The air above Ugbene-Ani shimmered with heat, the midday sun blazing high above the ancient groves. The land, sacred and alive, pulsed faintly beneath the soil—its rhythm older than cities, older than names. Birds cried warnings that no man could decipher, and the animals of the wild had already fled deeper into the shadows of the jungle.
And still, the shadows came.
They arrived not on planes, nor through ports or highways, but by fracture—a break in the very fabric of space, ripped open behind the great waterfall that guarded one of the lesser-known sanctums of the Echoing Waters. From the rent in reality, they emerged like spiders from a tear in a web—silent, swift, terrible.
Six of them.
The Black Choir.
Each was marked by silence. Not by accident or discipline—but by design. Their tongues had been offered to the Pale Flame. Their voices were not for words, but for curses, for destruction, for unmaking.
