The sky above Kinamis darkened too early for anyone's liking. The sun vanished behind a wall of thick clouds, casting a premature dusk that coated the town in an eerie grey. Thunder rumbled from far off, though the wind stood still. The air felt charged, waiting, like something unseen stood at the edge of the world, just out of reach.
By late afternoon, unease gripped the town. Animals paced and cried out in strange rhythms. The community well had gone dry for an hour before returning with water that tasted oddly metallic. Mothers pulled their children indoors, holding them close and whispering old words meant to bring calm. Even the trees seemed quieter, their leaves hanging still despite the occasional wind.
In the southeastern quarter of Kinamis, where the land sloped gently toward the fig grove, Mr. Kristen's compound sat in dignified silence. The councilman was one of the most respected voices in Kinamis. A retired principal with decades of teaching behind him, he had mentored kings and paupers alike, guided generations through their rites, and held stories older than memory itself. His house, modest but neat, was rarely disturbed.
But that day, nobody had seen him. Not since dawn.
Two of the neighborhood youths sent to gather supplies nearby noticed the unsettling quiet. The older one, Seme, offered to check in.
"Mr. Kristen!" he called from the gate, balancing the basket on his hip. "It's Seme o! We brought your harvest."
No reply.
He pushed the rickety wooden gate open. The compound was undisturbed but carried a heaviness he couldn't place. As he approached the apartment, the hairs on his neck stood. The front door was half ajar.
The moment he stepped inside, a stench of burnt metal and camphor hit him. Mr. Kristen sat upright on his stool, facing the doorway. His mouth hung open, frozen in a silent expression of terror, and his eyes were stretched wide with something far beyond fear. His fingers clutched the arms of the seat so hard the wood had split beneath them. His skin, drawn tight against his skull, looked dry and drained of life, as though something had pulled the color and warmth from him completely.
Seme froze.
A moment passed. Then another. Then he screamed.
His cries rang through the compound like a sudden storm. Neighbors rushed out from their homes, drawn by the commotion. Word spread quickly, and before long, the square near the gathering place filled with uneasy murmurs and growing fear.
King Marcus, already uneasy from his dream the night before, arrived swiftly with two guards. Gafan, followed in silence, beads clutched tightly in both hands.
When they stepped into his apartment, the temperature seemed to drop. None spoke for several seconds.
Gafan walked forward and placed his hand on Mr. Kristen's head. He withdrew instantly.
"His soul didn't leave gently," he said. "This is not old age. This is not illness."
"What is it then?" the king asked with low voice.
Gafan stood straight, his eyes shadowed. "The gods are crying out. Something old has stirred. This man has seen it. And it took his breath."
The king turned slowly to look at the others. "Kristen knew stories even I feared to hear. If it took him, it won't stop there."
A woman in the crowd sobbed. "It was the stone, it was the black thing they found."
Others nodded. Word of the construction crew's mysterious find had spread, in whispers and cautious glances. No one dared say too much.
A messenger was sent out again. "All council members, all who serve the land, all who know its ways, assemble at the sacred hall." As the sun disappeared and the storm clouds withheld their rain, the hall glowed with the light of oil lamps. A heavy stillness hung in the air.
Among those gathered was the old woman from the edge of the western field. Her dreams had always been dry and forgettable, until last night. She had seen flames licking skyward, rising from the soil itself, but leaving no ash, no scent of smoke. And when she woke, her cloth was damp with tears she didn't remember shedding.
A former midwife whispered that, at dawn, a ribbon of dark mist coiled around her ceiling beam.
One of the councilmen, clutched his chest and claimed he felt something watching him from beneath the earth. He said he dreamt of silence, complete, devouring silence, and woke gasping, convinced he had drowned in air.
Even the dogs in Kinamis had begun to act strangely. The community dogs no longer barked at strangers; they stared at empty walls, scraped the ground with restless paws, as if sensing something hidden beneath. One had even bolted into the bush and never came back. Children no longer played outside. Women hung tokens of protection above their doors.
At the construction camp outside Kinamis, a very different kind of silence ruled. Keyslar, the site foreman, walked with a clipboard and a twitch in his eye. He had spent years on rugged projects, dodging guerrillas in oil zones and paying customs officers to get cement across borders. But nothing rattled him quite like the feeling he'd had that morning, waking to find the camp dog growling at an empty space behind the shed.
Stephen Brandt, the site manager, was inside the administrative trailer going over permit files. Elinz had reported two near-accidents with power tools. Kizito had discovered that their compasses wouldn't point true in the area where the stone was unearthed.
"Maybe it's magnetized ore," Stephen had said.
"No," Kizito said, eyes unreadable. "It's something else."
Keyslar overheard and muttered under his breath, "We should've left that bloody rock where we found it."
Behind the tool shed, Grat had doubled the ropes around the crate. Emral paced nearby.
"Did you hear about the councilman?" Grat asked.
Emral nodded. "Dead. Face stretched like a mask. Something's wrong."
"And we're holding it," Grat said.
Inside the tent where Damitz served food, even the usually rowdy workers ate quietly. Mayo spooned his food slowly, eyes flicking toward the dark patch where the shed stood.
That night, Mayo and Grat met outside the latrine.
"We should move it again," Mayo said. "Somewhere far."
"We can't," Grat hissed. "Brandt will know. Keyslar too."
"So we wait until it kills someone here?"
Neither said anything for a moment.
Then Mayo said, "We do it quietly. Just you and me. Tonight."
Hidden from their awareness, another figure listened from the shadows, one of the local assistants, eyes wide with fear.
Back in Kinamis, the king lit a bundle of sage and walked alone to the river shrine.
He knelt beside the altar and whispered, "Where has it gone?"
The river didn't answer. But the water turned a strange hue of deep purple for three seconds before clearing again.
Behind him, Gafan arrived.
"It's time," the king said.
"Time for what?"
"To call the boy."
Iboro was eight years old, but even in a place like Kinamis, where age often arrived early on a child's face, he carried a kind of ancient quiet. He was not the sort of boy who ran after animals or kicked stones into the bush. He walked slowly, like his feet were always remembering where the earth had been wounded. The people of Kinamis didn't quite know what to make of him, so they mostly left him alone.
He lived with his grandmother, a spare woman named Mrs Adian, who had once been a midwife before her eyes dimmed and her knees stiffened. She raised Iboro alone since his mother died during childbirth. No one ever spoke of the father, not even Mrs Adian, and certainly not Iboro. Their house was near the edge of the eastern trail, where the bush pressed close and frogs sang at night like spirits mourning.
Strange things had always followed Iboro, though not in the loud, dramatic ways people feared. Instead, it was in the quiet disruptions, how animals would stop whatever they were doing when he passed, birds falling silent on branches, dogs lowering their ears and going still. And then there were the dreams. Not just his own, but ones others claimed to have after spending time near him, as if he carried fragments of the night that drifted into the minds of those nearby.
Twice, some councilmen woke from visions of darkness and flame and claimed they'd seen Iboro standing in the middle of it, calm and watching. Once, a blind man in the market dropped his bowl when Iboro brushed past, insisting later that he saw a tree split by lightning, the same tree, some said, from the night Iboro was born.
He hardly spoke, but when he did, his words often came like riddles. "The stone doesn't like forgetting," he once told Mrs. Adian after waking in sweat. She only nodded, patting his head, but that day she made a small offering at the crossroads.
No one had ever told him about the sacred place near the king's residence, yet he discovered it one day on his own and sat outside for hours. He didn't speak. He simply listened, hands folded, as if waiting for something older than words.
So when the king of Kinamis told Gafan, "Send for the boy," no one asked which boy he meant. It could only be Iboro, the quiet one, the one born in the thunder. The one the gods had already noticed.
And somewhere in the woods beyond Kinamis, a tree cracked down its middle with no wind to blame.
The game had begun.
And the first blood had already been spilled.