Beneath the Cursed Sun

CHAPTER ONE THE ACCIDENT The world went silent just before the crash. It wasn’t the kind of silence that comes from peace, no. This one was sharp and suffocating, the kind that hums in your ears like a warning from the gods. Chima remembered the flash of light first, bright, unnatural, splitting through the dark highway like lightning born of rage. Then came the deafening roar of metal against metal, the screech of tires, and finally… nothing. When he opened his eyes again, the world had changed. He was lying on the roadside, his vision swimming in and out of focus. Warm blood trickled down his forehead, tracing its way across his temple and dripping into the dust. But the sky above him, ah, the sky, burned like fire. The sun, too large and too red, hung motionless over him, pulsing faintly like a living heart. Its glow washed the landscape in strange shades of gold and scarlet, as though time itself had stopped breathing. For a moment, Chima thought he was dead. Then he heard it, a voice. Soft, distant, trembling through his bones like the echo of a forgotten song. > “Obinna… you have returned.” The sound wrapped around him like mist. His pulse quickened, confusion clawing at the edges of his mind. Obinna? Who was Obinna? His name was Chima, he was sure of that, yet something inside him stirred at the name, as if another life, buried deep within his blood, had just opened its eyes. He tried to move, but his body refused. The world around him rippled and blurred, shifting like a mirage. Then came the visions, fragments of another time, another place. He saw a battlefield beneath the same burning sun, the ground littered with broken spears and shields. Smoke rose from huts in the distance, and the cries of warriors pierced the air. A river ran black as night, carrying the reflection of a dying sky. Men in bronze masks stood in a circle, chanting words that vibrated in the air, a language he did not understand yet somehow felt he once spoke. At the center of it all was a woman clothed in white. Her eyes were deep and knowing, and her skin glowed faintly beneath the sunlight’s curse. She stretched out her hand toward him through the flames, her voice barely audible above the roar of chaos. > “Find the relic before the sun dies again,” she whispered. And then, darkness swallowed everything. When Chima awoke the second time, the battlefield and the burning sky were gone. He was in a hospital room. The sterile smell of antiseptic filled his lungs, and the slow, rhythmic beeping of a heart monitor pulsed beside his bed. His body ached all over, wrapped in bandages and IV tubes. A nurse bent over him, adjusting his drip. She had a gentle face, dark eyes that held a kind of calmness that didn’t belong in a place like that. Her name tag read Grace, but her voice, her accent, felt oddly familiar, like an echo from somewhere he couldn’t reach. > “You’re lucky to be alive,” she said softly. “That truck crushed everything except you.” Chima blinked, disoriented. His throat was dry as desert sand when he finally spoke. “Wh… what happened?” Grace smiled faintly, almost pityingly. “You tell me. They said you kept calling a name before you passed out.” She tilted her head slightly. “Adaora, right? Is she your wife?” He froze. The name struck him like a cold wind, slicing through the fog in his mind. Adaora. He didn’t know any Adaora at least, not in this life. But the sound of it stirred something deep within him… a grief he couldn’t explain, an ache older than memory. As his heart monitor ticked quietly in the background, Chima turned his face toward the window. The setting sun outside was red, too red , almost identical to the one he had seen in that other place. And for the first time since the crash, a single thought refused to leave his mind: What if the accident hadn’t just taken him near death but had taken him back to something far older than life itself?