Chapter 15

Amina wakes from ominous dreams to an unnaturally lifeless morning. Dalila spots a single fresh footprint overlooking their camp that no one saw in the night, sharpening Amina’s unease. They set out, but signs of habitation grow while the land remains eerily silent and smells of smoke and rot thicken.

The trio reaches a small village of burned huts and looted homes with no living souls or bodies in sight. Inside a darkened hut, Amina detects the same storm-brine scent found at the shipwreck. Then, by a church and a massive dragon’s blood tree, they discover three elders—two women and a priest—speared to the trunk, their skin blue-gray and eyes clouded.

Despite Amina’s urgency to leave, Dalila insists on burying the elders. As they work, Tinbu notes strange, even puncture marks on the priest’s throat. They finish three shallow graves in the rocky soil while Amina, rattled by the sense of being watched, patrols the perimeter and loses a throwing knife in the brush.

Departing the village, Amina’s paranoia intensifies; she hears laughter on the wind. In a shaded grove, a knife—Amina’s lost blade—whistles past and buries itself in a tree, narrowly missing Tinbu after Amina yanks him aside. A smoky figure drops from the canopy, shadows coalescing into Raksh, the demon Amina left for dead a decade earlier.

Raksh greets Amina as “Wife,” confirming a personal, dangerous reckoning and linking the island’s unnatural silence, the briny storm-stench, and the village atrocity to a supernatural adversary from Amina’s past.