Kaelo didn't sleep that night.
He lay on the woven mat in Mama Naa's old room, staring at the thatched ceiling. Outside, the drums of the night echoed from the far end of the village slow, heavy, like the earth remembering something it shouldn't. Beneath it all, he heard the whisper again.
It wasn't sound, not really. It was a presence. Something brushing against the inside of his skull, like fingertips trailing across water. The mask sat below, wrapped and hidden, but he could still feel its weight calling to him through the floorboards.
At dawn, Kaelo had made up his mind.
He would bury it. Far from the house. Far from himself.
The village graveyard lay where the earth met the trees. He dug alone, sweat stinging his eyes as he worked through clay and roots. When the hole was deep enough, he dropped the mask in, wrapped in cloth, and covered it with palm fronds and red soil.
"Stay buried," he whispered.
But the air didn't shift. No wind. No relief. Just silence.
That night, the dream took him.
He stood in a field of black earth, ringed by twisted trees. The sky overhead was cracked like old pottery, and fireflies moved in slow, deliberate spirals. At the center stood a figure tall, regal, and utterly still.
He was barefoot. His robe shimmered like the surface of a river at night black, shot through with faint gold veins. His skin was dark as coal, his face perfect and unreadable. But it was his eyes that struck Kaelo still: fathomless black, ancient, and watching him with the cold patience of stone.
"You buried the mask," the figure said. His voice was low, smooth, and human yet it echoed with something older behind it.
Kaelo found himself stepping forward without meaning to. "Who… are you?"
The man smiled faintly. "You already know me."
And Kaelo did. Somehow.
Anoku.
The forgotten god.
The voice behind the whispers.
"I am the part of the world no one wants to look at," Anoku said. "I am judgment. Balance. Reckoning. And now I am in you."
"I didn't choose this," Kaelo said.
"No. But the land did."
Anoku stepped closer. His presence bent the dream around him, and Kaelo felt himself shrink, his skin crawl. Not from fear but from recognition.
"You think you are a man," Anoku said, "but you were born for this. Every fracture in your life, every silence in your bloodline it was preparation."
Kaelo tried to turn away.
Anoku's hand reached out, gently touching Kaelo's forehead.
Suddenly
Flashes. Fire. Screams. A city swallowed by flood. A crown split in two.
His own hands drenched in blood.
His voice, speaking in tongues not his own.
The mask on his face.
He gasped and stumbled back. "No. I'm not your vessel."
"You already are," Anoku said, fading into smoke.
Kaelo woke with a scream.
Sweat soaked his back, his heart pounding like a drum.
Downstairs, he heard the faint creak of the trapdoor. He ran, barefoot, to the altar room.
The mask the one he buried was there again.
Clean. Waiting.
And this time, Kaelo knew:
He was not alone inside his skin.