Chapter Two
Night fell like a heavy cloth, folding over Orun-Oke and blotting out the last streaks of orange from the sky. But the darkness tonight was not ordinary. It was thick, ancient — the kind of darkness that remembers. The kind that watches back.
Asha stood barefoot beneath the tamarind tree, staring at the sky as if expecting something to fall from it. The stars were dimmer than usual. The moon was only a sliver, like a tooth waiting to bite.
Behind her, the faint glow of lanterns blinked across the village. But here, at the edge of the known world, only shadows reigned.
She had not spoken of the crow. Or the dream. Or the fact that sometimes, when she passed a mirror, her reflection blinked too late.
Instead, she had gone about the day in a blur — pounding yam, fetching firewood, pretending not to hear the river hum her name.
But now the silence pressed in.
And it began again.
The voices.
Low. Layered. Not loud enough to call attention, but sharp enough to pierce bone.
Asha…
She clutched her amulet — a copper disc once worn by her grandmother — and whispered a prayer.
Nothing changed.
Then the wind began to shift. Not in direction, but in tone. The rustling of palm fronds behind her no longer sounded like leaves. It sounded like laughter.
Soft. Childlike. Cruel.
She turned, heart thudding.
No one was there.
But she knew — she knew — she was not alone.
At dawn, she went to the river.
Mama Tani had told her once: When the spirit world knocks, water is where the veil is thinnest.
The river stretched wide, brown and slow, its banks heavy with mist. Asha knelt and dipped her fingers in.
The water was cold — but not wet.
It felt like touching memory.
She closed her eyes.
And suddenly, she was somewhere else.
It wasn't a dream.
She was standing in the same golden tide she'd seen before — the tangerine sky swelling above her, the horizon alive with murmuring spirits. This time, she wasn't alone.
A figure approached — cloaked in shadow, but with eyes that gleamed like lightning behind rainclouds.
It didn't speak. It simply raised its hand, and on its palm were three burning symbols — one shaped like a crescent, one like a bird, and one like a door.
When Asha tried to speak, her mouth filled with salt.
She awoke coughing, water dripping from her lips though she hadn't swallowed any.
The river was still.
But something in her chest now ached.
A mark, invisible but unmistakable, pulsed just below her collarbone — where her grandmother's amulet now felt hot to the touch.
That evening, she returned to Mama Tani, desperate.
"They're calling me," Asha said. "I saw one of them."
Mama Tani nodded solemnly.
"They will not stop," the priestess murmured. "Not until you answer."
"Answer how?"
"By going where they live. By remembering what they took from you. And by confronting the one who carries your shadow."
"My… what?"
Mama Tani pulled a scroll from the folds of her wrapper — an old, brittle page written in a script older than the village itself.
"You are not just a girl, Asha. You are a vessel. A doorway. You were born between the last breath of dusk and the first cry of night. Your life belongs to both."
Asha's hands shook.
"But I don't want to belong to shadows."
Mama Tani's voice was soft, but firm. "Then you must become something more than human."
That night, the crow returned.
This time, it perched on her windowsill, wings folded like a priest's robe, eyes glowing.
It dropped something into her room — a feather, ink-black, with a tiny, silver thread tied around its shaft.
When Asha touched it, the room changed.
The walls rippled like water. The air thinned.
And a voice — this time, her own voice — echoed back to her from the darkness:
"Find the third door before the tide turns red.
Or all three worlds will forget your name."
And so the path was set — not by choice, but by inheritance.
Beneath the tangerine sky, Asha would walk between the mouths of night,
not as a girl, but as a bridge.
Between what is seen — and what waits.