The village of Ilaro was small—half huts, half myth. Children were raised with silence in their mouths and salt on their skin, taught never to stare too long at stars or play near still water after dusk.


But Sungbo was different.


She stared.

She questioned.

And when her mother died during a storm, she did not cry.


She lit a candle with her tears.


By thirteen, Sungbo had already been called many things.


Cursed.

Marked.

Ash-child.


But none of them felt true.


Only the flame felt honest—when it danced between her fingers, whispered at her heels, curled around her when the village shunned her.


Her grandmother, Mara, was the only one unafraid.


“You were born before the fire had rules,” she said. “That’s why it listens to you.”


“But why won’t anyone else?”


“Because they know what you are,” Mara said, pulling a charm from beneath her tunic. “And they fear what you might become.”


That night, Sungbo dreamed of a woman with skin like obsidian and eyes made of smoke. She sat in the middle of a burning grove, her hands buried in living ash.


“Name yourself,” the woman said.


Sungbo tried to speak.


But in the dream, she had no voice.


She awoke in a fever.

The house had caught flame.

But the fire didn’t burn.

It circled her body, licked her skin, and whispered a name she had never heard before:


“Nyah.”


She didn’t know it yet, but she would carry that name forward.


Not as a title.

As a lineage.


When she stepped outside, barefoot and glowing, the villagers fell to their knees—not in worship… in fear.


She looked to Mara.


And Mara nodded.


“You’re no longer part of this village, child.

You’re part of something older.”