The scent of charred herbs drifted through the morning haze. Smoke curled above the roofs of Zaruma, soft as breath, clinging to the half-ruined walls like a warning that the night had not been kind.
Kazeem stepped outside just as the first light touched the rooftops, the scratch on his wall still vivid in his mind. But it disappeared . It wasn’t here anymore.
He walked past the cracked prayer stones and silent goats, the sky above painted in pale blue and ash. The path led him down toward the trench and the lower square, where scavengers began to gather with the rising sun.
The memory of the previous day (… or was it today again?) still clung to him in fractured flashes: a voice that wasn’t a voice, a mask without a face, an ache behind his eyes that hadn’t faded.
He rubbed his temples, exhaling slowly. The pain was still there. Not enough to drop him, but sharp, like something trying to pull him apart from the inside.
Behind him, the clamor was growing. Clattering boots, barking traders, someone swearing in three languages at once. The Zaruma market was always loud by the time the sun cracked the haze. But this morning, the air held something strange. A tension. Even the goats were quiet.
“Oi,” called Toma, a wiry boy barely Kazeem’s age but twice as talkative. He tossed a bundle of scrap onto a cracked cart and jogged over. “You’re early. Dream-hangover or just guilt?”
Kazeem blinked. “Neither.”
This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.
Toma snorted. “So, both. You look worse than usual.”
Kazeem gave a weak shrug, then hesitated. “Hey… what’s today?”
Toma squinted at him. “The 9th. Obviously.”
Kazeem didn’t reply. A cold ripple ran down his back.
“Why? You forget your name too?”
“No. Just making sure,” he said, and turned back toward the trench.
Toma raised an eyebrow but didn’t press.
Together they moved, feet crunching across gravel, smoke trailing behind them like gossip. The salt sheds sat near the edge of the ravine, half-collapsed stone shelters covered in prayer-cloths and tarps. A dozen scavengers were already there, clustered around what was left of a broken caravan.
Bodies had been piled, but not respectfully. No rites, no covering. Just torn shirts and bloodied limbs under the harsh morning sun.
Kazeem felt a lurch in his chest. Not sorrow. Recognition.
He didn’t know these people, but something deep in his stomach turned as if he had seen this before, lived through this, just not like this.
His hand drifted to the base of his neck, where the ache was stronger.
“Look there,” whispered someone nearby. “That merchant. His skin’s… bleached.”
“No, it’s salt. He drowned in it.”
“Don’t be stupid. Who drowns in salt?”
“Maybe he was offered.”
A woman in a green shawl knelt beside a corpse and whispered an old prayer. Not the common ones. Something older. The kind of thing you weren’t supposed to say unless you wanted attention from the wrong kind of spirits.
“Why are they so calm about this?” Kazeem murmured.
Toma leaned close. “Because nothing changes here. We bury, we scavenge, we move on. The world above burns and the world below eats.”
Kazeem didn’t respond.
Nothing changed and something had changed at the same time. He could feel it.
Behind his eyes, the timeline twisted.
The world around him blurred for a split second. The air felt like syrup, the sun blinked, and all sound dropped out. A flash of something. A reflection in the saltwater. A face, flickering, looking back…
Then gone.
He gasped.
“Kazeem?” Toma’s voice was distant. “You alright?”
The pain flared again, sharp this time, like a nail driven into memory.
He stumbled back, steadying himself on the side of the broken salt shed.
From somewhere in the depths of his mind, a word floated up. It didn’t belong to the present. It had no place in a place like this.
Deja-vu.
But not the kind people joked about.
The kind that screamed.
Not really anything to say appart from the fact that imagining a story is more fun and more difficult that I could expect.
