Another morning in Kinamis broke with no rooster call. Not a single one. A hush hung over the town like a held breath, a silence so dense it felt as though the earth itself was waiting. The sky, despite the hour, retained a purplish tint, and the air smelled faintly of scorched wood, though no fire had burned. At first, no one said anything. The market opened late, the stalls creaking as if waking from a troubled dream. Then the strange happenings began, slowly, like water beginning to boil.
In the fields on the western edge of town, where trees once stood tall and leafy, the stalks lay limp and yellowed, plants were no more. No pests. No signs of rot. Just dead. Freshly so, as if life had been sucked from the roots overnight. Not far off, a child collapsed during a game of football. His mother, found him burning with fever and murmuring in his sleep. When she pressed a wet cloth to his head, he muttered words in a tongue she didn't recognize. Others began to fall ill in the days that followed, four children, all under ten, suffering the same symptoms: a blazing fever, cold feet, and restless sleep filled with soft, indistinct whispering.
Harlem, the spiritual guide of Kinamis, was summoned time and again. He prepared sacred roots, lit ritual fires, and chanted at the sacred grounds, doing all he knew, but the whispers would not cease.
And then, the king began to sweat.
At first, it seemed a simple thing. A humid afternoon. A touch of unease. But the sweat did not dry. King Marcus awoke one morning with his right palm soaked through, as if he had dipped it in river water. The left remained dry. He washed but the sweat returned. He tied it in cloth. It soaked through. By the third day, he stood in his chamber with his hand wrapped in white linen, staring out at the darkening clouds above the eastern forest. His mind was troubled, not just by the endless dampness of his palm, but by the dreams that came with it, flashes of stone, of flame curling upward without smoke, of a face in shadow calling his name in a voice that sounded like wind scraping against stone.
Outside the palace, fear was growing. Women whispered near the communal water spot. Men stood in tight clusters at the edge of the fields, speaking in hushed, urgent tones. Someone said Mr. Kristin's spirit hadn't found rest. Another claimed to have seen a snake split down the middle by the riverbank, both halves still moving. And in the northern quarter, an elderly herbalist awoke with a scream, her tongue stained an unnatural shade of blue.
Mrs. Adian watched Iboro carefully. The boy was quiet as ever, but his silence now seemed deeper, stretched thin like a cloth about to tear. He sat for hours outside their compound, eyes fixed on the horizon, unmoving even as the shadows shifted around him.
"He's listening," she told Gafan one evening as they sat beneath the wide old tree near the edge of the square, sharing a small plate of chewed offerings passed down through tradition.
"Listening to what?" Gafan asked.
She shrugged. "To what's not being said."
At the construction camp, the effects of the stone's presence began to fray the nerves of even the most hardened workers. Keyslar barked orders with more aggression. Stephen Brandt kept to his trailer more, his notes increasingly disorganized. Elinz reported tools disappearing and reappearing elsewhere. Kizito had stopped sleeping in his tent, opting instead for a mat by the main trailer, closer to the camp's lights. Grat and Mayo continued to visit the crate every night.
"We should burn it," Mayo whispered one evening.
"We tried to move it again last night," Grat said. "The wheels wouldn't roll. It's like it grew heavier."
Damitz, the cook, began burning incense in the kitchen tent. When asked why, he only said, "The meat won't cook right anymore. Something's wrong with the fire."
Whispers coiled tighter around Kinamis like unseen vines, stretching their grip into places even the midday sun could not chase away. It began with the king's daughter, a bright-eyed girl of only ten, known for her laughter that rang out like chimes in the palace courtyard. One morning, her handmaid found the child sitting quietly by her bed, her eyes hollow, her hands stained with blood. At first, panic swept the palace, had she been injured? But a swift examination revealed the impossible truth: she had entered her womanhood far too early, without warning or cause.
King Marcus stood at the threshold of his chamber, his heart torn between disbelief and dread. His palm, which had begun sweating uncontrollably days before, now dripped ceaselessly, as though his body could no longer contain its own fear. He dared not ask the spiritual guide of Kinamis for an explanation yet. Deep inside, he already knew. The gods were no longer whispering. They were warning.
Elsewhere, deeper in the town's southern edge, another horror surfaced, a pregnant woman in her sixth month, had gone for a routine scan at the newly set-up clinic near the missionary school. The doctor, a man not known for superstition, frowned at the monitor. He shifted the probe again and again across her taut belly, smeared with cold gel, but the result remained unchanged: the womb was hollow. No heartbeat. No kicking limbs. No child.
And yet her belly still grew. Her face had softened with the roundness of pregnancy; her cravings came like tides; her husband had painted a new cot by hand. But now, faced with the impossible emptiness in the machine's image, the doctor sent her away with trembling lips, unable to form a comforting lie. By nightfall, whispers said the gods had replaced the unborn with a shadow. Some said it was the price for disturbing the earth.
And the earth itself seemed to agree. In the fields bordering the northern path to Kinamis, where Andar Holdings had begun clearing land for a new drainage system, the ground opened its mouth without warning. Gully erosion, they called it later, but no one could explain why the carefully surveyed soil suddenly liquefied, swallowing part of the gravel path and tearing a line through once-fertile farmland.
Keyslar, furious but shaken, ordered the engineers to inspect the site, but Grat and Kizito both knew, though none dared say it aloud, that the ground was rejecting their touch. What mathematics could predict the anger of earth and stone awakened?
The gully widened overnight. It stretched toward the village like a finger. Children were forbidden from playing outside after dusk. Mothers burned incense at their doorsteps. Old women hung amulets of thorn and shell over their windows. And always, there were the whispers.
At the market, a woman swore she heard her dead husband calling her name from beneath the yam stall. At the riverbank, the ferryman claimed the waters sometimes flowed backward, carrying empty calabashes that spun like dancers with broken feet. In the shrine, the priest fasted three days without food or sleep, listening for dreams that refused to come.
Everywhere, it was said: Kinamis had been warned. Kinamis had not listened. Now Kinamis would pay.
And above it all, the black stone, hidden behind rusted doors in a forgotten warehouse, pulsed once more in the dark, unseen, but not unfelt.
The storm was gathering. And no one, not king nor commoner, could stop it now.
And then came the animals. Dogs, cats, even birds, began avoiding the area near the warehouse where the stone was stored. One morning, a crow flew directly into the side of the site's metal gate and fell dead. Another night, one of the site's dog barked and then dropped motionless, eyes wide open, mouth frozen in a scream no one heard.
The king called a private meeting with Harlem the spiritual guide of Kinamis.
"I want to speak to the stone," he said.
"You don't speak to it," Harlem replied. "It speaks to you."
"Then let it speak."
Harlem hesitated. "It already has. Through sweat, through dreams, through Kristin's eyes frozen wide."
The king's eyes narrowed. "Then tell me what it wants."
Harlem looked down at his hands. "It wants what was taken. It wants silence restored."
"Then bring me the boy," the king whispered. "Bring Iboro."
In the days that followed, more whispers crept through Kinamis. The market woman who sold salt began handing out pepper by mistake, claiming the labels changed themselves. A man lost his shadow at midday, watched it vanish beneath him like a puddle drying too fast. Children drew symbols in the sand they claimed to have never seen before.
The whispers came mostly at night. Seme, the boy who had discovered Mr. Kristin's body, stopped speaking entirely. He wandered the edge of the grove, eyes hollow, hands always clenched as if still holding the basket. One of the council members dreamed of his own burial two times in one week. He told no one, but only lit more candles each morning.
The air in Kinamis grew heavier. Not with heat. With knowing.
At the town square, a tree cracked in half and bled sap that smelled like iron. No one touched it.
Then, one night, Iboro spoke.
"They're not dead," he told Mrs. Adian.
She paused mid-stir. "Who?"
"The ones under the stone."
She turned slowly. "What did you say?"
He didn't answer. He just walked outside and looked toward the horizon.
And for the first time in weeks, a wind moved the trees.