Suns of the Forgotten Gate

The staircase spiraled downward for what felt like forever, each step deepening the quiet. Not just the absence of sound, but something more ancient. A silence that had never been broken. It pressed into Mirella's ears, her chest, the hollows of her mind like a question she had not yet earned the right to answer.

Ayinla walked beside her, his fingers trailing along the walls. Faint glyphs glowed softly where his skin passed, then dimmed again, like blinking eyes. They weren't the Custodian marks Mirella had come to recognize. These were older. Wiser. And somehow still alive.

"The spiral is reacting," she whispered, her hand moving to her collarbone.

Ayinla nodded. "So is the key. These walls remember us, even though we've never been here."

The air began to change—thicker, heavier, expectant. The stair ended suddenly, leaving them on a circular platform suspended in a misty void. No sky. No ground. Just endless blue haze. And silence.

Then, without a sound, a doorway appeared at the center of the platform.

It shimmered like glass and smoke. Its surface shifted constantly, forming faces they almost recognized—older, younger, unfamiliar, but hauntingly close. Mirella stepped toward it, her breath catching. The door swung open before she could touch it.

Inside was a corridor made of light and dust. The walls flickered, not with fire, but with fragments of memory trying to settle into shape. Mirella hesitated at the threshold.

"They're watching us," she murmured.

"They're remembering," Ayinla replied.

They stepped through together. The floor didn't creak or echo. It received them in silence.

With every step, emotions flooded through them. Not their own, but pieces of others. Sadness, hope, loss, longing—echoes left behind by people who no longer existed, or had never been recorded. Mirella clutched her side as the spiral beneath her skin began to throb in rhythm with the corridor's pulse.

She saw flashes.

A river turning red. A boy with ash on his face whispering to the stars. A spiral carved into dirt by people who could not speak, but sang anyway.

Ayinla staggered beside her.

"This place—this is the history that was erased," he said. "We're walking through memory that was never allowed to be real."

The corridor ended abruptly at the edge of a great chamber filled with still, mirror-like water. Floating at the center was a single stone platform, wide and round, glowing faintly with the same symbols as the stairwell.

"It's calling to you," Mirella said.

"No," Ayinla replied. "It's calling to us."

They stepped onto the water, and to their surprise, it held them. Each step rippled out across the surface like soundless song. When they reached the platform, it pulsed once, then began to open—not like a door, but like a breath. Like something long asleep had just exhaled.

Smoke rose from its center and formed into a figure—tall, faceless, and made of shifting mist. No mouth, no eyes, no feet. Just presence.

Its voice entered their minds like a tide.

"You have entered the resting place of the Unnamed," it said. "You carry the spiral and the thread. You seek what should not be found."

"We seek what should not have been forgotten," Mirella said, her voice steady.

"What will you give in return for what was buried?" the being asked.

Ayinla stepped forward. "We offer what we are… and what we are willing to lose."

The being extended one long arm made of starlight and ash. "Then you will dream with us. If you wake, you may take what remains."

Before Mirella could speak, the world shattered.

There was no falling, only unfolding.

Mirella found herself in a desert, alone, wearing strange robes with golden embroidery. Her hands were callused from planting things in sand. Children ran past her, calling her name—though it was not "Mirella." It was Ana. Ana the Sand-Keeper.

She knew this place. Or a part of her did.

In this life, she helped people plant spirals in the ground that grew into memory trees. She sang stories into stars. She carried the dead not by name but by feeling. And she was loved.

Then the sand turned black.

The trees burned.

People forgot how to speak.

A shadow chased her—shaped like smoke and silence. It whispered, "Be still, and you will forget."

She screamed.

And woke up gasping on the stone platform beside Ayinla.

He was already awake, face wet with tears. They looked around. The chamber had changed.

The water was gone.

In its place: names.

Names written in the air, spiraling in dozens of languages—some Mirella knew, some she felt rather than read. They spun gently in the silence, as if waiting to be called again.

The smoke being returned, quieter now.

"You have survived the dreaming."

"Then give us the name," Mirella said. "The gate-opener. The one we came to find."

The figure raised one hand and traced a single glowing shape in the air.

It wasn't a name. It wasn't a word. It was a sound without sound.

A feeling.

A shape of meaning so pure it pressed against the spiral in her chest and opened it like a door.

And Mirella understood.

It was the first sound ever spoken.

And to unlock the lost gate-forger's name, she would have to speak that sound… backward.

She took Ayinla's hand.

"I know what to do."

"Are you sure?"

"No," she said. "But I believe it."

She closed her eyes and didn't speak with her mouth. She spoke with her memory. Not her mind. Not her spiral.

Her soul.

And the chamber lit up in a burst of white light.

The platform cracked open.

From its center, a man rose.

Tall. Dark-skinned. Wrapped in spiral-woven cloth.

His eyes were closed, but tears ran down his cheeks as if he'd been dreaming for centuries.

The names around them quieted, watching.

Mirella stepped forward.

"Ẹbùn-dára," she whispered.

His eyes opened.

And he smiled.

"I was waiting."

Then the chamber fell silent again—not empty, but full.

Not broken, but ready.