It was buried beneath the grave with no name.
Not in a coffin.
Not wrapped in cloth.
Just hidden—folded into the dry earth like a secret no one wanted to remember.
A book. Or what was left of one.
Its pages were made of something that wasn't quite paper. Not skin either.
They smelled of dust, blood, and silence.
I found it by accident.
At least, I told myself that.
I had followed a trail of ants crawling out of the mouth of a broken skull.
The trail led me here.
The nameless grave.
The dirt cracked open at the edges like it had whispered too many things.
And inside—this book.
I opened it with shaking fingers.
There were no titles. No chapters. Just lines scratched in charcoal and ash, some smeared, others etched with fury. The drawings were crude, but they told stories. Or warnings.
One came up again and again.
A woman without a face, walking between shadows.
She held a candle in one hand. And in the other… something darker. Something that dripped.
She touched people's foreheads. Marked them.
Not with symbols.
With their shadows.
The next page showed those same people… hollow.
As if she had taken something from them.
Their voices.
Their names.
And then I saw it—drawn in the margin, almost hidden.
A name.
Citlali.
My name.
I froze.
But not in fear.
In recognition.
Like something inside me sighed: Finally.
⸻
That night I didn't sleep.
I lit a candle and stared at it for hours, waiting for something to move in the flame.
And it did.
In the flicker, I saw her again.
The faceless woman.
She was standing on the edge of a cliff made of bones, holding the same dripping shape in her hand.
This time, she turned toward me.
And though she had no mouth, I heard her voice in my chest:
"You are not the first.
You are the echo."
I dropped the candle.
Its flame went out.
But the light stayed.
It hovered in the room like a breath that didn't belong to me.
And in that moment, I knew:
The dead without names…
They weren't strangers.
They were marked by me.
Not this me.
The other one…
The one who walked first.