Zaruko stumbled out of the trees just as the sun began to vanish behind the blood-colored cliffs. Smoke curled skyward from clustered chimneys carved into stone. Forges glowed red within the rock. The air was dry, metallic — like heated iron and ancient secrets.
His limbs trembled from hunger. His wounds had closed, but barely. Months of wilderness and a battle with an unholy beast had stripped his body to its limit. Still, his eyes burned with purpose.
At the crest of the final hill before the village, he collapsed.
Sentries in iron masks emerged from the shadows. They surrounded him with weapons drawn, voices low and unreadable.
One of them crouched and turned Zaruko over. His body was fevered, but his grip on the hilt of his blade had never loosened.
"Should we end him?" the soldier asked.
Another shook their head. "No. Matari will want to see him."
He awoke in a stone chamber. No windows. One door. A bowl of broth sat beside him, untouched.
Zaruko sat up slowly, noting the stiffness in his spine, the sting along his ribs. But he was alive. Again.
For days, he remained there. A different masked guard brought food and water, but no one spoke. He asked questions — they gave no answers. He meditated. He healed. He waited.
On the fifth day, the door opened.
She entered without fanfare — tall, lean, and wrapped in layers of black linen and steel-threaded leather. Her hair was braided with small copper rings. Her eyes, sharp as obsidian, studied him like he was both puzzle and threat.
"I am Matari," she said. "Warden of the Forged Cliffs. Why are you here?"
Zaruko rose to his feet despite the pain.
"I'm Zaruko of Kan Ogou. I've come to unite the tribes."
Her silence was louder than any laugh.
"Unite?" she repeated, as if tasting the word. "You bring an army?"
"I bring purpose."
She stepped closer. "I don't trust people who bleed purpose and expect loyalty."
"I don't ask for trust," Zaruko replied. "I'll earn it."
She studied him for a long time.
Then she left.
That night, a younger guard came to his room — limping, their arm wrapped poorly with torn cloth. Zaruko said nothing, only gestured for them to sit. With practiced care, he cleaned and rewrapped the wound, using herbs crushed from his satchel and cloth dipped in ash-water.
The next morning, Matari returned.
"You helped one of mine," she said.
"I didn't come to hurt them."
Later that day, a shrouded figure came to Zaruko's door. An elder with tattoos of soot and glass along their face — a seer. They carried a bone staff and a vial of thick, blackened blood.
"You killed a beast," the seer whispered. "Black-blooded. Long-fanged. Eyes red like buried fire."
Zaruko nodded.
The seer unwrapped the vial. The blood inside still pulsed faintly.
"We thought it could not be killed," they said. "It fed on the fear between words. We called it the Nayama — the breathless one."
Zaruko's hands curled into fists. "It bled like anything else."
"No. It remembered pain. That is different."
In the days that followed, the whispers grew.
The people still distrusted him, but the young watched him with wonder. They mimicked the slow draw of his blade. They whispered his name.
Matari watched too, and on the seventh day, she gave him a task.
"If you want to prove your intentions, go to the old forge-temple in the western hollow. Something dark has taken root there. It poisons the wind and cracks stone."
Zaruko didn't hesitate.
"Then I'll burn it out."
That night, he stood at the village gates as ash began to fall from the sky like pale snow. A trio of armored escorts stood behind him, silent and grim.
The western hollow loomed like a throat in the mountains — blackened, choked with rot.
Zaruko stepped forward, alone.
No banner. No torchbearer. Just a blade. A will. And the promise of what came after.
He thought of Kan Ogou. Of Maela. Of Ogou's flame.
And then he vanished into the dark.
The forge-temple was a ruin of smoke and silence.
Zaruko stepped deeper, his boots crunching over scorched bones and rusted tools half-melted into the stone. The deeper he walked, the heavier the air became — not with ash, but with something older. Something watching.
The stone trembled. Breath caught in his throat.
A shape formed from the smoke, pulling itself from the cracked walls like it had been slumbering inside them for centuries. It wasn't flesh. Not truly. It was shaped like a man — too tall, too thin — draped in shadow that clung to it like tar. Its mouth split vertically down the center of its face, and it dripped black fire.
It did not speak in words. It radiated malice. Hunger. Curiosity.
And then, recognition — not of Zaruko, but of something resting within him.
The creature stepped forward, and in that moment, the air changed.
A pressure rippled outward from Zaruko's body — invisible, but absolute. Like an unseen storm coiled around him, waiting.
The god recoiled.
"What… is this…?"
It staggered. Not from injury, but from knowing.
"I do not know your name, mortal… but what follows you is not yours."
It took another step back, voice sharper, panicked.
"You… carry a force that is older than this place. Something that remembers how to kill me."
The shadow twisted violently, clawing at the ground as if it could escape into it.
"If I strike… I end."
"And I am not ready to end."
Without another word, the god vanished. Not fled — evaporated, like it was fleeing not from Zaruko, but from what protected him.
The silence returned. The smoke thinned.
Zaruko breathed out slowly, his hand still near his blade. He hadn't drawn it. He hadn't needed to.
He didn't know what the god had seen — only that it had stared into the storm behind his soul and feared it.
And that storm bore the heat of Ogou, though no name had been spoken.
Zaruko turned and walked out of the hollow, smoke curling behind him like a forgotten curse.