The desert was too quiet.
By dawn, even the wind had stopped moving.
The fire from the night before still glowed faintly, yet no smoke rose from it — as if the air had forgotten how to lift flame.
Nakala awoke to the sound of her heartbeat echoing unnaturally loud in her ears. Every thud felt slightly delayed, like she was hearing her body from a few breaths away.
Iri'okan sat nearby, sword across his knees, staring at nothing. His shadow stretched wrong — longer than his body, flickering even in the still light.
"You feel it too?" she asked softly.
He nodded. "The rhythm's uneven. Something's feeding on the Histinak around us."
> "They have found us," Esh'ra murmured from within. Her voice was sharp now, stripped of its usual calm. "When you wove remembrance last night, the N'gai felt it. They crawl toward the pulse of memory like carrion to blood."
"The N'gai…" Nakala whispered. "I thought they erased. Not fed."
> "They feed by erasing," said Esh'ra. "They consume the proof that you ever existed — your name, your reflection, your place in another's thought. It is not hunger for flesh, but for meaning."
Iri'okan rose slowly, scanning the horizon. The sky seemed thinner now — the sun pale, bleeding faint white light that cast no warmth.
---
They walked for hours in silence.
Everywhere they went, the world felt less. The dunes lost their edges. Stones looked melted. Footprints vanished moments after they were made.
Then they reached what should have been a riverbed — only it wasn't.
The channel was there, carved deep into the earth, but dry as bone and smooth as glass. Even the memory of water seemed gone.
Iri'okan crouched beside it, touching the ground. "This was the River Hanu," he said quietly. "My people fought here for centuries. It's gone."
"How can a river just… disappear?"
"It didn't disappear," he said. "It was unremembered."
---
> "Do you see, Nakala?" Esh'ra's voice pressed gently against her thoughts.
"This is the rot that spreads when rhythm breaks. The N'gai do not destroy — they unwrite. Their touch untunes the Histinak until the song forgets its words."
"So they erase magic?" Nakala asked inwardly.
> "No. They erase the idea of it. They hollow the rhythm until it beats for nothing."
Nakala shivered. "Then what happens to those who use Histinak?"
> "They fade first," Esh'ra said simply. "Because they remember too much."
---
By the time night fell, they had made camp in the ruins of an old outpost.
Half the stone towers still stood, but their carvings were smeared — melted lines like tears in stone. Nakala traced them with her hand, feeling a strange chill crawl up her arm.
"Names used to be here," Iri'okan said from behind her. "A record of those who died in the last war. The N'gai always start with the names."
He unsheathed his sword and pressed its tip against the ground. "When we lose our words, we lose our rhythm. That's when the Eaters come."
"The what?"
He looked up. "The ones the demons call Akun-N'gai — the Memory Eaters. They take shape when too much forgetting gathers in one place."
> "The offspring of silence," Esh'ra whispered. "Fragments of the void left behind when the first gods turned away. They remember only hunger."
---
The wind picked up then — but it wasn't wind.
It was breath.
Thousands of overlapping whispers moving through the empty streets, like people reciting prayers they no longer believed in.
Nakala froze. "Do you hear that?"
Iri'okan's hand went to his sword. "Don't answer them."
"What are they saying?"
He met her eyes, his expression grim. "Your name."
The sound grew sharper.
"Nakala… Nakala… Nakala…"
A thousand voices, hollow and distorted, all carrying her memory — but wrong, stretched, broken, fading in and out.
> "They are feeding," Esh'ra hissed. "Do not think. Do not remember yourself."
"What—how do I stop that?"
> "Anchor your rhythm! Find the pulse beneath their noise. Breathe, child!"
Nakala closed her eyes, heart racing. She could feel her thoughts slipping, her own name dissolving at the edges like ink in water.
Her breath hitched — then steadied.
She reached inward, toward the rhythm Esh'ra had shown her — the Histinak of Breath.
She inhaled once, deeply.
The voices flickered.
She exhaled, shaping the rhythm in her mind: I am Nakala. Daughter of those who sang. Vessel of the Black Sun.
The whispers screamed — not loud, but wrong, like sound folding backward.
And then… silence.
---
When she opened her eyes, the world looked clearer again.
The dunes solid, the stars bright. Iri'okan stood near her, blade ready, though his expression was unreadable.
"They're gone," she breathed.
"No," he said quietly. "They've marked you now. Once the N'gai whisper your name, you belong to their memory. They won't stop until you fade… or they do."
> "Let them come," Esh'ra murmured, her tone cold and divine again. "They cannot erase what has devoured eternity before."
Nakala shivered at the goddess's voice — not from fear, but from the weight of it.
For the first time, she understood that her awakening hadn't just stirred power — it had drawn the gaze of things that even gods feared to remember.
And somewhere beyond the dunes, something unseen exhaled —
a slow, hungry sound that echoed through the Histinak itself.
---
End of Chapter 5