Voodoo

  The Mask That Dreamed

  The first omen was the wind.

  The wind that passed—and left.

  The savannah lay under a sheet of dead heat, the air thick and unmoving, as if the sky itself were holding its breath. Grass stopped whispering. Flies dropped from the air. Even the distant scavenger birds circled once, confused, before fleeing south in a crooked, panicked line.

  Only one man remained still enough to understand what this silence meant.

  Voodoo.

  He knelt in the hard dust at the edge of the village, head bowed, hands resting lightly on his thighs. His bandaged arms trembled faintly—though not from weakness. Something beneath his skin pulsed in slow, deliberate rhythms, roots of power shifting, listening. Beneath the mask, his eyes did not see, for he was blind. But the world could not hide from him. He felt the desert dunes humming with distant hunger. He sensed the sky thinning like stretched skin. And deeper still… a tremor in the Veil, a wrongness he could not yet name.

  A child’s cry snapped the trance.

  “Guardian!” a young voice pleaded. “You must come—now!”

  Voodoo rose with fluid grace, dust spilling from the folds of his scorched linen garments. The charms at his belt rattled softly—small bones, dried herbs, knotted cords. Tokens his people believed protected him. Or perhaps calmed him. Neither was true. He did not need protection, and he could not be softened.

  The child pointed toward the far hills.

  Smoke rose there—thick, black, unnatural.

  Voodoo did not look with his eyes.

  He felt it: a thundering pulse, a machine’s breath with infinite hunger wrapped in metal. A shape he knew—not by memory, but by instinct—etched into the mask fused with his flesh.

  One of them had awakened.

  He began walking. The villagers followed at a distance, too terrified to approach, too desperate to stay behind. They whispered prayers to ancestors and wandering spirits. They whispered the name they had given him—never knowing it was not his name at all.

  This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  “Voodoo… Voodoo… Voodoo…”

  He walked until the earth changed beneath his feet.

  Ash.

  A circle of burned ground stretched before him, the size of a fallen temple. At its center lumbered a hulking creature—three jagged legs, ribs exposed like iron cages, eyes steaming with red vapor. Flesh and metal braided together in terrible symmetry, hydraulic joints twitching with a corrupted heartbeat. A remnant of the Aftershock. A blight wearing the shape of a titan.

  It saw Voodoo.

  It roared—a sound like rusted worlds colliding. The villagers collapsed to their knees. Some fainted. Others clung to one another, sobbing. But Voodoo stood calmly. Almost gently, he raised a hand, and the air bent. Threads of shadow curled around his fingers like loyal serpents. His mask pulsed once, faint light leaking from its seams.

  The creature charged.

  Voodoo did not retreat.

  The mask spoke without words, but in ancient movements carved into his blood. His fingers shaped the air, and the air obeyed. A circle of light erupted beneath him, sigils rippling outward like molten glass.

  The beast lunged—

  —and froze mid-stride, trapped in thickened time.

  Voodoo exhaled, and the wind returned. A storm of dust spiraled upward. Shadows peeled from the ground like spilled ink, twisting around the monster’s limbs and dragging it to one knee.

  The villagers gasped.

  Voodoo touched the mask.

  The world blinked.

  A surge of white fire tore across the horizon, swallowing the creature in a scream of splintering metal and ruptured flesh. The land shook. A crater yawned open.

  Silence.

  When the light faded, only drifting ash remained. Voodoo lowered his hand.

  Grass sprouted through the scorched earth.

  Flowers trembled awake.

  Life returned to the soil as though remembering.

  The villagers watched in terrified awe as insects crawled from the ash and a clean wind breathed across the savannah. They approached slowly—hesitant, reverent, afraid.

  He did not turn to them.

  He did not accept their praise.

  The mask pulsed again—

  —with warning.

  Voodoo felt a gathering of powers—something disturbingly negative. He breathed in.

  Images of beings beyond this world appeared. No—he was there. Watching. Seeing.

  A black column of water spiraled upward. He stood within a cave. Twelve—no, thirteen—figures had gathered. They conversed in a strange language, one even the mask could not translate. Then—

  —a pulse.

  It tore through him as if his body were ripped apart.

  Have they noticed me? he thought.

  He was back.

  No injuries.

  His body whole.

  Far in the darkness, something stirred—something that had witnessed the explosion of power. Something that recognized it. A presence of roots and hunger, a name whispered in nightmares.

  An Exarch stood in the woven shadows of a dead forest. From his hidden abode, Bolo Hobtu felt the shard awaken, and he smiled.

  Voodoo lifted his head, a faint tremor crossing his stance.

  Something approaches, the mask murmured—something born of roots and old lies.

  He turned west, toward the land of twisted vines and sleeping horrors.

  Toward the Slaughter Zone.

  The villagers watched as their guardian walked into the dying sun. None dared follow. They felt the truth in their bones…

  The beginning had ended.