It started with dreams—nights where Azar saw black sands swallowing sunlight, grains rising like a tide to smother the horizon. A jackal made of smoke, laughing, its form twisting in oily wisps. The sun bleeding into the horizon, refusing to rise again, its golden disk cracking like an egg to spill crimson veins.
He'd wake with sand in his hair—though the dunes were days away—coarse black grains sifting from his locks onto sweat-dampened pillows. At first, he told Chimori, his voice trembling in the elder's tent, lamplight flickering across prophecy scrolls. The elder urged him to ignore them, his gnarled hand pressing a sun-ward over his brow. But the whispers grew stronger, coiling through his sleep like smoke.
So one morning, before dawn painted the sky in bruised purples, Azar walked east—past the river's silvery murmur, past the grasslands where dew jeweled the blades, past where light thinned into shadow, his bare feet leaving glowing prints that faded like dying stars.
He stood before the Obsidian Dunes for the first time.
The air there was wrong—hot, but cold at its edges, a prickling chill nipping his skin like invisible teeth. The sand gleamed black, like cooled magma, whispering as it moved—rasping shhh-shhh as grains shifted in hypnotic waves—as though memory itself was buried beneath it, clawing to surface. He felt the dunes pulse beneath his feet—like something breathing, a slow thrum-thrum rising through his soles. And in the wind, a laugh—faint, sly, curious—heh-heh-heh, slithering across the wastes like fingers on bone.
Mbweha's laugh.
It didn't frighten him. It intrigued him, drawing his lips into a curious smile. The laugh followed him home. It echoed in his thoughts, bouncing off the walls of his mind. And when he meditated, the rhythm of his breathing began to match the distant, playful panting of the unseen jackal—huff-huff, huff-huff—syncing like a secret heartbeat.
Azar began to visit more often—at first, once every few weeks, slipping away at dusk. Then every few days, his absences stretched longer under the moon's indifferent gaze. He'd tell his people he was meditating at the edges of the desert. But in truth, he was listening—learning—ears straining against the wind's howl.
The dunes had begun to hum softly when he arrived, like they recognized him—a low, resonant hum vibrating the air, welcoming. And somewhere beneath them, Mbweha waited—whispering in riddles, teasing him, testing him, voice bubbling up from cracks like poisoned springs.
"Little sun," the jackal's voice once murmured from the sand, grains parting to form sly eyes, "the brightest flame casts the longest shadow."
He found shards of black stone that shimmered with energy, jagged obsidian flecked with crimson veins. His Aura reacted differently here—sharper, colder, but clearer—flaring in jagged bursts that sliced the air. He began sketching strange diagrams in his journals: spirals of light feeding into shadow, equations that mirrored silence instead of song—ink bleeding black across sun-bleached pages.
When Chimori found him once meditating on a shard of obsidian, cross-legged in a circle of etched runes, he shouted, his voice cracking like thunder,
"You're letting the dark sing through you!"
Azar only smiled, gold-flecked eyes glinting.
"Is darkness not part of the dawn, Elder?"
But even as he spoke, his hand trembled slightly—as if another pulse guided it, a subtle twitch-twitch beneath the skin. A subtle sign that Mbweha's rhythm had already begun to weave itself through his Aura, threads of shadow lacing the gold. From that day, the tribe grew uneasy around him, their smiles faltering.
Animals avoided him, gazelles bolting at his approach, birds veering mid-flight. Children whispered that the wind around him didn't sound right—a faint hiss tainting the breeze. And yet—when he spoke, people still listened, hanging on his every word.
Because his voice was mesmerizing, smooth as honeyed flame.
Because his presence carried both warmth and gravity—like standing close to the sun without being burned, heat radiating in comforting waves.
Because when he smiled, even shadows seemed to lean closer, pooling at his feet like eager pets.
Azar's duality deepened, splitting him like a cracked dawn. In daylight, he was the Jua Tribe's golden prodigy—leading rituals under the blazing sun, healing with Aura that mended wounds in bursts of light, teaching the younger adepts with patient, glowing hands. At night, he wandered into the dunes, where Mbweha's whispers taught him the reverse rhythm—forbidden breathing patterns that inverted Aura flow, chest rising in eerie, hollow gasps.
He began calling this secret technique "The Silence Within the Flame," murmuring it to the stars. He discovered that by stilling his heartbeat and letting the void flow through him, his power doubled—light erupting in blinding pillars—but his warmth dimmed, leaving him chilled.
The others noticed, their eyes lingering. His skin grew pale, once-golden tones fading to alabaster veined with faint shadow. His laughter rarer, replaced by thoughtful silences. When he meditated, his shadow no longer followed the sun's angle—it bent toward the dunes, stretching unnaturally long across the sands.
Sometimes, when he spoke, an echo lingered—faint but unmistakably not his own—a sly heh trailing his words like smoke. Still, the tribe didn't cast him out.
Not yet.
They loved him, gathering around him with hopeful eyes. They remembered the child who could call sunlight with a smile. They believed he could be saved, chanting prayers at dawn. Only Elder Chimori knew the truth, watching from afar with grief-lined eyes.
Azar was no longer following the rhythm of the sun—he was sharing it with something else, a darkness gnawing at the edges. The breaking point came during the Festival of First Light.
Each year, the tribes of Ishara gathered to honor Ndege, the Sky Phoenix, with a ritual flame that symbolized rebirth—flames leaping from a central pyre under a sky ablaze with stars. Azar was chosen to ignite it—the tribe's greatest honor—his hands raised as thousands watched, breaths held. But as the flame rose, crackling orange tongues licking the night, Azar paused mid-chant, lips parted.
He felt something whisper through the heat—not just a voice, but a grin, sly and toothy.
Mbweha was there, unseen but present, laughing through the crackle of fire—heh-heh-crackle-heh.
"Burn brighter, little sun," the jackal hissed, voice slithering up his spine. "Let them see what hides behind the light."
Azar answered it, eyes flashing red at the edges. In that frozen instant, he revealed his forbidden secret: he had sought Ndege's secret of immortality. Under the dunes' shadowed veil, he had stolen a single feather from the Sky Phoenix's blazing plumage and forged it into a talisman through forbidden voidfire—the black flame of reversed Aura that he alone could summon, known as the Veil of Shadows. Now, clutching the shimmering obsidian talisman beneath his robes, he pressed it into the pyre's heart.
The fire turned black for an instant, flames inverting to voids that sucked light inward. The air froze, breath fogging in sudden chill. But from the heavens came a piercing cry—Ndege itself descended in a whirlwind of fiery wings, its radiant form eclipsing the stars. It did not fight. It wept fire, molten tears streaming down its plumage, cooling into jagged glass shards that rained upon the earth, shattering against the stone in tinkling cascades.
Azar's talisman ignited, the Phoenix's feather twisting in mortal hands—granting him not renewal, but eternal rot. A cursed ember erupted within his chest, searing through flesh and bone, sustaining life while devouring humanity from the inside—his veins glowing with blackened veins that pulsed like rotting roots beneath pale skin.
Ndege's parting words rode the wind, a mournful roar that shook the plains:
"You shall live forever, but never again be reborn."
Then the flame reignited, brighter than ever—towering twenty feet, illuminating faces in stark gold—but flickering with streaks of shadow, dark veins pulsing through the blaze like corrupted blood. Since that day, each of Ndege's rebirths blazed brighter—an act of defiance against the corruption that stole its flame. The crowd gasped, a collective inhale rippling outward. Some knelt, believing it divine, palms pressed to the earth.
Others screamed, children burying faces in parents' robes. Chimori saw the truth and shouted, voice slicing the chaos, "Stop this! You're opening a door that cannot close!"
Azar looked at him calmly, flames reflecting in his fractured eyes, the cursed ember throbbing hot beneath his ribs. "Then perhaps it was meant to be opened."
And for a moment—just a moment—the sun itself dimmed, its distant glow faltering as if strangled, plunging the festival into eerie half-light. That was the beginning of the end.
Within moons, the elders forbade his studies, barring the training grounds with woven wards.
Azar disobeyed.
Banished from the lands, traveled farther into the Obsidian Dunes, where Mbweha waited to finish what the flame had started—black sands swirling in welcome.
There, beneath a broken sky streaked with unnatural violets and shifting black sand that writhed like serpents, the child of the sun began his transformation—not into the Prophet of Silence yet, but into the first man who dared to share his soul with a shadow, his silhouette merging with the dunes as laughter echoed into the void.