The night air in Ugbene was thick with incense and silence.
Dr. Alaric Voss sat in the round hut that had been hastily prepared for him by the elders—more out of obligation than welcome. The woven walls of the structure breathed with the wind, creaking softly like a cradle. Outside, he could hear faint drumming in the distance. Not a celebration, he sensed. A warning. A rhythm meant to awaken the ancestors.
He leaned back on the mat, the firelight casting golden shadows across his sharp features. In his hand, he held his leather-bound field journal—worn, ink-stained, and filled with sketches and half-scrawled notes. But tonight, he could not write. The vision of Amarachi haunted him too strongly.
He had seen her, weeks ago. But now that he had stood before her, heard her voice, felt her energy, something deeper stirred within him. A pull. Not just of desire—though she was arrestingly beautiful—but of fate. Of something ancient demanding to be remembered.
He reached instinctively for the carved pendant at his neck—a keepsake from his grandmother, an Ashkenazi woman who once told him that blood remembers what the mind forgets. The pendant had grown warm lately. Too warm.
The fire cracked, and then—suddenly—it whispered.
Not aloud, but inside him. A voice. Not quite human.
"You walk on hallowed ground, child of the wind."
Alaric stiffened. His vision blurred, the room seeming to spin. The pendant glowed faintly against his chest, pulsing like a second heart.
"You seek what cannot be studied. You chase a woman who does not belong to you, yet she is already in you. Fire remembers fire."
He tried to move, to speak, but his body was heavy, pinned by some unseen force. In his mind, an image flared to life:
Amarachi standing barefoot in the sacred grove, moonlight brushing her bare shoulders. Her body was marked with the ancient sigils, but now they pulsed—alive, glowing like molten gold. Her eyes were shut. Her lips moved in silent prayer.
Around her, spirits floated—wisps of ancestral energy, some serene, some raging. The air burned with unseen heat. Her hair danced like flame in an invisible wind.
Then she opened her eyes—and looked directly at him.
"You are not ready," she said, her voice resonant and otherworldly.
Alaric gasped and was suddenly back in the hut, drenched in sweat. The pendant at his chest stopped glowing.
He breathed hard, eyes wide. The fire still burned calmly, as if nothing had happened. But he knew—he had just been touched by something divine. Or damned.
He rose shakily and stepped outside.
The village was quiet. The moon hung low and heavy. His gaze moved across the landscape until it found a figure standing at the riverbank, arms lifted to the sky, bathed in silver.
It was Amarachi.
She wore a wrapper of indigo cloth wrapped around her waist and nothing above it, her back bare and glistening with river mist. Symbols glowed softly along her spine, alive with magic. She moved slowly, her hands weaving through the air, calling on something unseen.
Alaric took a step forward, but a soft voice stopped him.
"You shouldn't disturb her," said Mama Nnenna, who had appeared silently beside him like smoke.
He turned to the old woman, startled. Her face was lined like tree bark, but her eyes were fierce with youth.
"She communes with the spirits when they are restless," she said. "Tonight, they whisper warnings."
"About me?" he asked, his voice dry.
Mama Nnenna gave a slow, unsettling smile. "About everything."
Then she looked up at the sky. "The witches grow bold. The Codex is awake. And now, the stranger has come."
She turned and hobbled back toward her hut, her staff tapping rhythmically against the ground.
Alaric looked once more at Amarachi, who still danced in the shadows of the moonlight—half-woman, half-goddess.
And for the first time in years, he felt fear.
Not of death. But of the truth.
Because deep down, he knew: he had not come to study Ugbene.
He had come to be changed by it.