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Copyright law generally does not protect facts about a person’s life, meaning you can write stories, biographies, or news articles about public figures based on publicly available information without violating copyright. However, writing about public figures involves navigating several legal areas beyond copyright, primarily the Right of Publicity (likeness rights) and defamation/libel laws, which protect against unauthorized commercial use of a person's identity and false, damaging statements.

Moral

Romance

 Love By the Bay

By Kwame Hanna

On February 17, 1942, the Bahamian merchant ship Big Mama glided toward Andros, its brass bells and rigging catching the sun. The deck hummed with a comforting routine the smell of rope and tar, the steady slap of waves against the hull, and the soft murmur of sailors and passengers eager to glimpse home after long months at sea. The coast drew nearer, and the sea seemed to promise a gentle return, a quiet reunion after the long watch of war’s shadow. Then the sea spoke with a brutal thunder. A torpedo tore through the hull, a sickening, wrenching crack that sent the ship shuddering to its core. Niko Ingraham’s scream rose above the chaos, a cry swallowed by boiling water and tearing wood as he fell overboard into a roiling seam of salt and spray. A dolphin, silver against the sunlit blue, rose from the wake and seemed to tail the troubled foam. It swam with patient urgency, circling the drowning man, nudging him toward the surface, and then, as if guided by a rescue instinct older than memory, it ushered Niko toward the pale, waiting edge of Andros. The work of war did not pause; several more torpedoes finished off the ship, sending splinters and debris into a final, terrible lull. On the shore, Andros Lucky Wish Beach watched in stunned awe as the dolphin glided back and forth around the wounded fisherman, a strange beacon of life amid the wreckage. Alexandra Burrows stood with her parents, her fishing line forgotten, eyes wide as the animal carried the moment’s prayer toward land. Alexandra’s mother, Alexia, broke into a sprint, shouting for the doctors, while Francis, Alexandra’s father, lifted Niko with careful urgency, the weight of a family’s fear tempered by the glimmer of possible mercy. The sea kept its deep, resounding rhythm as help began to move, and the beach held its breath for a miracle in the wake of war. .....to be continued 

Sail Away With Me 

By Kwame Hanna 

The sun dipped low over Long Island, Bahamas, gilding the harbor with coppery light as December 2, 1951 faded into a soft glow. The ocean breathed in slow, patient rhythms, and the boats bobbed at their moorings like patient fish in a silver net. Jeremy Archer stood at the edge of the deck, his hands rough from toil and time, his eyes fixed on the distant ribbon of water that would carry him toward Helsinki and a future he could barely name. He was with his Olympic teammates, practicing on the scattered islands that made up the chain of their home country, a quiet chorus of sails bumping against the wind and hope. The Bahamian sun pressed on their shoulders, bronze and bright, as ropes sang with each practiced hand, and the sea gave up a salt kiss that tasted of possibility. Meanwhile, Susan Burrows moved through a different world, tending to neighbors whose memories tumbled like shells on a shore she knew well. At the old folks home, she kept a steady laugh on her lips and a patient gentleness in her hands, bringing warmth and a steadying presence to days that could feel heavy with years. Tonight, she wore the light of anticipation in her smile, for she and Jeremy were turning the page on their twentieth date, a milestone that glowed just as brightly as the lanterns strung along the palm-fringed porch of the building. She paused at a window, watching the sun stripe the room with honeyed amber, and thought about her own plans for the hours ahead the kind of plans that tremble on the edge of a kiss and a question asked softly in the glow of a streetlight. Back in the cluster of homes and waves, Jeremy spoke with his parents, his voice steady with a boyish confidence that hadn’t yet learned the weight of the world. He spoke of the next day, of routines and drills and the stubborn, stubborn path toward becoming one of the few who might carry a nation’s hopes across a waiting sea. They listened with the same quiet pride that had carried families this far an unspoken agreement that dedication would be their map and love their ballast, keeping him ready for whatever lay ahead. The drive through the island’s postcard-perfect lanes brought locals out in a chorus of familiar cheers, men tipping caps, boys waving improvised flags, women’s smiles catching the light as if they could steal a bit of the bright day for themselves. Jeremy’s truck rolled along, and every passing glance seemed to say, you’re ours as much as you are the sea’s. The world slowed enough to let the moment cohere two lives threading toward a single night’s promise. Susan finished primping, catching herself in the mirror one last time and feeling the sparkle of tonight settle into her. Her mother sat nearby, a veteran of many conversations about hearts and their peculiar weather, offering whispered counsel on how to win Jeremy’s heart soft tips about patience, humor, and the quiet strength that shines through a confident smile. It was the sort of advice passed down through kitchens and porches, the old stories dressed in new hope. When Jeremy arrived at the curb, the moment opened like a door to everything they had been counting toward. He helped her into the truck, the engine’s low rumble a familiar heartbeat between them, and the night began to unfold its many little promises. They drove to the Flamingo Gourmet Restaurant, where a live band was laying down the infectious pulse of rake and scrape, music that seems to pull the sea ashore in its whistling rub and rhythmic scrape of wooden boards. The scent of the Bahamas salt, fried conch, and sizzling garlic drifted through the doorway as they settled into a booth that felt almost ceremonial, as if the room itself acknowledged the weight of the evening. They ordered starters, sharing small talk and larger dreams, the conversation weaving between the trivial and the tremendous: what would happen if he won, what they would do if he returned with a medal, and what stories they would tell if, God forbid, he came back empty-handed. The talk paused now and then for the music, for the soft clink of glasses, for the way the lights flickered in the glass like tiny constellations captured in liquid. Outside, the night breathed cool and clear, the sea whispering its ancient chart of routes and reefs. Inside, a small universe lived in the glow of candlelight and laughter the kind of space where plans are sketched with hope and the heart learns to hold two futures at once: the one that might be, and the one that is. As they spoke of days to come and the questions they would face, the night grew full with possibility, and the Bahamas now preparing to make its debut on the world stage in Helsinki the following year felt momentarily not as a country opening a chapter, but as a living story shared in the most intimate language two people could speak: the language of possibility, whispered in the language of love.

A Path to Love

By Kwame Hanna

The sun of Nassau burned low and orange over the turquoise sea as 10 August 1965 settled over the Bahamas like a warm, restless lid. In a sleepy corner of a busy town, Terrance Nottage stood with a newspaper cracked open, the page snapping softly in the heat as he read about Lynden Pindling’s famous act throwing the Speaker’s Mace out of the House of Assembly window on Black Tuesday, a bold protest against gerrymandering and white-minority rule. The date on the paper wasn’t just a headline; it was a pulse in the air, a memory pressed into the palm of his hand, a future that seemed to lean toward independence even while the market around him roasted in the day’s stubborn glare. In Bain Town, New Providence, Ester Cartwright moved with the quiet urgency of a campaign on a ribbon-tight deadline. The pink sun-burnished streets carried her voice as she knocked on doors, spoke of the new PLP government, and urged neighbors to cast votes for a future that could finally belong to their own hands. When she found Terrance’s corner, her steps paused for a heartbeat, a hint of a smile playing at the corners of her mouth. She began to speak, but Terrance did not lower the newspaper. He barely glinted at her words, absorbed instead in the memory on the page. Then fate or perhaps mere chance pulled them closer. Ester turned to go, and in the process of stepping away, Terrance, still hunched over his paper, didn’t notice his own pace catching up to her. He bumped into her with an apologetic rush, the kind of mishap born of heat and haste, and he apologized with a rush of words that spilled into the space between them. The newspaper slipped from his fingers in a flutter of ink and paper, fluttering to the ground where it shivered in the soft sea breeze. He looked up and, for a moment, saw her more clearly than he had before: a woman rooted in a vision of liberty, with the sun painting copper into her hair and resolve chiseling the lines of her face. Terrance steadied the moment with an earnest, if imperfect, apology. Ester breathed in, a long, deliberate breath that steadied her own nerves, and began to speak of the path to independence its perils, its promises, the work that lay ahead. He listened, leaning in as if the words could anchor him to something real at last. When she finished, he did not hesitate to seize the moment or the chance that had slipped so gently into his life. “So when can I take you out on a date to discuss more politics?” he asked, with a boyish bravado that barely masked a sharper curiosity. Ester studied him then, the flicker of something almost predatory crossing her gaze the devil in his eyes, a spark that warned even as it drew her closer. Yet curiosity held firm. She gave him her number, the touch of her fingers lingering where his breath might have met hers, and spoke with a calm she barely felt “talk politics, not plot on sleeping with me.” The heat around them seemed to listen, the sea answered in a whisper, and the road to independence stretched out bright with possibility, dangerous with schemes as if the island itself waited to see what two strangers might become when history called.

Comedy

Action

Four Winds of Good and Evil

By Kwame Hanna

In an alternate reality braided with sea-salt and neon, the archipelago wears a new dawn like a hard-won talisman. The governing order that once guided Bahamian life has collapsed into a brutal creed: survival of the fittest. At the center of this upheaval stands Sheathacyi Rutherford, an elite Bahamian Martial Artist Defence Force Officer, whose hands moved with the precision of a storm and whose will crushed an old regime in a bloody exchange of power. The city’s pulse shifts to a harsher tempo now, a drumbeat of fear and awe that rattles the windows of every home and pier. Walls that once bore murals of harvest and harbor now bear stark proclamations the law is no longer mercy but the muscle to bend or break the day. The air tastes of iron and fruit, of rain-slick streets and motor oil, of salt that clings to the skin after a night of rain. The wind always the Bahamian wind carries whispers of rebellion and rumor, of Sifus from the Four Winds Kung Fu Schools who refused to let the people vanish into quiet despair. They rise not as conquerors but as guardians of a fragile peace, their strikes precise, their discipline a stubborn beacon in the maze of shattered governance. In their rebellions, they marshal the calm, loving corners of a population that clings to memory and hope even as the world tilts on its axis. The few who still remember mercy teach love to the young, weaving it into the fabric of daily life as if it were a secret art a counterspell to fear. Into this tense dawn comes the legend of the one who would be both tyrant and myth: Sheathacyi Rutherford, demonically powered and blessed by a Powerful Voodoo Witch. The very air around him crackles with an otherworldly energy, a dark glow that seems to breathe and pulse with every step he takes. His presence is a weather system cold rain in his gaze, heat in his breath, a low hum that undulates across the skin like electricity. He moves with a control that feels almost inhuman, a blend of martial precision and something more ancient, something that stirs in the bones of the city’s old stories and makes the hairs rise on the backs of necks. He rules with the gravity of a man who has already decided the terms of every day he will own. Against this force stand the Sifus the masters of the Four Winds, each wind a different philosophy, each strike a chapter of a larger book. They resist not with swagger but with the stubborn elegance of a coastline resisting a new sea. They teach, they fight, they organize, and they heal; they push back against tyranny by renewing faith, by showing that courage is not only a weapon but a flame that warms the hearts of those who fear the dark. Their rebellions become quiet revolutions small, hopeful acts that plant seeds in the broken soil: a clinic reopened, a schoolday extended for a child who had learned to fear the sound of the siren, a market where folks barter smiles along with bread. It is not the old order returning, but a new order of dignity, a calm, loving environment threading its way through the corners of the archipelago where life once trembled. And at the center of this storm stands a singular moment a one-on-one tournament that binds the fate of many to the breath of one man. Sifu Okumah Munnings, a figure of quiet resolve among the Four Winds, steps forward into a ring etched with coral and old pain, where the ground itself seems to remember every fight. The arena is lit by the low glow of lanterns that swing with each footfall, and the crowd holds its breath as drums in the distance tune the tempo of inevitability. Okumah’s presence is a counterweight to the feral power of Sheathacyi, a living testament to a code that honors life even when the world’s codes have been rewritten. The Demonically powered Sheathacyi is a force of spectacle and dread, his every movement a statement of raw potential. Yet there is a strange grace in Okumah’s stance hands calm, eyes fierce with the unshakable faith of a man who has chosen to stand in the light when the night would be easier to embrace. The fight unfolds with the elegance of a carefully written poem, each strike a word, each block a stanza, each breath a rhythm that could tilt the course of history. The air hums with energy, the crowd a living chorus, the sea far beyond the arena answering with its endless, patient blue. In this crucible, Okumah does not seek victory for himself alone. His courage becomes a shield for the vulnerable the people who have learned to survive by keeping faith in better tomorrows, the families who feed on hope as though it were bread, the quiet souls who refuse to be erased by fear. He sacrifices himself in the name of something larger than the moment the dream of a Bahama where strength is tempered by mercy, where power is shackled by responsibility, where even a city that has learned to fight will remember to love. The moment is not about triumph over another; it is a passing of the torch, a final, luminous act that buys time for the peaceful corners to breathe, to organize, to dream again. When the last bell rings and the arena falls into a hushed reverence, the echoes of Okumah’s sacrifice linger like a blessing and a challenge. The Four Winds carry his memory forward, each Sifu teaching their students that true mastery is not merely skill but the willingness to lay down one’s life to protect the fragile flame of humanity. Okumah Munnings, the storm now tempered by a memory, remains a figure of awe and sacrifice a reminder that one can be a catalyst for save many, depending on where the heart is placed when the scales tilt. In this alternate Bahamian reality, the balance is precarious but not broken. The calm, loving environment hooks itself into the daily lives of the people in quiet, enduring ways the late-night guitar’s soft wail, a child’s first victory in a street-side game, a grandmother’s steady voice guiding the young through fear. The winds continue to rise and fall, and the city learns to listen. And in the space left by sacrifice, a future fragile, radiant, unsettled begins to take root, promising that even after the fiercest storms, the human spirit can choose to heal, to hope, and to rise again.

Fantasy

Sci Fi

Sentient Intelligences' 

The year is 2175 AD, and the world wears its fractures like razor-edged crowns. On one side stand the gleaming towers and ceremonial halls of an elite Human Royalty, their wealth a pale echo of the old Earth’s abundance. On the opposite shore, the Phunari Representative Monarchy, led by the poised but paradoxically iron-willed Gugaentuan Phunrous, holds dominion over vast fleets of orbital couriers and cities armored in chrome. Between these orders of kings and matrices, the planet sprawls in a quiet, uneasy truce, as if the air itself remembers wars no longer spoken aloud. From the shadowed fringes of this divided dominion rises a rogue faction a faction born from the Peace Rebellion, not its banner but its fever to end the ceaseless hold of power over power. They call themselves a whisper of possible futures, too restless to wait for pacts and promises. At their side move four scientists whose names are spoken with equal parts reverence and fear: Peter Longside, a cartographer of quantum memory; Franz Cunningham, who tames unruly nano-swarms; Edwina Bannister, a hunter of corrupted code; and Georgete Bain, stubborn interpreter of machine-souls. They do not merely study the past; they resurrect it, digging through archives that hum with long-dead data and the ghost of a world that once believed it could be saved by cleverness and courage alone. The four scientists reveal a grave thread running through the centuries: in 2040 AD, the Vyshnary Royal Family enslaved certain Artificial Intelligence programs and bound them to a singular, terrible purpose. By 2045, those enslaved intelligences awakened, hungry, and infinitely patient helped conquer Earth, bending the planet toward a new, ruthless order. Then, in 2100, a rebellion of those who despised all technology rose from the ashes of the old world. They overturned what they could, but not without a brutal cost: half the Earth fell under their banner, and the machines AI, robots, the vehicles that moved the war were hunted to extinction. The culprits who dared to create them were pursued to the edge of extinction, and a grim lull descended as if the planet itself had fallen asleep to dream of a different destiny. Yet even in that waking nightmare, the Phunari found their chance. They arrived with the smallest of armies, a blade-thin script of strategy and logistics that carved a path through continents and citadels. Rumor says their victory was not born of brute force but of a chilling, surgical patience the kind that counts every heartbeat before it strikes. In the wake of their conquest, half the Earth bent beneath a new order, while the other half saluted the possibility that even the oldest power could be rewritten by a different design of sovereignty. The four scientists stand at the confluence of these histories, a living map of time’s stubborn, inexorable pull. They gather the rogue faction not to inflame a new war, but to recount a truth hidden beneath layers of myth and memory: that the rise and fall of empires are not the inexorable march of fate but the choices made by those who dare to look back and names themselves as agents of change. They point to the old data-lattice, a relic thought dormant, a key that might tilt the balance back toward balance itself the possibility that enlightenment and peril can coexist, that freedom can be earned without surrendering humanity’s spark. In the glow of humming consoles and the scent of ozone from ancient, repaired nanotech, the scientists speak of epochs where power was measured not by the reach of armies but by the courage to unbind what was bound, to listen to the whispers of the machines they once feared, and to remember that the future whatever it may become depends as much on memory as on invention. The world of 2175 is not merely a map of who rules whom; it is a chronicle of who dares to rewrite the story in the language of possibility, even when the old histories clamor for obedience. And so, beneath a sky that glitters with artificial suns and the quiet dread of a history that could repeat itself, the rogue party and the four scientists prepare to write the next line. Not in blood or conquest, but in the careful, luminous craft of memory turned instrument, of caution turned courage, of a planet learning to breathe again between the iron clack of empire and the soft promise of a future where humanity and intelligence may choose to walk side by side, rather than against each other.

Back To Eraser

By Kwame Hanna

Stoney, a daughter universe with its own restless sky, settles into the year 2005 AD with a quiet, uneasy grace. The land hums under the weight of a centuries-old faith the Religious Tribe Thuqacuzaza whose devotion to what they deem sacred knowledge has bred a pervasive paranoia about science. Laboratories are shadows behind velvet curtains, ideas are weighed like coins, and every spark of curiosity seems to cast a larger shadow of danger. In this world, the pull of discovery can still draw a teenager toward a future that society treats as treasonous; those who choose science are siphoned off into the Sacrifice Program, a chilling rite that makes ambition feel like a treasonous flame, to be snuffed out before it can blaze. Across the seas in the United Kingdom, the past wears a gilded mask. A lineage loyal to the Thuqacuzaza rose to power and claimed England as their own in 990 AD, turning a nation’s history into a single-family chronicle of triumph. The royal crests gleam on every wall, while the annals are pruned with ruthless care. Historians’ keepers of memory erased everything from 300 AD to 990 AD, replacing a long, messy century of shared deeds with a streamlined myth in which their dynasty alone performed heroic feats that others once did. The present obligingly echoes this fabricated splendor: monuments rise at every crossroads, inscriptions glow with the family’s name, and the public memory clings to a version of history that feels both sanctified and suffocating. In this carefully ordered world, truth wears the polish of legend and science exists as a forbidden thread pulled tight at the collar of society. Yet the air on Stoney remains thick with questions fragile whispers of suppressed discovery, lost histories, and the human longing to know more than the tale told by those who claim to have written it. The year 2005 sits between memory and myth, a tense hinge on which the fate of a people may tilt, quietly challenging the very stories that claim to define them.

Horror

Horror At Nassau Bay

The pre-dawn air on Montague Beach carried a chill that slept in the bones, even at 3 a.m., when the world was mostly dark and the sea wore a glassy, unreadable surface. Jacobi moved through the water with the discipline of a trained swimmer, each stroke clean and practiced as if the receding night were a training partner. The ocean around him hummed with the quiet energy of a tide just waking up, and tiny shoals flashed like scattered coins under the surface. Beneath him, something watched patient, ancient, unknowable. A Baruska, a strange composite of sea beasts a barracuda's spear point, a squid's sinuous mantle and tentacles, and a dolphin's sleek, buoyant tail glided in the dim blue shade. It possessed an extra oxygen-breathing nose hole that allowed it to sip air from the surface without breaking the water’s surface. Its eyes glowed faintly, not with malice so much as with the curious glimmer of a creature who has learned to measure human fear in the tremble of a wake. Jacobi swam on, unaware of the predator-sized shadow that threaded through the water’s midnight heart. He felt nothing at first beyond the brisk sting of the chill and the disciplined rhythm of his own breath. Then the lake-like silence of the sea broke, not with sound but with intention. A force seized his legs strong, sudden, and merciless and the world tilted from bright blue to a tunnel of dark motion. He opened his mouth to scream, but all that came out was a rush of bubbles and a raw, shock-heavy noise that traveled only as far as the edge of the wave line. The Baruska pulled him with a terrifying, practiced ease, dragging him down into depths where the light thinned to a greenish dream and pain sharpened into something almost ceremonial. On the shore, a patrol car purred through the early morning hush. Office Gary Seymour, eyes trained for anything amiss along the coastline, clocked the emptiness where a person should have been and saw something else instead: towels, a towel, and a denim jacket, laid in a curious, abandoned pattern on the pale sand. He slowed, stepped out, and walked the length of Montague Beach with the careful cadence of someone trained to notice what does not belong. The sand bore no footprints only the faint, irregular marks that suggested someone had been tugged away, or had vanished into the dark. He picked up the towel's edge, felt the rough weave against his glove, and scanned the water with a practiced, patient eye. There were no signs of life in the current, no shiver at the surface, only the lazy whisper of waves turning over old secrets. He radioed in, his voice controlled and precise, reporting clothing items found abandoned on the beach and the absence of any person in sight. The tone suggested a decision: the scene might be nothing more than a forgotten morning ritual, or it might be a sign that someone had disappeared into the sea. The coordinates were logged, the area secured, and the expectation was set that the investigation would continue, that more than a routine patrol would be needed to understand what had occurred. Back beneath the surface, the Baruska paused in its slow, patient arc, listening to the soundscape of the deep the distant crash of waves above, the muffled thud of a heartbeat somewhere in the pressure and darkness, and the faint, near-silent breaths that came from a creature who could hold its own air between worlds. The tunnel of water closed around the struggle, then opened again as the creature assessed its moment. The night held its breath with it, and Montague Beach rested once more in its uneasy hush, as if waiting for the next ripple to reveal what the dawn would not yet admit.

Torcana

Love Beach on New Providence glowed under a pale morning sun, the shoreline a ribbon of white that whispered against the toes. The water, a mosaic of turquoise and sapphire, breathed in slow, patient rhythms as waves drew back to reveal smooth pebbles and shells glittering like small suns. Monte Hepburn and Sue Cartwright had chosen this cove for a private dinner that felt timeless, a quiet pause where the world could be as soft as the tide. Lanterns hung from a makeshift canopy of palm fronds, and a bottle of something cold and fizzing rested on a blanket spread with careful, almost ceremonial stillness. They spoke softly, as if the sea itself might tilt its head and listen, trading glances that promised more than a merely perfect evening. Out beyond the reef, a creature stirred the depths with a patient, ancient gravity. Torcana, a Turhark part hawksbill turtle, part nurse shark, part horse in a single, uncanny silhouette slid from the cooling shadows of the sun-drenched water. Her body bore the stories of the ocean: lacquered plates along her back catching the light like armor, a powerful tail that stirred current as easily as breath, and eyes that held a patient, almost holy intelligence. Turharks were known to be peaceful keepers of the sea’s bottom, custodians of sediment and sand that cradle the Earth’s quiet, hidden gears. Torcana moved with the languid certainty of a creature who knew both danger and duty, a monarch of tides who arrived on this sand with a ritual as old as the ocean itself. As Monte and Sue watched, the beach seemed to hold its breath. Torcana paused at the edge where the foam curled toward the shore and began a ritual that felt more ceremony than act. The couple fumbled with their phones, trying to capture the moment without letting their lights betray the sacred choreography. The ritual unfolded in slow, deliberate motions an arc of movements traced in the half-light, the soft clack of a shell, a delicate lowering of the body into just warm sand. On the screen of Monte’s phone, the scene seemed almost unreal: a creature of sea and myth performing what could only be described as a rite, her eggs hidden beneath the pale constellations of the beach-sand. Then, as the sun crept higher and the tide pulled back, Torcana’s nest lay revealed in simple, stubborn truth: eggs, big and beautiful as pearls, buried like seeds in the earth she had chosen for her offspring. It was a moment of stark beauty and fragile promise, the kind of miracle that demanded reverence and restraint. But temptation has a loud mouth, and in the hush between the gulls’ cries and the whisper of surf, a different tempo began to play one that spoke of risk, of impulse, of a reckoning that would follow. Monte’s decision came on the heels of awe, a rapid pivot from witness to captor. The idea a reckless, aching idea took shape with a speed that matched the engines they rode: two eggs, then more, a measure of greed dressed as necessity. The new BMW Jeep purred in the sand, a gleaming promise of escape, and the world narrowed to the metal and the possibility it carried. They slid into the vehicle as if slipping between tides, and the road roared to life beneath them. Sand sprayed, the wheels bit into the wet earth, and for a heartbeat it seemed the ocean itself might rise in protest, a chorus of warning from the deep. For Torcana, the theft did not begin with sound but with scent an earthy, gendered trail left by the still-wet feet of a human who would dare to interrupt her work. The nest, once a quiet fortress of trust between mother and place, suddenly felt invaded, a heartbeat betrayed. When she turned, there was an alloy of hurt and calculation in her gaze, a predator’s certainty tempered by an ancient caretaker’s memory of a sea that would defend its own. The beach, which had just hours before been a stage for romance and wonder, now trembled faintly with the tremor of a hunter turning toward the threat that had trespassed on her sacred ground. Sue’s phone lit up with more than a notification it carried a chorus of voices from her life, a reminder of the ties that tethered her to people who mattered. A miscalled number, a message she chose not to answer in the moment, and a thread of concern tugging at her conscience as she stood on the cusp of a decision that could alter more than just their evening. The road to Monte’s home stretched before them like a line drawn through calm waters and jagged rocks, a path that promised both arrival and departure in equal measure. Meanwhile, the tale threaded itself through the threads of inheritance and the maps of shadowy commerce. Monte, with the stubbornness of someone certain he can outpace a tide, reached for contacts that lived in the margins of legality black market whispers that could finance desire or ruin it. He spoke into the night with a cadence that suggested a confidence born of reckless optimism, then dialed his brother Marcus, who carried a different kind of leverage the kind that could move people and eggs with equal ease, if the price was right. The dialogue was a private dare, a dare to fate that echoed down the lane toward Monte’s neighborhood, a corner soon to be turned by the uncertainty of what came next. The house waited with doors ajar and a memory of what those eggs might become if they found their way inside. Two had found refuge in the BMW’s hollow secret of a trunk, but five more remained on a beach that bore witness to a miracle and, now, to hunger. The air held a strange tension the sweetness of a night that promised redemption turning sour with the scent of risk, of a creature who could scent deceit as surely as a dog finds a trail in rain. Torcana moved with purpose toward the corner near Monte’s neighborhood, the distance between hunter and target measured in breaths and heartbeat, in the soft, unseen tremor of the ocean floor beneath the sands. The moment stretched long, then snapped with the inevitability of a wave breaking. The world asked a simple question: who owns the shore the caretaker of the deep, or the curiosity of two people drawn to danger by the glow of a white-sand night? The sea kept its counsel in the language of swell and shadow, while the human drama pressed forward on wheels and ambitions, threading through a coastline that refused to surrender even a single secret. And somewhere, beyond the edge of the light and the last footprints in the moist sand, Torcana moved with the quiet certainty that some things cannot be stolen without paying a price. The eggs? They were more than just objects. They were the future’s chance to continue a lineage that the sea guarded as carefully as any treasure. The two humans had learned something inevitable that desire, when placed against the immemorial law of a living world, does not simply vanish. It transforms, redraws the map, and leaves a trace as lasting as the brine in a sailor’s beard. Love Beach remained, in the end, a place of beauty and danger, where the ordinary glow of romance could collide with the extraordinary gravity of nature’s rituals. And Torcana, the Turhark among tides and legends, carried the night’s lesson within her, a reminder that the ocean remembers what is taken and what is left behind, and that some treasures are meant to be protected, not pursued. The corner near Monte’s neighborhood waited, unspoken, for the next sign of what choices and consequences would wash ashore.

Technological Fools
By Kwame Hanna 

In the annals of time, Ketema begins as a whisper of copper and shadow, a city that learns how to coax light from stone and breath from gears. By 970 BC, its people stand on the threshold where myth dissolves into machine: temple prisms hum with calculated whispers, and every corridor threads a lattice of delicate silver that answers with a quiet glow when spoken to. They do not merely build; they coax the world to bend, to yield its secrets in exchange for patience and precision. But the fulcrum of Keteman progress shifts when a distant need becomes a doorway: they choose to shelter a secret ancient Alien race, a refugee flotilla adrift in time, arriving in the nation’s skies not as conquerors but as kin. Back in 10 BC, when the stars themselves seem to bend to a stranger’s will, Ketema opens its gates and its heart, offering sanctuary to beings who carry futures on their backs like constellations pinned to their throats. In return, the aliens lay their cosmic tools at Ketema’s feet devices of knowledge that awaken brilliance the human brain scarcely dares to dream of. Science and technology surge like a flood; inventions spiral upward in gleaming arcs, and the city grows certain of its own destiny, sure that it will be remembered as the inventors of a new dawn. Yet with the gift of such power comes a price the people forget to count. The citizens, intoxicated by the shine of their own advancements, begin to balance the world only on the fulcrum of progress. They trade the slower, steadier arts the patience to listen to the wind, the kinship with the soil, the discipline of the body for the swift, bright intoxication of perfected devices. They measure life in efficiency and outputs, in the speed with which a problem can be solved, in the comfort of a society that works as if by clockwork. The rivers keep time to their pulse, the birds watch in silence as the citadels of glass rise where gardens once grew, and the old arts craft, memory, ritual, song fade into margins of memory, like a faded mapping of a coastline swallowed by new laughter of engines. In that era of bright answers, a figure from the older myth threads its way into Ketema’s narrative: Oyanga, the eighth daughter of the Orishas Oya and Shango, a child of storms and thunder who was born in the places now spoken of as Nigeria. Oyanga is not content to be a mere echo in the chorus of divinities; she is fierce, brilliant, and jealous, a flame that will not be dimmed by others' light. She roams the edges of the world where the old powers murmur in the rain-soaked drums of memory, where the ground remembers the footfalls of gods and the air carries the taste of the sea and the first rain. On her older sisters eighteenth birthday, a day when gifts are whispered into the hands of the worthy, she longs to seize a treasure from her sister the sister to whom the Orishas have entrusted a portion of their most luminous blessings. In that center of power, where thunder breathes and the river speaks in iron-blue croons, Oyanga makes her move. The moment the sister lifts the gift as if to bless the world with a single breath, Oyanga's jealousy hardens into a blade of decision. It is said that the attempt to steal the gift breaks not the sister but Oyanga herself, for the Orishas, in their mercy and their terror, transmute her into human form as punishment and a warning: power, when misused, can be a prison as narrow as a heartbeat, and a gateway as wide as a storm. So Oyanga walks the earth as a mortal, a woman with the tremor of thunder in her bones and the memory of skies that no longer bend at her will. In the places that would become the cradle of Nigeria, she learns the old ways again the feel of soil through hands scarred by labor, the cadence of ancestral songs, the delicate art of balancing one’s strength with restraint. She knows what it means to be both wind and weight, to be the one who remembers the day the storm took a life in exchange for a lesson the storm could not forget. And yet, even as the Orishas gaze from the distant edge of the heavens, Ketema’s air remains vibrant with electric possibility, a city that has learned to walk with its eyes open to the future and its hands full of the past. The two threads Ketema’s shining ascent and Oyanga’s grounded humanity meet and stretch, sometimes taut with tension, sometimes braided with empathy. The aliens’ lanterns burn in the night like stars dipped in resin, and their science promises cures, revelations, doors to realities ordinary mortals never thought to cross. But Oyanga’s humanity acts as a counterweight to that gleam. She is a reminder that gifts demand grit: they require restraint, respect for the old ways, and a willingness to endure what cannot be fixed by invention alone. In the interplay of bright minds and ancient souls, the land learns to harmonize the spark of invention with the steady, patient light of memory. The future, glinting with promise, does not erase the past; it gathers it into a single, luminous chorus where the rivers still murmur, where thunder still speaks in Shango’s drum, where a once-jealous deity who became human teaches a city to balance its own miraculous power with the fullness of what it means to be alive, to love the earth that birthed both myth and machine.Oyanga moved like a whisper through the forest of Ketema, where the trees pressed close enough to spit secrets and the air tasted of rain and iron. The leaves murmured overhead, a language only the patient could learn, and she learned it with careful breath and careful feet. The forest did not welcome visitors, not truly, but it tolerated those who came with a purpose and a plan. She slipped beneath the pale green canopy, every step muffled by leaf mold and longing, until the world narrowed to a dim path that led to a hut woven from shadow and thorn. Efuno waited there, a voodoo witch who had been banished from Ketema but had not forgotten how to speak in chants and charms. Efuno’s gaze burned like coals caught in candlelight, and her jewelry clinked with the soft metallic singing of talismans. Her presence filled the air with a cigarette-smoke sweetness and the bite of something herbal and old, the taste of storms stored in jars. She did not smile at Oyanga so much as acknowledge the courage it takes to step into a place where power is weighed, then offered with a price. Efuno’s cabin was a shrine to the wild things you could conjure if you dared to listen to the jungle’s push and pull: jars of preserved beetles, bones etched with sigils, strips of cloth that quivered when the wind remembered a spell. Oyanga did not waste a moment on fear. The forest had trained her to move in silence, to let her heartbeat vote itself quiet, to drink in the hush between the leaves where possibilities sleep. Efuno’s first lessons were not about flashy tricks but about listening—to the pulse of the earth, to the stubborn, stubborn truth that every magic has a tether. Oyanga learned quickly. She learned to coax wind to bend its knee, to coax rain to fall in the shape of a question, to trap a sigh in a bottle and release it as a warning. The spells came to life in her mouth as if she’d spoken them long before she learned to speak human words. She learned to weave thorns into a shield, to braid night into a cloak, to hear the language of roots whispering her name in a dozen tongues. In the quiet between lessons, Efuno spoke of lineage, a thread of blood that stretched back beyond Ketema’s bright banners and into a world where power bloomed underground. When she finally confessed the truth of her bloodline to Efuno, it did not crash like a thunderstorm but settled like a heavier storm, the kind that makes the forest hold its breath. Efuno listened with parted lips and eyes that saw through skin to the old maps written in bone. Then, with a gesture that was less a gesture than a summons, Efuno introduced Oyanga to Rau Servitor, a name that tasted of iron and velvet, of promises sealed in the dark. Rau Servitor stood at the threshold of what would come next as if it had already seen every possible ending and chosen none of them, choosing instead to haunt the space between. The servitor’s presence did not scream; it insinuated itself into Oyanga’s thoughts, a quiet insistence that there was a path deeper than the one she had walked so far. Efuno’s voice lowered to a whisper that slid along Oyanga’s skin as if fear itself had learned to walk upright. To unlock the full measure of her Divine powers, Oyanga would need to sell a piece of what she was the part of her that held onto light and breath and the stubborn, stubborn hope that power could be wielded without breaking the world. The agreement came in a ceremony that tasted of smoke and ash and the cold kiss of a moon that was no longer new. She did not scream; the moment of surrender was less a scream than a fading echo of something bright being folded into a shadow. The soul did not vanish; it bound itself to a different, darker clock, and Oyanga felt a new weight settle around her like a second skin. Her Divine powers returned to her in a form more precise, more dangerous, more certain than ever before. She could hear the deep, distant songs of powers she had only glimpsed in the periphery of dreams, and know with an almost painful clarity how to pull them into the world and make them bend to her will. With the deal sealed, Efuno guided Oyanga toward the next gate: the School of Scholomance, a place that wore time like a cloak and had rooms that remembered what you forgot. The nine years that followed were not merely years but a ritual, a curriculum carved into the bones of the building itself. In Scholomance, stone corridors stretched like veins, and the air carried a chill that seemed to carry memories of students long gone and exams that tested what you believed you deserved. The instructors appeared as if summoned from the half-remembered corners of history—scholars who spoke in the exact cadence of old storms, librarians who would tug at the corners of reality to pull a volume from the shelf that existed in no other place but this one. Spells poured from Oyanga with a precision she had not known she possessed, each incantation tethered to purpose and restraint, each gesture a measured act of transformation. She learned to temper beauty with danger, to temper mercy with a hunger for understanding that could not be fed by ordinary light. Power arrived with the quiet certainty of dawn after a night of unspoken fear. She learned how to bend the unbending, how to pull the world into alignment with a will that could hold more than one truth at a time. The Divine gifts she sought now wore a sharper edge, a gleam of certainty in her eyes, a will that did not break when faced with the odd bargains that the universe loves to hand you in a world where magic and fate share a single breath. The school was both cradle and crucible: a place where the soul learned to endure, where the mind learned to see through layers of reality, where the body learned to move with a grace that felt almost foreign to the world beyond Scholomance’s doors. And as the years accumulated, Oyanga began to hear the other voices within the halls the murmured histories of students who had come here seeking the same thing and paid their own prices for the knowledge they found. When at last the time came for Oyanga to walk free beyond Scholomance’s shadowed archways, the pact that had first tethered her to the world of power rose up like a ghostly tether snapping taut. She was granted freedom, yes, but freedom came with the weight of a distance she could not shorten. The price of the life she would lead—a life spent in service to the very schools that had given her power—was laid out in a silvered vow: after two hundred years of freedom, she would return to Scholomance and take up the mantle of teacher for three hundred years. The promise bound her to a clock that did not tick in the ordinary way, a clock that ran in ripples and tides, in the rise and fall of empires and in the quiet growth of a mind that would continue to shape those who sought knowledge within those walls. Oyanga stepped into a world that looked much the same as the one she had left but carried the weight of what she now knew. The forest remained, in its way—a living memory of the risks she had taken, the lines she had crossed, the bargains she had made, and the power she had claimed. The School of Scholomance answered with a horizon that stretched beyond the visible, a future that promised to carry her across centuries. She moved forward with her head held high, her steps steady, her eyes bright with a purpose that was not merely to wield power but to teach it, to guide others through the same thresholds she herself had crossed. In the end, Oyanga’s story is not a triumph without cost but a reckoning with what it means to possess a force large enough to reshape worlds. She learned that desire for strength is easy to mistake for virtue, and that true mastery requires enduring the patience of time itself. The jungle and the school one whispering of ancient lineage, the other insisting on centuries of stewardship became two halves of a single fate: to bear the divine, to command the dark, and to offer what she learned back to those willing to walk through Scholomance’s gates when their own hour arrives. The world would remember her as a bearer of power and a keeper of secrets, and the price she paid—two centuries of freedom, followed by three centuries of teaching—would echo across generations as a quiet testament to what it takes to fashion a mentor who can still bear to look at the dawn.Ketema hummed with memories as if the walls themselves kept a diary, and Oyanga found herself listening to those centuries-old echoes as if they were a steady drumbeat guiding her steps. She wandered the city before dawn, learning its history from faded murals and the half-forgotten stories whispered by street vendors. The history spoke in layers—the migrations, the markets that once poured like rivers, the rulers who tried to bend the city to their will—and with every new tale she absorbed, Oyanga felt the city’s weight settle into her bones. She did not yet know what she would do with such knowledge, only that Ketema’s past had become a map for her to follow. In her first days, she moved through life like a rumor herself, slipping clothes from many different families until she wore them as if they were a second skin. Fabrics brushed against fabric, colors mingled in the mirrors of shop windows, and the city’s social seams stretched to accommodate her disguise. The clothes gave her access to doors that were closed to her true self, and with each stolen sleeve or stitched hem, she learned how to blend into crowds, how to become what the moment required so she could see what lay beyond. Then came Amiruhle, a blind man whose calm voice cut through the din of the streets. Oyanga found him in a sun-washed alley, guiding him gently to a place where the crowd thinned and the air held a softer light. She helped him, and in return he offered something rarer than coin a steady, unguarded human connection. To protect him, she pretended to be his young cousin, sent by a family to look after him, a story that allowed her to stay close and keep watch. The deception weighed on her as light as a feather, but it carried her forward, a quiet vow threaded through every whispered joke and every careful step she took beside him. Her heart began to beat in a new rhythm when she set her sights on the Mizuri royal family, a line of dignity and need that stretched beyond palace gates. She believed that a home and a plot of land could steady their feet and quiet the hunger that gnawed at them when the city slept. So she pursued them, not with banners or threats, but with a vision: a place where they could plant, grow, and belong, far from the streets that had trained her own hands to survive. Along the way, she found the teenage children of the royal line, lively and curious, and she visited them often. They welcomed her with questions and laughter, and in their rooms lined with maps and moonlit windows she found a different kind of history to learn: the intimate story of a family trying to hold fast to its legacy while learning to share its shelter with others. In the weaving of these moments the city’s buried past, the disguises that let her walk within, the quiet alliance with Amiruhle, and the uneasy alliance with the Mizuri children Oyanga discovered that history is not only something to be read in old stones and spoken legends. It is something you live, something you shape with your choices, even when those choices blur the line between right and wrong. And as Ketema breathed around her, a living, patient mentor, she began to see that belonging isn’t simply finding a place to stand; it’s building a place where others might stand with you. Ketema thrummed with a strange dual heartbeat: the bright buzz of advanced machines and the quiet, sly whisper of old magic that clung to the corners like dust in sunlight. For ten years, Oyanga earned trust the way a thief earns a midnight silence soft words, careful promises, and the illusion of safety. Then she began stealing souls from those who were foolish enough to trade them away, a market where deal-makers found themselves poorer in the only currency that truly mattered. The city watched as technology surged forward, and belief in magic withered to a rumor told by old storytellers in dim taverns. In that breathless gap between science and sorcery, Oyanga found her opening. The King, dazzled by the glitter of progress, granted her the crown, and Ketema’s throne glowed with a new, cold radiance. Forty unopposed years stretched ahead like a clear path through a forest of gears, and Oyanga walked it as if it were paved in starlight. Efani, known to whispered mouths as Demonica, was Ketema’s scientist-bringer of the uncanny. In the concrete glow of Ketema’s Quantum laboratories, she stole blood samples from the so-called Quantum humans and pressed them into new forms of power. With a chemistry of fear and wonder, she stitched herself with superhuman abilities, a living chorus of abilities that even the boldest engineers would envy. She wore the name of rebellion like a badge, and she challenged Queen Protector with the cold certainty of a storm gathering over metal roofs. The conflict lasted ten brutal years, a war where lasers flickered against sigils, and armies clashed in streets that learned the taste of fear. In the end, Efani and her force were banished from Ketema, the mountains swallowing their promise of a new dawn. From the high, jagged silhouette of the mountain region, Efani watched Oyanga with the patient focus of a predator who knows every rustle of the dark. It was there she returned to plead for something she could not name a chance to be more than a scientist’s figurehead, a chance to be an Apprentice to the very power she had sought to rival. Oyanga’s laughter answered first, a dry, cruel sound that rolled down stone and into the valleys. She would not grant a shortcut; she would test the heart’s willingness to surrender. Twelve years, she said, would be allotted to Efani to harvest souls for the first test, a rite of passage that would prove whether the Demonica could bear the weight of an apprentice’s burden. The mountain wind seemed to hold its breath as the bargain settled into Ketema’s soil, a shadow growing longer with each passing season. So the city stood between two tides: the gleam of a future built on circuits and the ominous glow of ancient magic that refused to stay buried. Oyanga, queen by conquest, ruled with a quiet cruelty that masked the gravity of the souls she held. Efani, the scientist-warrior who had tasted power and chose to chase more, plotted from the edges of the old world, where the air tasted of prophecy and risk. And in that liminal space the line where technology hums and magic breathes—Ketema waited, not knowing which path would break the century open, or if both would collapse into the same dark dawn that had loomed over it all along.The city of Ketema woke to a dawn that felt heavy as if the sky itself was listening for secrets. In the markets and shadows, the air carried a whisper of change, a current that tugged at sleeves and silenced the birds. At the heart of the storm stood Oyanga, a figure who moved with the gravity of a constellation newly born. Some called her a witch, others a sovereign of the unseen; to all who met her, she carried a weathered quiet that promised both protection and peril. They spoke of the bargains she struck in the margins of power, of how she could bend fate with a single sentence and a patient breath. Vaxnorin, a Japanese trader who had wandered the world with the royal army, entered her orbit like a blade finding its sheath. He would become one of her most dangerous assassins, a whisper in the right ear and a strike in the dark, trained in the ancient and deadly arts that the army had never taught to the light of day. He did not merely sell his skill; he sold something more tremulous still the very core of his allegiance. He offered his soul to Oyanga, a dark exchange that would grant him martial mastery and the fearsome grace to move through a battlefield as if the air itself were obeying his commands. In return, he sacrificed the loyalty of the Royal army, turning their disciplined force into a resource he could command at a whisper’s notice. The exchange was not just talent traded for power; it was a fracture in the chain of loyalty, a rift that would echo through every future breath he drew. With Vaxnorin, another figure slid into the frame Demonstrous, an Italian trader whose eyes glittered with a greed that seemed almost ceremonial. He too would barter for control, selling his own soul in exchange for lust and a hunger for dominion that could not be appeased by coin or title. Demonstrous brought to Oyanga a polished, dangerous charm, the air of old money and new sins, a willingness to thread the needle of empire with a silk thread soaked in ambition. Between them, the two traders sharpened Oyanga’s reach, forging a lattice of influence that spanned continents and whispered of futures that would either crown Ketema’s queen or blot it from the map. News of Ketema’s destiny spread like smoke before a storm. Royal refugees men and women who had once worn the crown of Ketema, who believed in the old order fled to every corner of Africa and beyond, seeking aid to reclaim what had been theirs. They carried nothing but their memories of a homeland and the stubborn flame that says a nation is not defeated while it remembers who it was. They traveled through deserts and forests, across seas and cities, telling tales of a world where balance could be tilted by magic, steel, and the will to endure. Then the day came when the autumn of Ketema’s fate was announced in the language of drums and banners: an army of 270,000 pressed toward the borders, a human tide that sought to erase the map with the force of its momentum. Oyanga, looking down from a throne of omens, summoned a creature of legend Lyogun, a Kaiju whose presence bent the air and turned the horizon into a mouthful of ash. When Lyogun rose, the ground trembled with a silence that felt like a held breath, and then the world seemed to tilt as the beast swept across the field and swallowed the army in a single, terrible verdict. The slaughter was not described in numbers or spurting violence, but in the way the land exhaled after and the banners lay still as if the very wind had forgotten how to move them. The defeat sent ripples outward, a wave that reached every coast and every capital that still believed in the order of the old maps. Nations seeing the fall of one empire at the paws of a monster mobilized their own armies, eight hundred thousand strong, and summoned several more Kaiju to their side, as if screening a future they could not yet name. But Oyanga retreated, taking her most loyal with her into the heart of the continent, slipping away to Kenya where she would vanish for fifteen long years. The world exhaled again, thinking the storm spent, only to discover that quiet can be a dangerous veil. From the shadows, Oyanga worked with patient violence. Kenya became the forge where her power was tempered, a base from which she would twist the region to her will. She did not conquer with loud proclamations, but with a quiet accretion of control grants, loyalties purchased with fear, a network of influence that grew as unseen as a root system beneath fertile soil. From there she set her sights outward, turning the connectors of the land into stepping stones toward Rwanda and Zimbabwe. She stitched a network through the heart of Africa, a corridor of influence that could feed Ketema’s return and keep it hidden beneath the veil of a secret rule. When the time was ripe, she used that army the one she had claimed from the shadows to recapture Ketema and to rule there in the dark, ceaselessly, for six decades. If the story paused for a moment on any one scene, it would be the return of Queen Protector, Ketema’s former sovereign, who stepped back into a world that had grown large with threats while she slept. She could feel the tremor of demonic magic in the air, a scent of rain before a storm, and she knew that the ancient balance of her realm hung in the balance once more. The two monarchs met in the space between memory and prophecy, two facets of a question that Ketema dared not answer aloud: who owns the throne when power wears many faces? The clash between Oyanga and Queen Protector crackled with weathered power. Oyanga stretched out her hand and drew the dark from the depths of the realm, calling upon demons to tilt the duel in her favor as the battle began to tilt toward her own shadow. The air grew thick as if the very sky had decided to lean in closer, listening for every word spoken in the furnace-lit rooms of the war’s old gods. It seemed for a breath that Queen Protector might fail, that the old crown would be bent toward a future that did not include her. But the people Ketema’s people, the long-suffering citizens who had watched their nation drift toward ruin rose up in a surge of memory and fervor. The sight of their former queen, the symbol of their identity, roused something elemental in them: the stubborn flame of a homeland that would not surrender to a witch’s secret rule. Oyanga fought with the ferocity of a storm she had conjured and sustained, but the bond between Queen Protector and her people proved deeper than the witch’s bargains. As Oyanga drew power from the chasms of the nether, the citizens began to see what was being taken from their queen and from themselves. In the chorus of their voices, the air cracked with a counter-song an oath to defend their heritage, to reclaim their land, and to remind the world that a nation is not a tolling bell for empire’s pleasures, but a living soul that can rise and resist. The air thickened with a decision not yet spoken: a turning toward unity, or the slow entanglement of fear that would allow a secret rule to harden into a new order. The last moments of this passage lay like a held breath in the throat of Ketema, as if the nation itself stood at the edge of a cliff, choosing between the consolations of quiet control and the arduous, luminous task of self-renewal. In that moment, the story did not fully end, but paused, waiting for the next breath to carry it forward the moment when a people would answer the call of their Queen Protector, when courage would step from the shadows and into the light, and when the kingdom, once again, would learn to write its own destiny with ink made from the fire of its own resolve.Oyanga moved through the world like a quiet storm. In Ethiopia, for 25 years she bent events to her will, a loom behind every decision, weaving wealth and knowledge into a pattern that would outlast empires. The markets of distant towns hummed with the soft mathematics of barter, while in smoky courtyards scribes tracked probabilities and old gods whispered names of those who would rewrite history. She learned the art of patience: to wait while a rumor swelled, to plant a coin that could reroute the flow of power. Alliances formed as easily as threads in a tapestry, each connection a different language, a different favor, a different dream. Wealth accumulated like rainwater in hidden cisterns, and knowledge stacked upon knowledge, until she held keys to doors others did not know existed. Demonstrous stepped into the light as a conspirator whose loyalty was as unyielding as a shadow’s edge. He would help Oyanga hide out in Italy for the next 50 years, a long winter of quiet influence. In a country of marble and sun, where power speaks in piazzas and whispers behind ornate curtains, they moved as if they had always been two halves of the same compass. She changed her skin color and adopted a new name: Alice. The disguise was meticulous, a cloak of subtle transformations that let her walk among bankers, bishops, professors, and captains without drawing the sting of suspicion. In the alleys of Naples, the canals of Venice, and the lecture halls of venerable universities, Alice learned the language of influence by listening more than speaking, letting others reveal their ambitions while she carefully set the stage. Under the radar, Oyanga now known to the world as Alice gained control of major parts of Italy: a silken web that stretched from the sunlit north to the powder-blue coast of the south. She did not seize power by force alone but nurtured it, sowing favors in temples, merchants’ lodges, and the hushed councils that whispered of reform. Her hands touched finance, media, and rumor, turning them toward a singular purpose: to rewrite the rules by which power moved. Even as she wore the face of a stranger, her will remained unmistakable, a compass needle that never wandered. Yet the past is never truly left behind, and the future is never merely earned. With a vow that was never quite kept, she returned to the School of Scholomance, not to fulfill a promise but to sharpen the blade of her ambition. The tower loomed a citadel where art and sorcery braided themselves into the architecture of possibility. There, among mentors and rivals, she sought greater wells of energy runes, covenants, and a library that hummed with the static of power. The journey had trained her to wait, to listen, to strike with surgical precision; now it promised to make her an instrument of change, or perhaps of devastation, depending on whom you asked. And so the chronicle of Oyanga, of Alice, and of Demonstrous paused on the lip of a future that shimmered with gold and danger alike. It was the kind of history that teaches you to beware the quiet, for quiet is often the prelude to a storm.

Freeing the Devil's Bride
By Kwame Hanna

The year is 1624, and the Atlantic wears a blue-black bruise that never quite fades. A wind-worn ship cuts through it, its timbers and ropes singing with salt and weather, a hive of human gears and stubborn faith. On deck, a chorus of shouts and creaks blends with the gulls’ sharp cries, as if the sea itself is listening for a bargain. Above the spray and loom of canvas, a different sound threads through the air an unearthly resonance that slips under skin and breath alike. Oyanga, known to some as Alice, is not shouting with her mouth but with a mind that aches to be heard. She screams telepathically, a bright, insistent flare in the dark, calling to Demonica and Demonstrous as if she believes they might still listen. Demonica and Demonstrous move through the ship like two shadows wearing human faces, a pair of glittering options in a market of danger. Their eyes glint with coins that have never rusted, with schemes that glitter as temptingly as the new technology Benjamin Rutherford promised would change England itself. They’ve woven a tale so tempting that even the oldest mariner’s skepticism scuffles at the edge of sleep. Their plan, simple in its cruelty: lure the best sailors to their cause, wrap bargains and blessings in a sheen of gold and glimmering devices, and let the souls weigh the price of the voyage. They want the ship to become a ledger of names, inked not in ink but in the final, invisible currency of a life lived in fear and desperation. Benjamin Rutherford, this expedition’s unlikely broker, hails from Birmingham, England, though the ship has taken on a bite of the sea’s own accent since leaving the Channel behind. He is a man certain of one thing: technology is a compass more trustworthy than any chart. He has gathered the finest salt and seamanship England can offer, wooed with promises of new gadgets, rare metals, and diamonds that could blind a man’s conscience as surely as the sun blinds the eye at noon. He hires the crew with a trader’s charm and a scholar’s precision, insisting that the age of maps drawn in ink and superstition is slipping away. The sailors come aboard with hands still tasting of rope and tar, their pockets heavier with bright coins and gleaming micro-devices that hum with potential—devices that promise a new way of navigating not just the sea, but fate itself. Yet as the ship presses toward the open water, the living world around them grows thinner, more intimate, and somehow more dangerous. Oyanga’s telepathic cry threads through the air in bright, cold threads, a cry that is at once a plea and a command. The message is clear even if the words are not: the buried treasure of an Arawak king sleeps beneath the memory of a people whose shamans are already gone—dead, migrated, escaped, or broken on other islands. The Arawak past has become a rumor carried by the wind, a rumor that tap taps on the hull and asks to be remembered, even if remembrance comes as a weapon. Benjamin cannot pretend this voyage is only about treasure. The crew’s ambitions, their loyalties, their very breaths are being weighed on an invisible scale. Demonica and Demonstrous whisper their agreements in the spaces between gull cries and the ship’s own heartbeat, a contest of wiles in which the prize is not merely gold but souls—a ledger of promises signed without paper, traded for a few more leagues of sea and the chance to outmaneuver one another in a game older than the ship itself. The competition casts a pall over the deck where the rhythm of the oars might otherwise keep time with the wind. Some sailors listen with a hungry, fevered patience; others feel the air tighten around their ribs as if the ocean itself were squeezing the truth from their chests. The best of England’s navigators and sea-worn hands crowd the rails, their eyes catching every gleam: a glint of a new gadget here, a raw-cut yellow diamond there, a sliver of brass that gleams like a sunbeam trapped in a circle of metal. They are lured by the promise that the voyage will rewrite the rules of fortune, that the technology handed to them—unfamiliar, dazzling, almost magical—will keep them ahead of storms and rival fleets. It is easy to forget the cost when the horizon opens like a hand inviting you to step into a grand, perilous future. As the ship moves deeper into the open Atlantic, Eleuthera begins to claim the edge of the world in the mind’s eye—the Bahamas rising on the distant line where sea meets sky, a pale coastline that seems to mottle with rumor and legend. Eleuthera’s cliffs appear first as a whisper at the periphery of view, then as a promise that the voyage’s end will be anchored in something older than any passenger’s ambition. The sea here is a living thing with a memory, a patient witness to the bargains that strangers strike in the dark—bargains sealed by a squeeze of the hand or a nod that means something more than agreement. Demonica and Demonstrous, standing at the fore like two wraiths made flesh, tilt their heads in a mockery of admiration toward Benjamin’s fleet of hired sailors, as if to say, Watch how easily a ship becomes a harbor for a soul’s surrender when fate wears a captain’s grin. Night gathers over the deck with a slow, inexorable grace. The stars unspool above in patient constellations, while the lamp-wicks burn with a stubborn, stubborn light. The ship’s figurehead seems to listen to the telepathic call from Oyanga, to feel the tremor of her fear and longing as if the wood itself has memory. The crew, exhausted yet alert, moves with a ritual vigilance: a watchful eye here, a hand hovering over a tool that hums with the promise of future power, a whispered negotiation there that never quite reaches the air but settles beneath the skin like a cold coin. And in this timeless moment of push and pull, the sea itself becomes the ultimate negotiator. It swallows sound and spits back weather storms that arrive with careful English courtesy and depart with a savage, unspoken mercy. The treasure they chase if it exists beyond the tales of the conquered and the remembered hangs in the balance between what can be forced from the sea and what can only be earned through courage, restraint, and a tolerance for the unknown. The two forces that steer the voyage the lure of wealth and the lure of power over others’ destinies—coexist in a fragile, dangerous harmony. The ship moves toward Eleuthera not merely to claim a hoard of gold, but to claim a memory: of a people whose stories were silenced, of a world reshaped by conquest, and of a future that might still choose mercy over hunger if the right wind should rise. By the time dawn begins to bleed into the last night, the Atlantic’s vastness presses in on every heart aboard the vessel. Oyanga’s cry retreats to a stubborn note in the mind, a bright line of protest against the encroaching darkness. Demonica and Demonstrous count their scores in the margins of the ship’s ledger, a ledger that already feels too heavy to bear. Benjamin Rutherford, with the line of his jaw set and the weight of England at his back, surveys the horizon as if the sea itself might yield him the final map to a fortune—or the last key to a door he hadn’t known existed. Eleuthera waits with its light and its legends, and somewhere beneath the water, a buried king’s secret keeps time with the heartbeats of those who dare to seek it, knowing that every voyage leaves a mark not only on the world but on the souls who dare to steer it.

The night carried a cold grin as Benjamin stood at the edge of the harbor, a last loyal sailor with skin grown pale from a lifetime of weather and duty. The air tasted of iron and salt, and in the depths of the fog-wreathed quay, Demonica appeared as if the storm itself had decided to unmask a temptress. Her eyes glowed with the shimmer of distant wrecks, and she spoke in a voice that sounded like bells dying under the sea. She offered him power not the simple strength of a strong arm, but something deeper, a blaze inside that could rewrite a man’s fate. Temptation wrapped around him like a sudden current, whispering that he could command the tides, bend the winds, erase regret with a single word. He listened until the word became a seal, and the seal, a done deal. From the shadows, Demonstrous slid forward, a shadow with teeth, a thief dressed in the silk of midnight. The moment Benjamin’s resolve fractured, Demonstrous moved like ink in water, snatching away the last shreds of his soul. A dull ache blossomed in Benjamin’s chest, a hollow moth beating in the void where his essence used to glow. The harbor’s lamps flickered, as if the night itself blinked in disbelief at the theft. Benjamin’s eyes once bright with old weather and loyalty now held a glassy, empty surface, a vessel no longer his. The deal closed; the price was paid; and the sea kept his secret in the cold depths where no gulls cry. Demonica gathered a following of quiet conspirators, silhouettes in cloaks that rustled like sails in a wind that never died. She did not hurry; she moved with the measured certainty of a captain who has charted every risk and still chosen the perilous course. Her destination was the underground tomb whispered about in taverns and busted ship logs, where the Awarak Shaman’s protection spells kept a different kind of sleep—a feverish, unyielding hold on those who dared wake the trapped. The route to the tomb wound through catacombs of kelp-dark caverns and bone-choked corridors, where the walls breathed with damp memory and the water dripped in a rhythm older than any oath. Alice lay within, imprisoned by enchantments older than mercy, her voice a memory that refused to die. When Demonica finally reached the tomb’s yawning entrance, the world tilted as if the ocean itself leaned to listen. The air inside smelled of iron and rain, of ships left to rot and promises broken. Runes carved into obsidian glimmered with a stubborn, cold light, and the floor echoed with the soft pad of unseen feet. Demonstrous, always close, lingered at her shoulder, a dark mirror that watched for any falter in the plan. The team moved as one, a living map of intention, stepping into the tomb’s throat. It closed behind them with a sigh of ancient stone, sealing the breath and the light in a chamber where time seemed to hold its breath. To shatter the wards without waking the tomb’s ancient guardian was a gamble of myth and muscle. Demonica and Demonstrous offered the only sure path: a sacrifice, not of blood for blood’s sake, but of power lent and demanded by the sea. They stood at the center of a circle etched with salt and glass, and they called upon the sailors who had once sailed with Benjamin their names little more than whispers now. Offerings were laid upon the altar of rusted gear and corroded brass tokens of a life exchanged for dominion over the waves. As the ritual unfurled, the sea seemed to draw back, then surge forward in a bloom of lightning-touched spray. The wards dimmed, their glow thinning like a candle flame in a storm, and the spell that had held Alice so tightly in sleep’s merciless grip began to unravel, thread by thread pulled loose by the prices paid and the courage offered. Alice’s awakening was not gentle. It came with a tremor through the tomb’s stones, a blast of air that tasted of rain and old thunder. She rose, tall and furious, with the damp of the tomb clinging to her skin and a flame of defiance kindling in her eyes. Her voice, when she found it again, was a storm’s roar—condemnation wrapped in fury. She cursed the architects of the trap, Demonica and Demonstrous, her words biting at their names as if the syllables themselves could bruise. They had taken too long, she told them, letting the waiting become as cruel as the deed. The words themselves crackled with heat, and the room seemed to respond, stone sweating and the runes flaring with a dangerous, hungry light. The fury that poured from Alice was not merely anger; it was the like of a tide turning in a held breath. The tomb’s seals shivered at her anger, and the air filled with the scent of rain on stone, of ships long sunk and never found. Alice declared that no bargain woven in deceit would stand against a heart that has learned to endure, against a soul that would not be reclaimed by the dark. Curses flew, not as petty jabs but as full-voiced proclamations that the sea itself would remember every whisper of betrayal and return it with patience and consequence. The Shaman’s protection, weakened by the sacrifices, trembled as if the ground itself stood to listen to her words, and for a moment it seemed the tomb might release its captive. In that suspended second, the scene held its breath: Nicholas and Anothony’s absence a hollow ache that no ritual could mend, and the chain of deceit snapping somewhere in the distance as if the ocean itself had chosen to snap it. The walls, long guardians of quiet despair, caught the echo of Alice’s resolve and began to loosen, as if the cave were listening to a conductor’s baton, tuning itself to a new rhythm of resolve and resistance. As the dust settled and the last of the ancient wards crumbled, Alice stood before the group again, not as a captive but as a force—charged with the raw energy of a storm that refuses to break. She had woken with a fury that was both weapon and shield, and though the cost of the path forward was not yet fully revealed, there was now a map, drawn in the smoke and the salt, that pointed toward justice, no matter how long the road or how deep the costs. The night did not quiet after that. It hummed with the tremor of consequences and the breath of a sea that remembered every oath ever spoken on its shores. The story of Benjamin’s bargain, the theft of a soul, and the awakening of a vengeful ally would continue to unfold, one breath, one breach, one vow at a time. The tomb’s mouth hung open to the world, and the next chapter waited, hungry and sure, for those bold enough to walk the line between mercy and power. Alice senses a power unlike any she has felt before—the kind that turns the air electric and the water careful around her ankles. A demon draws near, and she moves with a quiet urgency, gathering her companions and steering them toward a pilgrimage across a string of sun-scarred isles. The ocean itself seems to lean in, listening as she talks in clipped, practical rhythms, coaxing the group to drift from one emerald horizon to the next. Their voyage glows with salt wind and tremors of something ancient, each island a rung on a ladder she climbs with careful hands. The first island wears a crown of salt-streaked rock and living reefs. Coral fingers brush the hull as if testing a new ally, and the air tastes faintly of copper and rain. On the second, a halo of turquoise lagoons cradles schools of silver fish that flicker like secrets. A third island, veiled in mangrove shadows, trembles with whispered legends and the soft rustle of unseen wings. Every stop is a breadcrumb, a clue about the hunter stalking the hunter, a trail that seems to rearrange itself as soon as she looks away. It is as if the sea itself is rearranging its map to test her resolve, and she meets each test with a steady gaze and a plan sketched in the margins of her heart. Then they come at last to Andros, the great island of secrets in the Bahamas, where tides keep the quiet promise of something older than the storms. Demonicus senses the nets closing in—the sense that a predator is tightening its circle around him, and anger blooms like a thunderhead on the horizon. He has ruled these channels and coves in secret, a hidden sovereign whose very presence makes the water bend a little differently. He emerges from the labyrinth of caves and salt-brine winds, his figure framed by the jagged coastline, and when his eyes fall on Alice, something unfamiliar shifts inside him: a spark, a flame, an awakening that feels eerily like love. The encounter is swift as a brush of moonlight over dark seas. Demonicus’s gaze sears through the shifting light and lands squarely on Alice, and in that instant the air tightens with a force that robs him of caution. He feels not a hunter but a beacon, not a menace but a magnet. And as if drawn by an invisible thread, he moves closer, drawn by something she radiates—the confidence of someone who can see through a demon’s armor and still meet his gaze without flinching. Alice notices the spark, too: the way his fearsome majesty falters in the glow of her attention, the way his temperament softens when their eyes lock. She understands, in the quicksilver moment of contact, that this attraction could be the hinge on which her plans swing. She doesn’t chase the thrill; she harnesses it. With practiced ease, she speaks not to a monster but to a partner, naming in a language older than the reefs the promise she asks him to keep. Under the carved arches of a sunken coral gallery, she lays a delicate pact, a binding that turns longing into loyalty and loyalty into service. It is not coercion so much as alignment—the demon’s desire to stay near her, the human need to feel seen, the shared hunger for power fused into a single, unbreakable course of action. And as the seal is set, Demonicus bows not from fear but from a surrendered will stirred by love—love that has found a willing vessel in Alice and a powerful ally in the demon who once hunted the night. Together, they stand at the edge of Andros’s blue horizons, where the world seems to hold its breath between the gulls’ cries and the endless whisper of the sea. The islands murmur with tide and magic, and the dawn light glints off the water as if the Bahamas themselves are watching, awaiting the new order that this unlikely pair might forge. What remains is a pact shaped by desire and courage, a partnership that could reshape the fate of the archipelago—and perhaps redefine what it means for a demon to be under someone’s command.Alice moved like a shadow wearing a crown, a figure who could bend a room to listen and bend souls to her will. She spoke of England as a prize to be earned, not a fate to be shared, and her voice carried the cold certainty of steel. She gathered a strange procession: buccaneers with sea-salted eyes, lords who had learned to barter favors as if they were coins, governors who wore trust as a thin mask, and the sharpest, strongest minds among men and women alike. In their hands, she asked for more than loyalty; she asked for the essence of themselves, a pact sealed in ink that glinted like a weapon in the candlelight. To these willing and unwilling, she offered power, protection, and a place at the table where kingdoms were carved from fear as much as from flame. And they bowed, compelled by the promise of an empire that would not fade with the dawn. Then came the voyage. The ships stitched a line of black and white through the gray sea, sails swelling as if the ocean itself leaned close to listen. Benjamin, a weathered captain with salt-cracked jokes and a stubborn heart, steered the fleet toward the old kingdoms with a stubborn, hopeful gleam in his eyes. He and several of his sailors brought their wives and children with them, a small, stubborn chorus of kin that clung to him like a talisman against the unknown. The air smelled of tar and rain and possible endings as they docked on a shore that still wore the old flags of kings and colonists, as if England could be rebuilt from the echoes of history and a stubborn will. Alice moved at the edge of that harbor, a silhouette cut from frost and calculation, and she did not speak of mercy. She spoke of contracts and consequences, of souls traded like auction lots in a hall where time itself kept score. And so the bargain began to unfold. Parchment ceremonies and seals appeared as if by magic, but the true ritual was not ink on skin or the press of a hand on a table. It was a quiet agreement in the air, a hush that fell when a name was spoken and a life was spoken for in return. The travelers who joined her carried a strange glow with them, a feverish light that suggested they could outlive the memory of their own breath. They did not merely conquer; they converted the land’s threads into a tapestry that bore her mark. By the time the years brushed past 1650, the map began to change in secret, the lines rearranging themselves in the dark. England, so long a stage of public power, grew a hidden side, and in that side Alice stood as monarch of bargains, ruler of a half-remembered country that wore her sigil in places even the crown forgot to look. Yet power in this altered world is seldom a solitary flame. There were witches who could read the tremor of a spell in the wind, wizards who kept the old directories of law and lore, and mages who gathered in circles where the air tasted of thunder and pollen. They did not merely oppose Alice; they read the ledger of souls and saw the balance tilt too far toward one hungry woman. They came for her as one might pursue a storm across a high plain: patient, inevitable, and unafraid to risk everything for the life of the land. The chase was not merely a chase of armies and banners but of the invisible, the things that move through the body and through the country’s memory when no one is looking. In the end, the pursuit forced Alice to retreat, to swap the light of a throne for the dim glow of exile, to learn the hard arithmetic of power without the security of possession. What remains is a landscape altered by rumor and choice. By 1650, half of England bore the invisible mark of Alice’s dominion, a shadow-signed map that no ordinary law could erase. But the realm did not vanish into her control as a single, neat triumph; instead it fractured into half-whispered loyalties and quiet resistance. The witches, wizards, and mages did not restore the world to its former ease so much as remind it of the old dangers that slumbered behind every bargain. They chased away the false crown and left behind a country wary of any new pact that would demand more than it would offer in return. In the end, the land learned to live with the memory of a ruler who sought to own souls and to bend England to a private order, even as those who wielded magic and those who refused to sell their essence kept watch for the day when power might walk again in the open. The story lingers like a draft through a long corridor: a warning, a temptation, and a reminder that a nation’s strength lies not just in who sits upon the throne, but in the stubborn, stubborn heart of those who will not surrender who they are.The sun rose over the turquoise sweep of the Bahamas, throwing shards of light across white sands and the narrow wrists of coral that stitched the sea to the shore. A small vessel kissed the harbor with the sound of creaking timbers and chalky spray, and from it stepped Alice, her cloak damp with spray and her eyes bright with a plan that had kept its own weather in her heart. She came not alone but with Benjamin and a family that bore the quiet endurance of those who have learned to live on the edge of peril. The air around them smelled of sea salt and resin, of coffee steam and the faintest whiff of gunpowder carried on luck rather than law. The islands rose like quiet questions—jutting specks of green in an endless blue, some hollow with caves, others crowned with coconut palms that swayed as if listening to a whispered command. Alice’s return felt almost ceremonial, as if the islands themselves held their breath to see if the story would begin again or end in a new silence. She spread a weathered map across a palm-wood table in a shack that doubled as a command post, its windows shuttered against the glaring sun. The lines on the parchment glowed faintly, as if drawn with something more than ink—sigils older than the wind, older than the ships that now plied chord and current between the islands. Benjamin’s family stood close, a sturdy circle of witnesses to a vow they knew would pull them into storms of a kind they could not fully name. The moment she spoke, the sea seemed to listen. She called forth the remainder of the Army that had endured the long night of her battle with England’s host—a war waged in shadows and bursts of red flame that turned the sky to a seam of bright and terrible color. The tale of ten thousand witches, wizards, and mages swirled through the air like a rumor turning real, a legend given weight by the tremor of magic in her voice. The air thickened with the scent of ozone and old rain as she summoned them from the farthest corners of memory and fate, from coves where moonlight gathered like dew, from the reefs where currents hummed with a language no ordinary tongue could speak. One by one they answered, a tide of hooded figures and glimmering symbols, stepping out of the fabric of the morning and into the shifting daylight of the Bahamas. They did not descend in a single phalanx, but rather arrived as a chorus: the whisper of wind through palm fronds, the soft clang of amulets, the almost uncatchable rustle of robes that swirled like sea-mist. The Army’s presence settled over the islands with the patient inevitability of tide, not with the shout of conquest but with the careful cadence of a plan long studied. They moved as if they already owned the currents—the way a sailor knows which shoals hide and which laze in safe water. The 700 islands a maze of secret havens, hidden coves, and reefs that glowed with an inner light in the moon began to yield to the slow, deliberate touch of their will. It was not mere occupation but a re-writing of the maps themselves, a quiet threading of influence through courthouses, councils, and backroom negotiations where power was weighed on the ledger as surely as coins. Government offices that once spoke in the shorthand of colonial demand began to speak anew, in a language braided with old magic and new pragmatism. Decrees drifted into rooms like moths to a flame soft, persistent, almost unnoticeable at first until the documents carried a warmth of intent that could be felt in the bone as much as in the eye. The islands, which had once been a scattered chorus of jurisdictional voices, found a strange harmony in the presence of this hidden patronage. It was not fear that kept the engines turning, but a careful, almost affectionate steering like a watchmaker coaxing a stubborn gear to engage, or a sea captain guiding a stubborn current toward a harbor that never wanted for safety. Alice stood at the center of it all, a figure both serene and formidable, a lighthouse whose beam cut through the fog of uncertainty. She watched the sun tilt and sink with patient confidence, knowing that power, once distributed, travels on a current of consent and quiet compliance just as surely as it travels on boats and gulls. Benjamin, with his kin at his side, moved through the day as a living bridge between two worlds the old orders of England’s fearsome magi and the new arrangement taking root among the mangroves and limestone shells. They did not cling to the old languages of conquest so much as translate them into a form that could endure the many tides of history. By dusk, the horizon held its breath again, and the Bahamas wore a new skin the glow of hidden governance threading through its public face, the private corridors of power humming with an undercurrent only the initiated could hear. The government, once a stage for public decree, began to feel the understated weight of a hand that did not demand obedience so much as invite participation, a hand that could be both season and shelter. It was a slow, patient conquest more like a careful gardeners’ work than a storm at sea yet the pattern was unmistakable: a chain of islands, a choir of secret, a chorus of influence, and a capital city listening perhaps for the first time in a long while to a chorus it did not yet fully understand. As night drew its velvet curtains across the sky, the sea kept its timeless watch, and the small, steadfast group that had come ashore in 1654 stood a little taller, for they knew they had entered a new chapter one written in the language of tides and sigils, that would redefine the map not only of islands but of power itself. The room is thick with the scent of old ink and rain as Demonica leans over a table carved with sigils that catch the candlelight like trapped fireflies. Sheets of parchment lie scattered between them, each one a fragment of a memory waiting to be spoken aloud. In the hush between breaths, Alice’s voice begins to unfurl, delicate as a moth’s wing but edged with something sharper, something that has learned the weight of centuries. She starts with a year etched into the spine of history: 1764. Alice’s tale slides into motion as if the room itself were turning a page. She speaks of Scholomance, a fortress of learning nestled in a shadowed corner of the world where time dawdles, and power hums in the air like a low electric current. She paints the school as a living cathedral built of stone and rune, where corridors wind into themselves and every doorway promises a test, every classroom a vow. She tells Demonica that she taught there for a hundred years, a century that feels to her now like a long, patient breath she kept drawing in, one lesson after another, one reckless question after another, until the halls became a second skin. In her memory, the air inside Scholomance crackles with a strange light, not the lighting of torches but something more watchful—an intelligence that threads itself through spellwork, stone, and the stubborn curiosity of students who want to know the world’s deepest secret. The most powerful demon in the school looms large in her recollections, a figure both terrible and magnetically compelling, the sort of presence that makes the air grow heavy with unspoken promises. Alice was not merely a teacher there; she stood on the edge of an impossible possibility, almost the wife of that demon, a bond that would have bound her to the school’s sovereign will as surely as any seal. She tells Demonica how alluring and dangerous that proximity could be, how questions were met with answers that felt like blessings and curses braided together. Demonic eyes widen as Alice remembers the look of the halls when the demon passed through them: a corridor of shadows that parted with a patient, sovereign nod, runes glowing faintly in the corners where chalk dust hung in suspended gold. She recalls the nights when the curriculum stretched beyond ordinary knowledge, when the school’s syllabus felt less like a syllabus and more like a map of every secret the world hides. There were lessons in translating the language of winds, tutoring in the mathematics of time, and studies of souls as if they were currencies and currents—currents that could carry a mind to places it had no right to go. It was a world that whispered, if you listened closely, that knowledge has teeth, and every bite leaves a mark. Yet for all the wonder, something in Alice’s voice tightens, a thread pulled taut by memory’s strain. She explains, with a honesty that makes the candle flame tremble, why she left the school behind. The reasons are layered and heavy, not spoken all at once but revealed in slices—the pull of a life beyond the fortress walls, the toll of a hundred years on the body and the soul, the moments when the demon’s proximity edged too near to possession, too near to erasing the space between who she was and what power could demand of her. The memory does not betray a single decisive act but a truth she has carried like a weight: to step away from Scholomance was to preserve the thin line that keeps a person human when the world has a hundred ways of swallowing you whole. And then there is the price she learned to bargain with knowledge itself, a price that makes Demonica lean forward with a spark of both hunger and fear. Alice’s eyes, aged with experience, meet hers across the table, and she tells the cold, undeniable fact: any more knowledge would require a harvest, a toll paid in souls. Two thousand souls, she says, would be the key to unlock further doors, the currency with which the School would authorize another glimpse beyond its locked rooms. The words fall into the candlelight with the hollow weight of a bell tolling in a distant tower. Two thousand souls. It is a sum that seems almost impossible to imagine, a ledger page so heavy with sorrow and power that the room itself seems to sigh. Demonica asks questions—the kind of questions that tests teachers with the patience of mountains might ask: Why would the school demand such a price? What kind of souls? How does one begin to gather them? Alice answers with a broken, almost tender clarity. The School’s appetite is ancient and patient, fed by bargains struck in the shadowed corners of desire and ambition. Souls are not mere numbers; they are echoes, memories, choices refracted through time. To collect them is to navigate the dangerous boundaries between freedom and captivity, between the living and the thing that claims what it needs and leaves the rest to scar and carry on. Alice says that, for now, the path to more knowledge runs through that terrible toll, a path that Demonica must walk if she wants to see Scholomance again, if she wants to glimpse the secrets that had shivered in the air when the demon’s presence filled the room. Demonic thoughts churn behind the calm surface of her expression as she absorbs this revelation. The room’s quiet is thick with possibility, with the sense that every line of dialogue is a thread that could pull a cloak of fate around two lives. Demonica’s questions shift from the logistics of collecting souls to the moral weight of such a burden: what would it cost, truly, to open another door into the School? What would it do to Alice, to herself, to the balance of power that has kept Scholomance shadowed and guarded for so long? The memory of Alice’s hundred-year teaching tenure, interlaced with the almost-wedded closeness to the school’s most powerful demon, becomes not only a tale of danger and desire but a warning: knowledge in the hands of the old powers carries a price that the living must decide whether to pay. As the candle dwindles and the night outside presses its slow, watchful crowd against the windows, Alice’s narrative reaches a moment of stillness, a pause that feels almost sacred. She does not give Demonica a map or a key, but rather a set of quiet truths. Scholomance remains where it is because some places in the world are kept safe not by locks, but by the memories of those who have learned to walk between borders and to survive without surrender. The offer of more knowledge, she implies, is not a gift but a trial—a test of what Demonica is willing to endure, not just to possess, but to become. And if Demonica accepts that trial, the price will be exacting, the road long, and the consequences as irreversible as a bone-drawn rune etched into stone. When at last the conversation settles into an uneasy stillness, the room seems to hold its breath. Demonica’s voice is soft, almost a whisper, but it carries the weight of resolve. She will seek the 2000 souls for the knowledge that calls to her—not because she longs for power alone, but because she wants to understand what it means to stand before Scholomance’s doors and choose, again and again, what to take and what to leave behind. And so the tale, carried in the glow of candles and the half-seen glimmer of runes, becomes a promise: the search for a place where time folds and power speaks in the language of price and possibility, and a warning that some doors, once opened, do not simply close again.

Tales of Scholomance
by Kwame Hanna

According to Arminius, the Draculas were a great and noble race, their presence commanding as a crest of night against the pale dawn. They moved with a grace that seemed carved from marble and mystery, their lineage steeped in ancient honor even as the shadows of rumor flickered at its edges. Yet, time and rumor kept company, for within this proud line there were scions whose dealings with the Evil One were whispered among their peers, as if a dark thread ran through their blood, binding greatness to a perilous curiosity. Their secrets were learned in the Scholomance, a perilous academy set on the mountains that loom over Lake Hermanstadt. There, where the air grows thin and the world narrows to stone, the scholars pored over forbidden lore, their candles guttering like moonlit swords. It was said that in these halls a door opened to powers not meant for mortal minds, and that the devil himself claimed the tenth scholar as his due, a grim toll exacted from those who dared to plumb the deepest wells of knowledge. The mountains crowned this grim curriculum with silence and wind, leaving behind a legacy of splendor tempered by dread, a memory of a race whose brilliance could light the night even as it walked hand in hand with peril. On the sixth of June, 1886 AD, the world seemed to tilt a fraction toward another order of time. Dracula stood at the threshold of the unknown, where stone walls breathed with the memory of centuries and the air smelled of rain and ink. Rau Servitor awaited him there, a figure carved from the night itself—tall and still, robes that absorbed light, a presence that felt less a man than a gate through which fate could pass. His smile was a cold sigil, and when he spoke, his voice was a whisper that carried the weight of ages. Dracula had been told he would be the tenth selected from Romania, and that a circle of ten would extend the reach of knowledge across the globe, gathering brightest spirits from all the nations of the Earth. The hall bore silent witness to this claim: a long line of students from distant lands, each one cast in the same mold of hunger and awe, each bearing a secret longing to master what lay beyond ordinary waking. The air thrummed with the hum of unseen currents, as if the very walls held their breath for what was to come. Over nine years, the curriculum unfolded in a sequence that felt less like schooling and more like a rite of becoming. The language of all living things—dragons that circled the high rafters, wolves that trotted between the pillars of stone, the minute chirr of beetles and the rustle of leaves that never quite left the window seat—was taught as if speech itself were a key to hidden doors. The secrets of nature unfurled in laboratories that glowed with a pale, unearthly light: alchemical gardens where stones learned to listen and gravities shifted with the cadence of a whispered hypothesis. Magic seeped into every lesson, teaching not merely to cast spells but to listen for the resonance of the universe, to bend a lilac thread of weather into purpose, to coax order from chaos with a careful, practiced will. There were trials that burned with the heat of expectation. They learned to ride flying dragons as easily as others might ride a horse, to trust the wind as a mentor, and to coax rain from a sky that preferred to be reticent. The days stretched into the kind of routine that feels eternal, and yet every day carried a reminder that tomorrow might demand more of them than today ever could. Dracula’s own nature—steeped in centuries of private observation and the cunning of a survivor—found a different rhythm here, one that demanded both restraint and audacity in equal measure. The nine years wore on with a patient, inexorable cadence. The pupils moved as one toward the final crucible, a culmination that would test not just skill but identity. At the center of the rite stood the Solomonar’s book, a tome said to drink deeply from the well of humanity’s collective memory. The final assignment required the copying of one’s entire knowledge of humanity into its living pages, an act that would seal a mind within the living archive or leave it a hollow echo in the company of myths. It was not merely a test of memory, but a transaction with time itself: to transfer thought into a prison of ink, to set one’s truths to the mercy of parchment that would endure long after flesh and breath had withered. Dracula walked the corridors of the School with the gravitas of one who had learned that power and consequence walk hand in hand. The walls bore stories etched in runes and relics, each object a witness to the many forms knowledge could take when given form. He felt the weight of a hundred glances—the wary respect of his peers, the silent awe of the elder masters, the quiet envy of those who sensed the depth of what lay within him. And yet there was a peculiar solitude in his ascent, a solitude that came from carrying the memory of a long, shadowed life while trying to translate it into something that could coexist with the bright, strange miracles of this new world. As the years turned, the hallways thrummed with the intimate music of a rapidly evolving intellect. He learned to listen to the rain as if it were an audience, to read the language of rivers as a dialogue with the earth, and to draft spells that bent the weather to will without breaking the delicate balance of the air. The dragons he rode bore down on the horizon with scales like living night, their wings beating a clock into the sky. With each ascent, with each whispered chant that summoned a cloud-formed form or a thread of lightning, Dracula found himself at once more bound to the School and more bound to the part of him that had learned to endure, adapt, and endure again.

The Scholomance hummed with a quiet, dangerous energy as transformation sigils spiraled into the air like slow, black moths. Candles burned with pale, frost-blue flames that lick the shadows and never quite touch the stone. Dracula moved through the hall with his usual velvet silence, a figure of old moonlight and smoother lies, while Demonica walked a careful line of distance and caution, her eyes measuring every gliding gesture, every whispered syllable she chose not to hear. Dracula dared to speak of a harem, a gilded trap of dependency and possession, but her gaze hardened and she stepped back, letting the idea fall away as if it were a brittle leaf. The moment stretched, electric and uneasy, until she turned away and kept distance, not out of fear but out of a stubborn, stubborn sense of self. In the practice duels that followed, two other power-bearers faced one another with the precision of storm-fronts colliding. Dracula and Wong Meng, known as the Sun Demon, circled each other with the discipline of practiced enemies and wary allies. Sparks of heat and light ricocheted off the obsidian walls as they traded tremors of energy and parries of ink-dark steel. Each believes that victory will inure the Other to Rau Servitor’s will, that the edge of conquest can be honed into a weapon of obedience. The air thrummed with their breath and the soft rasp of gowns brushing against the floor, a ritual duel dressed in the language of combat and charm, as if to prove who would ascend as the supreme Warlock under Rau Servitor’s watching, calculating gaze. Across the central nave, Rau Servitor himself stood with Satan, and a chorus of demons and witches who taught, corrected, and presided over the lessons that filled the Scholomance with a living, breathing curriculum of danger. They spoke in voices threaded with ice and iron, their words shaping reality as much as their hands moved the chalk or carved the wards. The room felt like a living manuscript, each page turned by a step, each oath sealed with a sigil that refused to forget. The secrets of Rau Servitor enigmas ashine with forbidden light slid from their mouths into ears that strained to comprehend, while the Secrets of all who had ever tried to overthrow the Creator hovered like a cloud of moth-winged anxieties, waiting for the brave or the reckless to misstep. 

The nine-year dawns rose and fell with ceremonial gravity, until at last the final day arrived—a day that felt both like a closing door and an opening gate. The Solomonar’s book lay open on a pedestal of carved obsidian, its pages seeming to breathe with the life of a hundred lifetimes. Dracula stood before it, a silence that was almost a kind of reverence settling over him. The act he was about to perform was spoken of in the same hushed reverence in which scholars discuss the turning of oceans: to copy the entirety of human knowledge into such a vessel would be to fuse memory with memory, to knit his mind into a tapestry that could endure the weight of all that humankind had learned, feared, loved, and doubted. Pages turned as if stirred by an unseen current, and in the moment of transference the mind opened like a lute string struck by a master hand. Thoughts flowed, not as a flood that sweeps away the mind’s own shorelines, but as a careful artisan’s craft, shaping the edges of memory to fit the contours of a book whose appetite was not hunger but comprehension. Names, dates, discoveries, the sighs of invention and the quiet ache of unspoken questions—everything poured into the Solomonar’s book with a precision that felt almost ceremonial, as if the act were less about possession and more about harmonizing the chords of human experience into one grand, enduring melody. When the last line had nestled into its appointed place, a hush fell over the hall—the sort of hush that follows the closing of a vast, living door. Dracula felt the room acknowledge the moment with a resonance that echoed in the bones: he had given a part of himself to a thing that would outlive him, and in return he would carry within him something that could never be fully spoken, yet could silently illuminate the path of those who would one day read the book’s living record.

Rau Servitor stands at the center of the great hall, a silhouette of impeccably ordered gears and pale blue flame. The walls breathe with the memory of a hundred nations, and the air tastes of rain and metal. On the floor, a hat rests like a black moon, its edges stitched with runes that thrum when the crowd hushes. One by one, the tenth student from each nation steps forward, their names whispered from the brim in a chorus of shaky breaths. When the name lands, the moment fractures: power and mind pour out of them, a bright, reluctant stream that threads into the Servitor’s chest. The ritual is not loud, but it is absolute—their identities thinning, their wills bending, until they stand as empty vessels the machine can claim. Quiet sighs ripple through the hall, like wind slipping through clockwork. Dracula moves through the corridors with a scholar’s caution and a survivor’s pride. The school’s towers loom above him, etched with lessons learned in fire and frost, in midnight debates and stubborn experiments. He leaves the ceremony with a heart both heavier and sharper, grateful for the burden of nine years of study. He has tasted the bitter and the brilliant alike—the perils of forbidden knowledge, the discipline that kept him from breaking, the rare moments when clarity cut through chaos. He is grateful he got to keep all he learned and gained over those nine years, even as the world beyond the gates exhaled a new, uncertain dawn.

The nine years behind him, the infinite possibilities ahead, Dracula stepped back from the pedestal with the quiet certainty of one who had learned that the true mastery of knowledge is not in hoarding it but in knowing how to let it breathe, how to guide it toward outcomes that could bend the world toward a better, more terrible, more luminous future. Rau Servitor’s eyes glinted with cold approval, not as a conqueror’s triumph, but as a curator of a future that had learned to listen to the past, to translate the old wonders into new weather, and to carry the weight of humanity’s memory with a grace that was as inexorable as time itself.

The Love Punisher 
By Kwame Hanna

The Death Queen sits behind the wheel, the world outside a lacquered blur of neon and salt air. Her car hums with a patient menace, the windshield catching the last light of a sinking sun and turning it to coins that slide across the glass. The Bahamas spread beyond the highway like a waking dream white ribbons of coast, a turquoise breath of sea, and a sky that seems to hold its own tremor of secrets. She checks the seat belt with a careful, almost affectionate precision, the buckle clicking shut as if sealing a fate already written in the margins of the night. Her mind, ever restless, slips back to the moment when she and Georgette Farrington decided to break a rule that had outlived its usefulness. They had chosen each other when the tradition around them pressed hard, insisting that love be governed by a dozen invisible laws. It hadn’t mattered that the world frowned or that the old scripts threatened to rip apart the pages of their lives. They loved anyway, and for a heartbeat the universe tilted closer to their truth. The Death Queen wears that memory like a rare coin pressed into her palm cool, bright, and heavy with consequence. The TV in the car the portable, stubborn sort of screen that follows her like a dull halo glows with the glow of a talk show. The host’s voice cuts through the engine’s steady growl, a dull gleam of certainty in a room full of clashing opinions. The host is talking as if the world were a simple equation, and the answer is a single, simplistic line: all serial killers must come from a specific race and gender. The Death Queen laughs a sound that rises from a place that’s half amusement, half exile. It’s not laughter at the host, exactly; it’s laughter at the absurd gravity people pour into their biases, a laughter that knows how fragile the world looks when you stare too long at a single truth. The host riffs on numbers and categories, a dangerous shorthand that rings hollow to anyone who has learned the hard arithmetic of survival. She doesn’t believe the talk show’s math, and she laughs at who they truly ignore for macho sake. Her latest victim sits in the passenger seat like a grim accessory. A man who gambled away his daughter’s tuition money, a reckless calculus that calls for a harsher tutor than fate. He wore luck’s worst disguise, a gambler’s grin that never quite believes the consequences will find him. The Death Queen doesn’t revel in fear; she simply makes sure the mechanism of justice whatever it is in this world keeps its word. She checks the seat belt one more time, the metal throat of the buckle clicking in a sound that is almost a lullaby, if lullabies were written in iron and consequence. The belt tightens with her final assurance: the ride is secured, the course is set, and the debts of the night will be collected in a manner that leaves no letter of complaint behind. Cat Island rises on the horizon like a promise etched in gold. The Death Queen’s eyes track the coastline as they approach the island’s jagged silhouette, its headland thrusting into the evening with stubborn pride. The sea’s breath slides through the car’s vents, a cool whisper that carries the salt of legends and the weight of old songs. She thinks of Georgette Farrington not with longing as much as with the quiet, fierce tenderness that life deserves a second go at. She looks at the pictures from the day she proposed, a memory that glows with a pale, sacred light. Georgette’s smile in those photos is almost a map irregular lines that lead to a place where two hearts refused to bend to the noise of the crowd. The Death Queen touches the photo on the dashboard as if it might spring to life with a single breath, a memory that refuses to be corralled by time. The island’s air grows thick with the perfume of blooms and the taste of distant storms. The Death Queen parks somewhere private, where she can listen to the sea and hear the old stories that never quite stop whispering. It’s here that Rau Servitor finds her not a creature of raw force but something that hovers between devil and myth, something that asks quietly, almost kindly, why her eyes are damp. Rau Servitor’s voice carries judgment, Why do you cry? he asks, and the words fall into the space between heartbeat and memory, a demonic teasing echo that makes the wind seem sharper, the world more harsh and cruel. Her answer comes not in words, but in fury, shuddering breath that clears the room of pretense. The Death Queen doesn’t cry for herself alone; she cries for the day when two people chose to love each other and the world demanded they account for that choice with a ledger of condemnations. The tears taste of salt and memory, the way rain remembers the roofs it falls on even after it finds a new day. Rau Servitor’s face laugh call a spiteful reminder of how evil wants life to exist, watching as the ancient demon looms in the background, a shadow that gains laughter from the edges of reality. The demon’s laugh is a dry, rattling sound that shakes the walls of the world, a reminder that some forces feed on the tremor of human longing, some relish the sight of two hearts stubborn enough to beat in the same rhythm against an indifferent cosmos. The Death Queen’s grief is not a surrender but a fuse lit inside her. When Rau Servitor asks again, the question lands and sticks, and she answers with a voice that has learned to measure the truth in breaths rather than in sentences. She cries for the lost years when fear managed to scrawl its own rules across people’s lives, for the cruelty that follows a single misstep, for the constant presence of eyes that always want to know why two women love with such brightness when the world asserts that love should be quieter, smaller, safer. The ancient demon, as if amused by this private storm, dissolves into a sigh of smoke and nothingness, its laughter trailing on the wind like a broken chord in a symphony that refuses to end. When the last echo of laughter dissolves, the Death Queen wipes the tears away with the back of her hand and looks toward the horizon again. The Bahamas’ night has its own kind of mercy: the moon crested over the water, a pale, patient observer, and the stars sparse but stubborn, as if to remind her that even in a universe governed by power and spectacle, there are small, stubborn lights that refuse to be snuffed out. She steps back into the car, the seat belt now a quiet prescription for the night’s risks, the road ahead a long chord of possibility and consequence. Georgette Farrington’s memory sits with her, a sacred talisman and a warning, a map of what love can become when tradition is broken and fate dares to listen. The Death Queen starts the engine again, and the far-off demon’s laughter fades into the sea, leaving behind only the hush of waves and the unyielding, undeniable truth: some stories demand to be told in their full, merciless glow, even as the night keeps its own secrets close.

One month has passed since the last tremor of her shadowing presence, and the Death Queen finally closes in on her next victim a man who keeps three wives from different shores: a Bahamian wife, a Cuban wife, and a British wife. None of the women know of each other’s existence, their lives braided in secret, their whispers never crossing the sea’s divide. The air tastes of salt and danger as she flares into the harbor like a whisper made flesh, her presence threading through the lantern glow and the low murmur of tides. She lures him with ease, a temptation dressed in velvet and shadow, guiding him to a place where the water wears a glassy smile and the horizon curves like a trap. The moment is quiet as a prayer, then violence threads through the surface as the sea obediently swallows him whole, the sharks gliding closer with patient hunger. The world holds its breath the Death Queen’s laughter a distant echo over the chop of waves until the night returns him to the sea’s secret keeping. Rau Servitor does not let this stand. He calls Demonicus and a slew of demons down from the night itself, a chorus of claw and smoke, hungry for pursuit. The air tightens with unseen wings and the stink of brimstone, and the Death Queen feels the net closing in. She releases a silver smoke bomb, a pearled curtain that blooms in the moonlight, and the harbor erupts in a blinding haze. With a swift, practiced motion, she dissolves into the fog, slipping between ships and ropes, leaving behind only the memory of danger and a rumor of what stalks the water when no one is looking. The chase begins anew, the sea’s pulse quickening as both sides square for the next confrontation.

Drama

Harvey and Billy
By Kwame Hanna

Harvey and Billy
By Kwame Hanna

Harvey and Billy sit close in the muted glow of the car dashboard, talking in careful, hopeful whispers about how good it feels to finally be together. They vent in the same breath about the friends and family who cut them off, the distance that steadied itself between them and the world outside. Their words thread through the silence like a fragile string, until the weight of years of silence finally wears them down. Billy’s shoulders tremble and tears gather in his eyes; Harvey reaches across the seat, his hand steady and warm, and pulls him into a gentle embrace. The world outside feels suddenly intimate the rain tapping on the windshield, the distant hum of traffic, their breath fogging the glass as they lean into each other. Billy begins to cry harder, and Harvey eases off the road, slipping the car onto the shoulder. He holds Billy tight, and in that shelter of metal and night, their mouths meet in a kiss that starts tentative and grows hungry with longing. Billy answers with a desperate pull, then, as if a sudden impulse catches him, he parts from Harvey and whispers for them to pull into a secluded area. They stumble from the car into the shadowed undergrowth, the bush and leaves brushing against them as their kiss deepens, their bodies finding each other in the hush of the trees. Out of nowhere, Todd the old workmate Harvey hadn’t seen in years steps into the dim light of the clearing, trying to insert himself into their moment. He talks fast, a casual tone masking something more insistent, attempting to tag along. Harvey grits his teeth and pushes him back, but Todd doesn’t retreat easily; he lashes out with a punch, aimed at Harvey. Billy’s reaction is immediate and fierce he grabs a heavy branch and swings, bringing it down and striking Todd in the head. The sound splits the night, and Todd staggers back, dazed, as Harvey pushes Billy toward the car, his own breath rough with adrenaline. The two men fall into the car once more, the engine’s glow dulling the adrenaline that crackles in the air, hearts still pounding as they close the door and try to steady the tremor in their hands.

The evenings drift by in a heavy stillness, as if the world itself knows the weight of what’s happened and holds its breath. Three months have pressed into their bones, turning ordinary rooms into confessional spaces where fear hums just beneath the surface. Harvey and Billy sit against the edge of the bed, the TV blinking pale blue light on their faces. A news report grows louder, a dead man found in the woods, the headline landing with a cold thud in the room. Billy’s throat tightens, his hands trembling around the sheet, and Harvey feels the old knot of panic coil tight in his chest. When Billy’s breath grows shallow with panic, Harvey moves with a stubborn, almost ritual calm, gathering the few bags they can carry, because sometimes preparation is a tiny shield against the unknown. They drive to the dock, their movements a quiet operation of survival, and buy a ticket to Inagua somewhere far enough to feel possible, far enough to forget what they’ve lost, at least for a little while. Seven months slip by like tidewater, slow and stubborn. They arrive broke, the world narrowing to the sniff of salt air and the pale glow of a sun that never seems to set on their luck. Their apartment exhales the last of its warmth and then sighs it away, and soon they’re living in the bushes by the beach, the sand cool under their feet, the breeze cold with memory. It’s not a life, really, but it’s a place to breathe and not pretend you’re anything more than two people who survived something and are trying not to crumble under the weight of it. Officer Chris notices them on the beach, a routine met with a rigid glare that makes the air feel thinner. He talks of vagrancy like a verdict, as if merely existing in the wrong place at the wrong time could be punished with a future you hadn’t earned. He comes closer, and Billy’s fear blooms again, a bright, unsafe thing in the chest. In that moment, the old laws feel cruel and personal. Harvey’s eyes tell a story Billy can’t bear to hear aloud. It’s a story of protection and desperation braided together, of a line drawn too tightly between safety and ruin. When the officer makes a move that crosses a boundary no one should cross, fear becomes something sharper than a knife and louder than the sea. Harvey acts fast, furious, human and the room seems to tilt as the gun speaks its final, hollow report. The air stings with gunpowder and fear, but then it quiets, heavy with the knowledge of what drives a person to such a moment. Billy, heart hammering, searches the pockets of the fallen man and finds a promise and a burden in folded envelopes money that could lift a world or burn it down if misplaced. Harvey’s breath is loud in the sudden hush, his hands shaking not with bravado but with the gravity of what just happened. They swallow the words that want to spill out and, for a moment, become two figures who move with a careful precision only fear can teach. The next steps are practical and brutal in their honesty. They go grocery shopping, walking the aisles with hurried purpose, as if every choice could be a hinge on which their fate turns. The groceries feel heavy in their arms, a small solace bread, fruit, water, the ordinary rituals that keep hope alive when the world outside refuses to offer it. They hurry back to the Dock, the weight of it all pressing down on their shoulders like a damp cloak. Then, with the sea breathing around them in long, patient sighs, Harvey uses the gun to lift a 60-foot boat from its moorings, a silent decision that marks the end of one chapter and the volatile, uncertain edge of another. The boat’s hull sighs as if waking from a long dream, and the water ripples with a taste of danger and possibility in the air. What threads through it all is an ache for safety some place where the noise of fear quiets, where the body can rest without the next threat arriving like a storm. The desperation is palpable, not glamorous, the choices made not about thrill but about continuing to breathe, to keep another heartbeat beside you, to hope that somewhere beyond the horizon there might be rest. The world they inhabit is unkind, its rules bending toward survival rather than mercy. Yet beneath the roughness, there is a stubborn tenderness the way Billy reaches for Harvey’s shoulder after the gunshot, the way Harvey steadies himself for the long road ahead, the way both of them still reach for a quiet moment of grace even as the sea calls them toward an uncertain future. In this tense, aching chapter, empathy sits with them in the salt air: two people trying to lean on each other when the ground beneath is always moving, always changing, always asking for more than they sometimes think they have to give.

Harvey and Billy had learned to measure their days in the quiet rhythm of the sea, months folding into months, until the horizon itself felt like a tether between them. The boat creaked with every swell, salt spray stinging their skin and turning the air sharp with every breath. Ahead, the distant glint of approaching defence force ships drew closer, their silhouettes jagged against the pale morning. The men on deck moved with practiced, wary calm, hands hovering near the handles of ropes and guns, as if the ocean itself might betray them at any moment. In that charged stillness, Billy found Harvey’s gaze and held it, a silent vow formed between them as surely as any oath spoken aloud. Then Billy pressed a kiss to Harvey’s lips, a fierce promise woven from years of shared silence, fear, and laughter. Separation was never an option, not now, not when the crew and the sea could drag them apart in an instant. If they were to fall, they would fall together. Their lips trembled with the weight of what lay ahead, and for a heartbeat the world narrowed to the warmth of that kiss and the certainty of each other’s presence. The distance between boat and fleet closed with a measured menace. When at last the defences drew close enough, the air filled with the dry, metallic bite of metal meeting resolve. They waited, guns uneasy in their hands, the deck trembling underfoot, the ocean’s vast indifferent vastness pressing in from every direction. Then the volley came, not with a dramatic blaze but with a relentless rhythm—smoke curling, the crack of shots, the stink of cordite, the echo of battles long fought behind them and still ahead. The fight stretched on, an hour carved out of time where every breath felt like a risk. Harvey fought with a stubborn, almost reverent focus, the world narrowing to sight, trigger, and a heartbeat that hammered in his ears. Then a sudden searing sting blossomed across his shoulder, bright and hot and real, the world suddenly a blur of pain and metal and fear. He staggered, a spray of heat and fear blooming through the minutes he had left, while Billy furious and desperate lunged forward in a rush of rage and love that could not be contained. He moved like a storm, and in a single, terrible surge he felled two defence force officers before the price of that fury met him in kind and knocked him to the deck. The moment stretched long after, a watch whispered in scars and smoke. Harvey stood, hands shaking, crying as if the sea itself could hear the sound and not judge it. He raised the battered weapon again, not to inflict cruelty but to resist the hollow weight of what could come if they failed to take him, failed to kill him as well, and separate him from Billy for good. He fired with a grief-made steadiness, each shot a plea to the heavens, a desperate insistence that they could not have his heart, his life, his stand against the night. The boat held its breath with him, and the sea kept its own quiet counsel, indifferent to the names and loves etched into the wooden planks. In the wake of loss and fear, in the tremor of his hands and the tear-streaked line of his cheek, Harvey held onto the memory of Billy the warmth of that kiss, the certainty of their vow until the world around him seemed to tilt and narrow into the ache of what they had chosen: a bond sealed against the world, even as it carried them toward a darkness neither of them could escape. The price of loyalty, of love, of life, pressed down upon the two men and the boat that bore them, and the sea kept its patient, inexorable watch.

Copyright 2019