The wind had softened. No more howling through the cracks, no more biting at the skin. Just a hush, like a giant had finally exhaled. The storm was over, but Azuma still carried its fingerprints.

  Rain had scoured the red-dust paths clean, leaving puddles that mirrored a sky still half-asleep. Scattered leaves and broken branches lay about like forgotten offerings. Smoke coiled from the chimneys of North Azuma, rising into a morning that didn’t yet trust its own peace.

  Azuma was no small village. People called it a city, though it lacked walls or grandeur. It was a place grown from stubbornness and routine . Too large to be forgotten but at the same time too poor to be feared.

  To the north, where homes like Kazeem’s stood in tidy rows of mudbrick and timber, the morning had begun again. Children splashed through puddles, chasing chickens that clucked like they’d survived a war. Market stalls reopened with sighs and muttered prayers, baskets of damp goods reshuffled. The schoolhouse sat crooked as ever, a one-room structure where children were supposed to learn how to read, write, and memorize the local laws. Whether any laws were remembered was another matter.

  Beyond the houses stretched the forest. Thick, green, and tangled. Dangerous enough to make people wary, but not enough to stop trade. Roads cut through it like veins, leading to faraway cities with real towers, real gold. That’s where the merchants came from. That’s where opportunity was supposed to live.

  At Azuma’s center lay the raid camp . A cluster of tents, crates, and rusting spears. Its watchtower still bore signs of the storm: canvas ripped, a ladder half-split, men grumbling as they patched things together. Kazeem had stood up there once. Not long ago, but it felt like another life. Before the trench. Before the whisper. Before the loops.

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  South of the camp lay land that people didn’t speak of lightly.

  The vines.

  They slithered along the earth like snakes made of root and hate. No one could say how they moved …but they did. Slowly. Unnaturally. Zokou had warned his son never to go near them. He had gone anyway. And now… the world had changed.

  To the east were farmlands. Neat rows of cassava, yam, and beans, stubbornly maintained by men and women who prayed more than they harvested. The storm had flattened a few stalks and drowned a few roots, but the farmers were already out there, grumbling, replanting.

  And to the west, past the dry gorges and broken stone…

  The salt trenches.

  Long dead. Once, maybe, there’d been a sea. Now it was just white-crusted dirt and echoing gullies. That’s where the pile had been. The corpses. That’s where the loops had taken root.

  Kazeem walked through all of it.

  Not with purpose, not exactly. He needed to move. To breathe the air. To feel the dirt beneath his feet and remind himself that this wasn’t the 9th. This wasn’t the same day, again. The sun was warmer. The shadows moved differently.

  He passed a scavenger cart, rusted wheels half-buried in mud. Old machines lay scattered near the edge of the west. Motors stripped bare. Radios cracked open. There was a rumor that something valuable might still be hiding in the wrecks , some old relic worth selling at the city markets. Every week, new scavengers tried their luck. Most came back with junk.

  They didn’t know.

  They didn’t know that one artifact had already been discovered and not in the center, not in the south either, but here, in the west.

  And it had bound itself to the little weird but strangely handsome teenager, Kazeem also nicknamed ghost-eye by the other kids of Azuma.

  Kazeem said nothing as he walked past them. No one noticed him. Not like he wanted them to. The hunger in him had dulled, but only just. His thoughts spun like dust behind his eyes.

  The vine.

  the spirit.

  The mask.

  The old woman.

  The rusty blade.

  It wasn’t just the loop that had broken.

  It was him.

  I think I recovered from the flu i got (yeah I know we are in the summer … don’t judge me I’m not usually that weak??) so tomorrow I will go back to work … yeees…