Marked by the Shadow King

Chapter One: The Wrong Skin The mark appeared on a Tuesday. Adaeze had woken up that morning the same way she always did to the sound of her landlord's generator coughing to life three floors below and the smell of agbo from the woman next door who swore the bitter herb tea cured everything from malaria to heartbreak. She had stumbled to the bathroom, splashed water on her face, and that was when she saw it. A black mark, thin as ink, curling across the inside of her left wrist like a word written in a language she had never learned. She had scrubbed at it with a cloth. It did not move. "Ada!" Her younger brother Chidi's voice shot through the door. "You've been in there for twenty minutes. Some of us have school!" She pulled her sleeve down, unlocked the door, and said nothing. The market where she worked was a forty-minute bus ride from the flat she shared with Chidi and their aunt, Mama Ngozi, who had taken them in six years ago when their parents stopped coming home from the north. Adaeze was twenty-two. She sold secondhand clothes from a stall she had built from scratch, piece by piece, bale by bale. She was not special. She was not chosen. She was just a girl trying to keep the lights on. She told herself that on the bus. She told herself that while arranging blouses on the rack. She told herself that right up until the moment an old woman she had never seen before stopped dead in the middle of the market aisle, stared at Adaeze's covered wrist, and whispered: "The shadow has found its vessel." Adaeze looked up. The old woman's eyes were completely white. By the time she blinked, the woman was gone. By evening, the mark had grown. Not by much. Just a few millimetres, the lines curling further up toward her inner elbow like roots reaching for water. But it was warmer now. Not painful warm, the way a held hand is warm. Adaeze did not like that at all. Marks on your skin were not supposed to feel like anything. Marks on your skin were not supposed to grow. She sat on the edge of her bed and opened her laptop. She typed in everything she could think of: strange birthmarks, marks that appear overnight, growing tattoos, shadow marks. She got medical forums, conspiracy pages, and one very alarming Reddit thread she closed immediately. Nothing useful. Nothing real. She was still staring at the ceiling two hours later when the power went out not the generator-failing kind of out, but the everything-at-once kind. The streetlights. The neighbours' television. The red standby light on her neighbour's air conditioner that was always, always on.Total darkness, except for her wrist. The mark was glowing. Faint and silver-black, like moonlight caught in a c***k. She could see every line of it now, she realised. It was a symbol. Ancient and deliberate and unmistakably intentional, carved into her skin by something that did not ask permission. "What are you?" she whispered to it. The lights came back on. And standing at her window three floors up, no balcony, no way was a man. Tall, dark-robed, but his face was half in shadow, and his eyes. His eyes caught hers and held them, then Adaeze felt something in her chest go very, very still. This feeling was not fear, though fear came a half-second later. First came something she had no name for. Recognition, maybe. The kind that makes no sense. He looked at her wrist. Then back at her face. "You have something that belongs to my world," he said. His voice came through the glass as though the glass wasn't there. Adaeze grabbed her phone off the bed. "I'm calling the police," she said. Something moved at the corner of his mouth, it looked something like a small but it wasn't quite. "Call them," he said. "I will wait. — End of Chapter One —