Chuka grabbed her arm. "Don't move."
The air grew hot. Whispers filled the chamber, words too ancient to decipher, echoing off the walls.
Then, as quickly as it came, the light dimmed and the face dissolved back into the stone. The hum faded into silence again.
Amara clutched her chest. "It—it looked at me."
Chuka knelt, examining the relic. "It responded to you," he said grimly. "Maybe because of your father's bloodline. Maybe because he awakened it through you."
Her expression darkened. "You mean it's marked me."
He didn't answer. He didn't need to.
Outside, thunder rumbled above the Jos Plateau, the kind that rolled for miles across the savanna. The cave trembled faintly, and dust trickled down from the ceiling.
They turned back toward the narrow passageway leading to the surface. As they climbed, Amara couldn't help but feel a faint heat beneath her palm—like something had branded her skin from within.
When they emerged from the tunnel, the night was thick with mist.
The ruins behind them glowed faintly in the dark, as if the earth itself remembered fire.
For a moment, Amara couldn't speak. The stars stretched endlessly above them, and the plateau whispered with wind and the distant cry of birds.
Chuka loaded their equipment into the jeep in silence. The engine growled to life, but the sound seemed almost insignificant against the hum that still echoed faintly in their ears.
Amara sank into the passenger seat, staring back toward the ridge.
"You said the curse destroyed whoever wore the armour," she murmured. "But what if it doesn't need to be worn to take hold?"
Chuka glanced at her. "What do you mean?"
She turned her hand palm-up, revealing faint glowing lines—barely visible, like fireflies under her skin. "I mean… what if it's already chosen someone?"
Chuka slammed the brakes, staring at her in disbelief. "Amara…"
"I felt it," she said. "When the relic flared—it didn't just react. It connected."
He reached for her hand, but she pulled away, trembling.
"Don't," she whispered. "It's still warm."
For a long stretch of silence, only the rain spoke—soft, steady, washing against the windshield.
Then Chuka exhaled and gripped the wheel tighter. "We're leaving Jos before sunrise. We'll take the records, the relic photos, everything. We find someone who can help us interpret this before it consumes you."
Amara nodded, though her eyes were distant.
Outside, lightning split the horizon again, revealing the plateau—dark, wide, and endless.
Behind them, deep within the cavern, the relic pulsed once more.
And this time, the hum carried a voice—a whisper that echoed faintly across the valley, half-song, half-sentence:
> "Blood remembers what the earth forgets."
Neither of them heard it.
But far away, in the heart of Abuja, lights flickered in Chief Roman's old research compound—monitors flashing to life one by one, as if answering a silent call from beneath the soil of Jos.
The relic's pulse faded beneath the earth as Chuka and Amara's jeep disappeared down the winding road. Thunder rolled again, low and endless, echoing across the Jos Plateau like the growl of something stirring from a long sleep.
Miles away, in the quiet outskirts of Abuja, Chief Roman's abandoned research compound sat cloaked in dust and silence. The building had been untouched for months — sealed since his death — its windows dark, its corridors lined with dormant servers and scattered notes left in haste.
Then, at precisely 2:13 a.m., one of the monitors flickered to life.
A single line of code appeared on the black screen:
ACTIVATION SIGNAL: RECEIVED — SOURCE UNKNOWN.
Another light blinked on. Then another. Within seconds, the entire lab was alive — rows of monitors lighting up in cascading rhythm, forming a heartbeat of light through the building.
Cameras rotated on their mounts. The air-conditioning units groaned awake. A faint hum filled the space — the same tone that once vibrated beneath the Nok relic in Jos.
In the main control room, a digital interface bloomed across the central screen — ROMAN ENERGY SYSTEMS — followed by an error message that pulsed like a warning beacon:
BIO-SYNCHRONIZATION PROTOCOL INITIALIZED
TARGET DNA: AMARA ROMAN
The lights flickered violently. The hum deepened.
In a far corner of the lab, sealed beneath a glass cylinder, something stirred — a fragment of terracotta armour that Chief Roman had smuggled out from Jos years ago. Its cracks began to glow faintly, threads of red light weaving through the stone like veins coming alive.
The sensors spiked.
Alarms stuttered once, then went silent — overridden by an unseen command.
A distorted voice came through the speakers, layered and ancient, not entirely human:
> "The bloodline has spoken… and the vessel stirs again."
The fragment pulsed once more, and then — impossibly — the glass case shattered from within.
Fragments of light scattered through the lab, crawling along the metallic floor, snaking their way into the open server ports. The screens glitched, their data replaced by the same circular Nok sigil that Amara and Chuka had uncovered hours earlier in the cave.
Lightning flashed outside the windows, and the compound's lights went out — except for one monitor, glowing crimson in the darkness.
On it, a new message appeared:
RECONNECTION COMPLETE.
THE GODS REMEMBER.
And far away, as Amara's jeep sped into the night, the faint glow beneath her skin flared once more — perfectly in sync with the pulse now radiating from her father's machines.
The curse had found its way home.
---