GAME OF RETURN

CHAPTER 1: The Legend.

The Atlantic ocean does not give , and it certainly does not forget. It is a graveyard of secrets , but some secrets are too heavy to sink.

In the year 1482, the sky over the mouth of the Congo River turned a bruised , sickly shade of violet . It was not a storm, it was an omen . On the shoreline of what the Portuguese called the " New World " , a man named Kento Okoro stood in heavy iron shackles. He was a prince of the blood , a Nganga who understood the language of the stars , but the men with muskets , he was merely a cargo.

As they dragged him toward the belly of the ship , the San Pedro ,Kento did something that would haunt his lineage for six centuries. He didn't beg . He didn't fight . Instead , he knelt in the wet sand and began to draw with his heel . He traced a jagged , geometric labyrinth into the earth - a Cosmogram. As the guards kicked him , Kento whispered words that sounded like the rattling of dry bones in a jar .

He was starting a ritual he had no intention of finishing; The Game Of Return.

As the San Pedro pulled away from the African coast , the Game began to "feed " . It needed a toll to cross the salt water , and it took that toll from the men who held Kento's chains . The ' misfortune ' was not a sudden storm; it was a slow , methodical harvest of souls .

The ship's doctor recorded the horrors in a logbook that would later be whispered about in the occult of circles . On the third night, a soldier named Da Silva was found dead in his bunk . His blankets were bone - dry , his skin warm , but his lungs were filled with sea water . He had drowned in his sleep , while lying in a dry bed in the middle of a calm sea .

A week later , the night watchman, a man with eyes like a hawk , was found slumped against the mast. When they turned him over , his eyes were filled with sand , not the white sand of the Caribbean, but deep , black African soil that should not have existed a thousand miles from the coast.

Then the disappearances. A guard vanished during his night watch, leaving no traces of struggle- only a perfect spiral carved into the wooden deck where he had been standing , the wood still smoking as if etched by a phantom fire . Perhaps the most terrifying was the sergeant found in the galley . He was sitting upright and smiling, a look of ecstatic peace on his face , but his mouth was packed with cold , burnt ashes .

By the time the San Pedro reached South American coast, the deck was a tomb. Of the hundred men who set sail , only five soldiers and the captain remained. They were shells of men , their luck drained to fuel a journey they were never meant to survive.

Kento Okoro spend his forty years in a humid , dark cell in a Caribbean sugar mill. The guards feared him . They claimed that at night , they could hear him talking to someone in the cell - someone the guards could never see . Kento would laugh into the shadows , a sound like breaking glass , begging and chanting in a Congolese dialect to an unseen visitor. On his last final night , as the breath rattled in his sleep , Kento spoke his last words to a priest who had came to visit him . The old man leaned in close, and Kento whispered the truth of the Game.

" The Game wanted blood to finish the path ," Kento hissed, his milky eyes fixed on the priest.

" It wanted my family . I refused. So it promised to return......For my grandchildren. Every 600 years. "

When the sun rose , Kento was dead . But he had left a signature . The labyrinth on the stone cell floor had burned itself into the rock , glowing with a faint , ghostly heat as if the stone itself had accepted the promise . The Game was not over ; it was merely " Paused ," waiting for a bloodline to wake up.

PRESENT DAY : The Grey Zones.

600 years later , the " legend " had been chewed up by time and spat out as a ghost story told in the urban slums of the Caribbean.

Amara Ximenez-Okoro did not have time for legends. At nineteen, her reality was made of corrugated tin roofs and sour smells of the " Grey Zones " - the hillside slums that looked like they were one heavy rainstorm away from sliding into the sea .

She was an orphan of the " Saint Jude of the Shadows " home - a crumbling building where thirty children shared ten bunk beds . She was the oldest , the " big sister " to kids who had no names other than the ones they gave each other .

" Amara, look ! I found a treasure !"

She turned, wiping sweat from her brow. Leo a six- year- old with a gap - toothed grin , was holding up a nusted soda can cab . She loved him , she cherished everyone of them. But as she reached out to him , she felt a sudden , white- hot sting on her forearm . Under her sleeve, the MARK- thin blackline she had since birth- began to pulse with a bruised obsidian light.

The " Unlucky karma " of 600 years ,the same force that had filled a soldier's eyes with sand and his lungs with water, was suddenly surging through her veins . The 600 year promise was being called in .

Above them , a heavy , rusted iron pipe on the side of the building groaned.

It didn't just break ; it snapped with a sound like a gunshot , the jagged metal edge swinging down directly toward Leo's head .