Aditia listened intently.
"An adult man came to the forest where I lived. I had been found there as a baby, and after they branded me a curse, I was forced to return to the forest once again."
"My father?" Aditia asked.
"He had a gentle face... a lot like yours. He reached out his hand and told me he had come to take me home. I reached for him, but the moment our hands touched, he looked startled. Then he said... that I was human, not one of the souls he could take home."
"So... you really are human?" Aditia had been convinced from the beginning that she wasn't an ordinary human, only someone extraordinary. "Then what happened?"
Alka took a slow breath.
"It happened like this."
Thirty Years Earlier
Mulyana and a young Dirga—both only twenty-one years old at the time—arrived at the
