The soul speaks in symbols the flesh cannot forget.
Smoke curled in delicate tendrils around the hut as Alaric knelt before a crude circle scorched into the earth. Seven sigils surrounded it—each drawn with precise mineral mixtures, each pulsating with a quiet energy that stirred the air like breath.
He was no longer just experimenting.
He was summoning.
The Codex rested beside him, open to a page that had not existed days before. Symbols moved across the parchment, shifting of their own accord—living ink rearranging ancient truths.
"Calcium. Hematite. Baobab resin," he murmured, dropping powders into the burning basin in the center of the circle. A low hum filled the space.
As the mixture caught flame, the air split.
Light didn't just shine—it screamed.
He stumbled back, shielding his face. When the brightness died, floating above the circle was a shape—like a human skeleton made of smoke, bound in glowing script.
Then it vanished.
But the vision did not.
He was in the Grove. Blood. Ash. Amarachi kneeling in white, her back to him, her wrists bound in golden sigils.
A blade above her throat.
A voice in his head: Save her or doom them all.
He gasped, falling hard onto the ground. The Codex snapped shut beside him, as if to say: Enough.
Amarachi stirred from her meditation in the grove temple, her body slick with sweat. She had tried to push the visions away, to close the door the gods kept forcing open.
But they would not let her forget.
She saw herself—not as she was now, but as Obianuju, a priestess from centuries past, her life bound to the fireborn lover she had betrayed.
She saw Alaric as he was then—dark-haired, gold-eyed, a foreigner who bled for her and burned the world when she chose duty over him.
In that life, she had died with his name on her lips.
Now, she lived with it in her chest.
The present blurred with the past, and the boundaries between reincarnation and reality began to crumble.
She emerged from the shrine and found him sitting outside the hut, smoke curling gently from the sigil circle.
He was breathing heavily, sweat matting his shirt to his chest. The Codex glowed beside him like a heartbeat.
"You saw something," she said.
"I saw you," he whispered. "Bound. Bleeding. In the Grove."
Her spine stiffened.
"Do you believe me now?" he asked.
"I never doubted the bond," she said. "Only the danger it brings."
He reached for her hand, and this time, she let him take it.
Their fingers locked.
Her breath hitched.
Their souls remembered each other in the touch.
"I wasn't ready to see you again," she admitted.
"But I was always coming," he said.
A pause. A silence that throbbed with old hunger.
Then she leaned close, pressing her forehead to his.
No kiss.
Not yet.
But the fire was there—smoldering beneath skin and fate.
Later that night, she watched him from the shadows as he traced another sigil in salt and ash, whispering words in a language not taught but remembered.
She knew then that he had crossed the threshold.
He was no longer just a man of science.
He was becoming a weapon of prophecy.
And she—the key that could either save him…
Or break him all over again.