The Sky That Should Not Burn
Hours before the incident, Ayinla had run a fragment of the tablet through his own AI interpreter, one he'd built from a hybrid Yoruba-Chinese symbolic structure. It had rejected 67% of the characters as "non-human" logic.
But one phrase had come through, clear as daylight:
"Where the gate breaks, memory returns. Those with the blood of echoes must choose."
He hadn't told anyone. Not even Mirella.
Because Ayinla had seen that phrase before—in a dream he hadn't had since childhood, back when his Chinese grandmother would burn paper effigies for ancestors he'd never met, whispering over pots of black vinegar and cassia bark.
He didn't believe in fate. Not really.
But the tablet… the sky… Mirella's blood?
This wasn't coincidence.
It was summoning.
At the far edge of the valley, another part of the team stirred. Da-Xiang, the site's quietest member, was a former military cartographer turned underground historian. He worked by moonlight, scribbling lines no one else understood.
In his tent, a long parchment stretched across the floor—part map, part spell diagram. It showed Spain's major energy ley lines overlaid with lost trade routes from West Africa to Southern Europe, through Rome, the Moors, and down into Saharan mystic paths.
One symbol repeated at every junction:
A sun inside a broken ring.
The mark of The Obsidian Custodians.
Da-Xiang had once tried to explain it to Mirella:
"They are not a cult. Not a religion. They are memory itself—kept alive in silence. In exile."
Now he inked a new point on the map, right over Las Villuercas.
Something had shifted.
The pattern was waking up.
Mirella finally gathered enough courage to return to the chamber with Ayinla.
They descended the stone steps slowly, flashlight beams catching the glitter of mica and iron in the walls. The air was damp and old—older than anything that should've still breathed.
And then they saw it.
A new mark had appeared in the stone—charred, as if burned from within. It formed an oval like an eye, with eight lines radiating outward like a spider's legs. Beneath it, more of the unknown script.
But this time, Mirella could read it.
"I don't know how I know what this says," she murmured.
"What does it say?" Ayinla asked.
She touched the wall. Whispered the words aloud:
"If you are reading this, the Veil is already thinning."
She stepped back. Shaken.
"I've seen this language before."
Ayinla looked at her.
"Where?"
"In a dream," she said. "Or a memory I never lived."
That night, one of the site guards vanished.
His name was Luis. Spanish-Basque. Ex-military. Reliable.
They found his rifle, warm to the touch.
But no blood. No tracks. No sound.
Only a blackened outline on the stone wall behind where he'd last been seen, as if a shadow had burned itself into the rock and forgotten to come back.
Mirella stared at it for a long time.
"There's a pattern here," she said. "People disappear. The sky changes. And the stone speaks when we sleep."
Ayinla touched the outline gently.
"It's not done with us," he said.
"No," Mirella replied. "It's only just begun."