Suns of the Forgotten Gate

The Ashlight Morning

The sky was wrong again.

This time, it wasn't a second sun or a missing moon.

It was the color of forgetting a pale ash tone that turned the world flat, as if all contrast had been leached from existence. Trees cast no shadows. The wind moved, but carried no sound.

Mirella stood barefoot in the ruins of the chamber, a faint halo of heat rising from her skin.

She had dreamed of fire the night before.

But not destruction.

Language.

Letters made of flame written in a spiral words she didn't know she could read. Words that screamed when remembered.

Behind her, Efua stirred weakly in her bedroll. Ayinla was awake already, sketching one of the glyphs that had followed them from the Archive, now imprinted into the rock like a ghost fossil.

"We didn't escape," Mirella whispered. "We were marked."

The Phoenix Codex

They found it under the bones of a half-collapsed altar, near where the Book of Echoes had once rested.

It wasn't a book.

It was a scroll of smoke, coiled like a living thing.

The moment Mirella touched it, fire bloomed along the edges but it didn't burn. It revealed.

Lines formed across the air twisting paths, branching corridors, staircases that bent into sky.

The scroll wrote itself as they watched, and in its center: a single symbol.

Two wings joined at the spine, aflame.

Efua's eyes widened. "The Phoenix Codex," she said.

"It only shows itself to those who've died once."

Mirella looked at her.

"I didn't die."

Efua corrected her gently.

"You did. Just not in body."

Feather-Tongue

Later that evening, Ayinla sat by the fire, repeating the dream-syllables Mirella had described.

None of them made sense in any known language.

Until Efua pulled a necklace from her satchel a single white feather made of bone.

"Speak them again," she said.

Mirella did.

And the feather vibrated.

Efua nodded slowly. "That's Feather-Tongue. A dead language. Literally. Only spoken by those who crossed death and came back with memory intact."

Ayinla frowned. "Is that what the Hollow Name tried to do?"

Efua looked toward the collapsed chamber.

"No. He never came back. That's what made him dangerous."

The Sky That Isn't There

The next morning, the Phoenix Codex burned again new lines, new curves.

It now showed an impossible route: not under the earth, but through the sky itself.

A spiral of wind, time, and broken stars leading to a place that shouldn't exist.

The Returning Gate.

Visible only from the edge of death.

Mirella touched the Codex and instantly collapsed.

Her body remained.

But her soul… rose.

Ayinla screamed her name.

But she was already elsewhere.

Wings of the Custodians

Mirella opened her eyes above the world.

A plane of sky. No land. No sea. Only horizon and light.

And in the far distance: a gate made entirely of wings not metallic, but feathered, pulsing, white and gold, arranged in a circle.

This was not Heaven. Not Hell.

This was the Veil's high crossing.

Dozens of figures hovered near the gate. Some had no faces. Some bore masks made of clouds. One turned and spoke:

"You should not be here."

Mirella stepped forward.

"Then why did the Codex lead me?"

The masked one whispered:

"Because you are the one meant to return the wings to the world."

And as the wings of the gate unfolded, she saw behind them.

herself.

Burning.

And weeping.

The Wing That Remembers

In the sky beyond sky, Mirella stepped closer to the radiant arc of wings. They pulsed with memory not light. Every feather shimmered with ancestral faces. Laughing. Weeping. Dying.

She reached toward one.

It recoiled.

The masked figure beside her spoke:

"Only the unbroken wing may return. Yours is not yet healed."

She looked at him. "What does that mean?"

"You carry flame, but not flight. Memory, but not weight. The others bound themselves to survival. You… must choose truth or self."

He extended a hand toward her chest, fingers barely brushing the center of her ribcage.

And there a glowing spiral pulsed beneath her skin.

It was the same sigil etched on the Phoenix Codex.

Efua's Song of Calling

Back in the waking world, Ayinla carried Mirella's body from the collapsed altar and laid her near the blackened ash-circle they had used during the Rite.

Efua stood over her, eyes unfocused.

"We can't wake her," Ayinla said. "She's too deep."

Efua opened her mouth and began to sing.

It wasn't a lullaby. It wasn't a hymn.

It was a Custodian summoning in Feather-Tongue.

Every note was a command, shaped not in pitch but in truth: Return. Remember. Release.

And slowly, the air around Mirella's body warmed.

A shadow flitted above them a single feather, made of light, falling toward the earth.

The Codex That Shouldn't Be

As Mirella's breath returned to her chest, the Phoenix Codex flared.

And then shattered.

Not with destruction. With duplication.

Two new scrolls appeared opposite in tone:

One warm, radiant, glowing with amber runes.

One cold, ink-dark, steaming with frost and flickering glyphs.

Efua recoiled. "The Cold Codex. It doesn't belong to us."

Ayinla examined it. The script resembled none they had seen not Nsibidi, not Latin, not even from the Book.

"This… this looks like it was written backward," he said.

Efua backed further away. "That's because it was. It belongs to someone who remembers the wrong way."

A rustle in the forest behind them.

And then: a figure emerged.

The Other-Walker

He looked like Ayinla.

Same height. Same face. Same hands.

But his skin shimmered, like it remembered another world.

His eyes were empty not lifeless, but rewritten. As if someone had overwritten him with a version from another gate.

Mirella gasped, rising to her elbows. "Who?"

Efua whispered: "A Walker from the mirror line."

Ayinla reached for his code-disc.

But the Other-Walker spoke first.

"You sealed the Archive. You denied the Name. You've broken balance."

His voice carried two tones one echoing forward, one reversing with every syllable.

"The gate you saved was only one of many. And the others are watching."

Behind him, the Cold Codex lifted itself from the ground.

The First Echo of War

Without warning, the Cold Codex opened.

And out of it came not light but wind.

Sharp. Shredding. Screaming.

Mirella and Efua were knocked flat.

Ayinla stood firm barely gripping his encoded disc and pressing his palm to the Codex's exposed spiral. He shouted one word in Yoruba a name lost to storms and the Codex snapped shut, flinging the Other-Walker backward into smoke.

Silence returned.

But not peace.

Efua's lip bled. Mirella's ears rang. Ayinla's pulse burned like fire beneath his skin.

The Codex floated back to the earth, closed but not silent.

Etched now across its cover were six words:

"This is not the first war."