The rain hadn't stopped for three days. It wasn't violent no howling winds, no crashing thunder. Just a ceaseless drizzle, fine and cold, that soaked the earth and muted the world into a dull, endless gray. It made time feel strange slower, as if the sun itself had forgotten its path.
Djaka stood at the edge of the forest, boots sunken in red clay, shoulders stiff beneath his soaked cloak. Before him rose a monolith, jagged and obsidian, like the spine of some ancient creature thrust halfway out of the earth. It didn't belong here. The trees recoiled from it. Vines dared not climb it. Even the birds avoided perching near.
It had no name. No map marked it. No story spoke of it. Yet it stood, tall and unmoved, hidden deep in the Madyan wilds where no one ventured without reason or without desperation.
Djaka wasn't sure why he had come. He had dreamt of it. For weeks. The same image: a black stone weeping mist, his name burning across its face, and a voice calling him not by title, but by wound.
Now that he was here, standing before it, heart pounding against his ribs, he almost turned back.
But it was too late.
His name was already there.
Etched into the stone, glowing faintly through the rain.
"Djaka. Son of No One. Died the day the mist opened its second eye."
He read it. Again. Again. The words did not shimmer, but breathed. There was heat to them. Not just from fire but from memory. They weren't carved. They were seared. Yet the stone bore no marks around them no cracks, no soot. Just truth, laid bare in alien script that somehow made sense in his mind.
Behind him, Pati's voice broke the stillness. "Djaka. That's… that's your name."
Djaka didn't answer.
Pati approached, his boots squelching in the mud. "What the hell is this? You've never been out here. This thing how does it know you?"
Djaka's lips parted, but no words came. The weight in his chest wasn't fear. Not exactly. It was like being stared at from inside his own skull.
Pati stepped beside him. "This is a prank, right? You came earlier and carved it? Some kind of joke to mess with me?"
"No," Djaka said finally, voice dry. "I've never seen this place. Not with my eyes."
Pati squinted. "Not with your…? Man, don't start with that cryptic hunter stuff. We're not in a story."
But they were. They just didn't know what kind.
The rain intensified. A drop slid down Djaka's cheek, warm compared to the air.
He glanced at Pati. His friend was pale beneath his hood, knuckles white around his spear. This was supposed to be a routine trip hunting game, checking snares. They hadn't packed for hauntings.
Then came the whispering.
It was subtle at first, like wind brushing tree bark. But there was rhythm. Language. Not in the ears but in the spine.
Djaka turned slowly toward the forest. The mist had thickened. Not rolling in from the east as usual but rising. As if exhaled from beneath the ground.
"Pati," Djaka said, backing away from the stone. "Don't move."
"Too late," Pati muttered, already stepping back.
In the mist, shapes shifted. Not creatures. Not yet. But suggestions. The sense of being watched. Judged. Unraveled.
Then Djaka saw it.
A figure.
Still and tall, cloaked in fog, just beyond the trees. Its face was hidden behind a smooth mask of pale wood, unpainted, marked only by three vertical lines carved straight down the center.
The mask had no eye holes.
Yet Djaka felt seen.
The figure did not move. But its voice came directly into Djaka's mind.
"You arrived too early. The spiral is incomplete."
Djaka took a step forward. "Who are you?"
The figure tilted its head. A sound like breath soft and hollow escaped into the rain.
"You were not meant to awaken yet. But the stone has spoken."
Djaka's skin prickled. "Why is my name here? What spiral?"
The mist surged. Trees disappeared behind it. Pati shouted something Djaka didn't hear. The stone behind him pulsed with warmth, like a heart buried in rock.
Then the figure vanished.
The mist reacted coiling, grasping. Pati cried out. Djaka spun.
A void opened beneath Pati's feet not a hole, but an absence. Like a place where the world had been forgotten. Pati reached out, but was already being pulled.
Djaka lunged.
Fingers touched fingers.
But only for a second.
Pati's face eyes wide, lips parting in shock was the last thing Djaka saw before his friend disappeared. Swallowed. Not by fog. But by something colder. Older. Hungrier.
Djaka fell to his knees. Rain pattered on the back of his neck. His hand still outstretched.
The forest was silent.
Even the wind held its breath.
Then the stone cracked.
A hairline fracture split its surface down the middle. From within, black mist spilled out like smoke in water, curling around Djaka's legs without touch or weight.
New words began to form below the old ones, burned into being by invisible fire:
"Let the second eye open. Let the blood remember its name."
Djaka stared.
His heart beat slow. Heavy.
He didn't understand.
Not yet.
But he felt something shift inside him. Not pain. Not power. Something deeper.
A memory not his own.
A voice, ancient and cruel, whispered behind his thoughts.
"Return to where you were unmade."
Djaka gasped. He stumbled back. The monolith loomed. The forest spun.
Pati was gone.
The figure in the mask was gone.
But Djaka remained.
And the stone… the stone now watched him.