise.
My voice is not a threat.
My spirit will not kneel.
When she was thirteen, she was promised to a man three times her age. A man who had already buried two wives. "He has land," they said. "He will protect you."
Ajkuna looked at him once — the way he licked his lips at her — and knew she would rather die free than live caged.
The night before the wedding, she took her mother's old blade from under the floorboard.
She didn't run.
She didn't cry.
She confronted him at the door of his home, and she told him: "If you touch me, your blood will mix with mine."
No one knows what happened in that room. But he was found the next day with a gash across his cheek and a broken hand.
Ajkuna disappeared before the sun rose.
Some say the mountains swallowed her. Others say the eagles carried her away. But the women in the village began to whisper her name like a secret prayer.
And months later, when a war between tribes left the men scattered and the children starving — it was women who stood guard at the village gate. It was women who fed the fires. And it was a woman, cloaked in black, who left bread at every doorstep before vanishing into the fog.
Ajkuna's body was never found.
But her law — her truth — remained.
And in time, mothers began to name their daughters after her.
And when little girls stood up too soon, or spoke too loud, or dreamed too much — the elders would mutter:
"Ajkuna walks again."