Chapter 561

The harmattan wind scraped across Cotonou, carrying dust and the ghosts of whispers. Koffi, a young man hardened by 26 years of survival, felt it bite at his exposed skin, a sensation oddly comforting in its familiarity. He pulled his thin cotton shirt tighter, his eyes tracing the warped lines of the once-familiar buildings.

Everything had altered. Not gradually, not over generations, but in a horrifying rush of something that defied explanation. One moment, the world was as he knew it, gritty and loud; the next, it was this… twisted reflection.

He worked for Ayaba. That's what she'd told him, anyway. The term "worked" was perhaps too formal for the brutal tasks she assigned. Ayaba, who claimed to be an aspect of a greater Orisha, a fragment of a god regaining power.

Koffi hadn't seen her true form. Only the avatar she presented to him, a woman of impossible beauty and unnerving stillness, her skin the color of polished obsidian. Her eyes, however, sometimes betrayed something older, colder, something that made Koffi's stomach clench.

"Koffi," her voice, smooth and resonant, echoed in his head. He didn't hear it with his ears. It was a pressure behind his eyes, a vibration in his bones. "The market. There is a… disruption."

Disruptions were becoming the norm. People disappearing. Buildings changing shape. The sky, once a familiar blue, now often bled into shades of violet and sickly green. He understood what she wanted to occur, the task to be carried out, through more than just what she told him, a new kind of sense or an extrasensory awareness.

He reached the Dantokpa Market, or what remained of it. It had been the vibrant heart of Cotonou, a cacophony of vendors and buyers. Now, the stalls were skewed at odd angles, made of materials Koffi couldn't identify – a strange, porous stone that seemed to breathe.

A handful of people were there, their faces blank, eyes unfocused, moving in odd circles around it all, walking at an unnervingly odd gait. He found that to be disturbing to observe and the lack of any kind of energy about them only compounded that unease.

The "disruption" was at the center of the marketplace. A knot of energy, visible as shimmering distortion in the air, not like the sparkle of glass or other normal light sources, but something more alive, almost malevolent. It pulsed with a slow, sick beat.

Koffi knew his role. He wasn't a fighter, not in the traditional sense. He was a conduit, a tool. Ayaba channeled her power through him, power he barely understood and fiercely feared. He dreaded what he would have to go through but there was nothing to be done, she demanded, he carried out.

He approached the anomaly, the air growing heavy, pressing on his chest. It was like wading through thick, invisible syrup. He could feel his body change as he went along, not enough that he was any more than himself, but altered from himself enough.

"Focus, Koffi," Ayaba's voice throbbed in his skull. "Draw it in. Contain it."

He hated this part. It felt like his soul was being shredded, his insides rearranged. But he obeyed. He had learned the consequences of disobedience were… unpleasant, an understatement for all it was.

He reached out a hand, not physically, but with his will, a sensation he couldn't describe. The shimmering distortion reacted, tendrils of energy lashing out. They wrapped around his arm, his chest, his mind.

The pain was intense, a white-hot agony that erased everything else. He screamed, a sound that was swallowed by the strange energy. He was pulling the distortion into himself, containing the raw, wild power.

His body convulsed. He could feel his bones cracking, his flesh warping. But the anomaly was shrinking, collapsing in on itself, becoming smaller and smaller, getting sucked into him, piece by piece.

He could taste blood in his mouth, coppery and thick. His vision was fading, darkening at the edges. He felt Ayaba's presence, a cold indifference watching his struggle. She cared very much about the task being accomplished but had nothing for him as the vehicle to complete it.

The anomaly was gone. Imprisoned within him. He collapsed to his knees, his body trembling uncontrollably. He felt… full, stretched, violated. But he was alive, another understatement given the extent of what had happened.

"Good," Ayaba said, her voice sounding distant, faint. "There is another… in the old quarter."

Another. There was always another. Koffi knew this was his life now, an unending cycle of pain and servitude, with no possibility for that to ever be changed, and only his own willpower preventing him from simply giving up and dying.

He stumbled to his feet, his body screaming in protest. He felt the contained anomaly shift within him, a cold, malevolent presence. He had no relief. He could go about for his daily needs but these instances would keep him up through their pressure and the fear of them being released somehow.

Days, or perhaps they were weeks, bled into one another. The world continued its terrifying transformation. The sun, when it was visible, had grown a sickly, pale yellow. It burned on a new frequency and he did not know if others noticed as he did.

He went from disruption to disruption, a living prison for forces he couldn't comprehend. He no longer felt human. His reflections, his awareness, it was a horrifying sense he carried and it made the other parts of the horror of his changed world seem negligible.

He saw other "workers", similar to himself, across the altered city. Broken, empty vessels used by the burgeoning god-fragments. They didn't speak, didn't acknowledge one another. He even saw two engaged in some brutal, unorganized brawl to see the other subdued, the work complete.

One evening, which he sensed by the deepening of the violet in the sky, Ayaba's voice echoed stronger than usual. "Koffi. The coast. Something… significant."

He made his way to the shoreline. The ocean, once a restless blue, was now a churning, oily black. The waves crashed against the shore with a force that seemed almost malicious, a purposeful energy he felt, a conscious one.

There, standing on the sand, was a figure unlike anything he had seen before. Taller than any human, its form shifted and flowed like liquid night, solidifying for instants before melting away.

It had no face, only a swirling vortex of darkness where a head should be. Tendrils of shadow snaked out from its body, testing the air, the ground, probing into what might be. This was beyond anything he had handled for Ayaba before.

"Another… claimant," Ayaba's voice held a rare tremor of… something. Annoyance? Competition? He can never assume when she gives an ounce more to a command or utterance than normal.

"What… what do I do?" Koffi asked, his voice a shaky whisper, internal, knowing she would get his intentions through more than the small thought sound he made in his head.

"You will… absorb it," Ayaba's command was clear. But even he, a simple man, not given to seeing far beyond what must be known, could understand something he saw clearly; This was impossible.

This wasn't a rogue energy fragment, a "disruption". This was something ancient, powerful, an equal. And Ayaba intended to use him, Koffi, as a disposable weapon in an unwinnable, inexplicable god-level quarrel.

He could refuse. He knew he could. He could finally just make that choice, even at this moment. What would be his end if so?

But he wouldn't. The habit of obedience, the bone-deep terror Ayaba had instilled, was too strong. Plus, a sliver of sick pride pushed at it, a whisper; it told him that if he could beat this then perhaps she would acknowledge, reward.

He stepped toward the monstrous figure, the ground trembling beneath his feet. He felt the energy of this new being wash over him, a cold so intense it burned. A power was at work that he had no previous understanding of at all.

"Begin, Koffi," Ayaba commanded.

He reached out, bracing himself for the agony. But what happened next was different, was entirely worse.

The figure on the beach didn't attack. It didn't resist. It yielded. A torrent of energy, raw and boundless, flooded into Koffi, overwhelming his meager capacity. It brought no resistance to test, no resistance to overcome.

He felt his body inflate, distend. His skin stretched taut, cracking like ancient parchment. He could see the bones beneath, shifting, breaking, rearranging themselves. Ayaba does nothing and it occurs to him that even she cannot know how this would unfold.

His scream was soundless, internal, a shattering of his very essence. He was no longer Koffi. He was a vessel, stretched to the breaking point, filled with competing god-essences. All that remained were the memories he'd had, the feelings and things he had loved.

He was a battlefield, a tiny microcosm of the war raging across this changed world. Two forces, Ayaba and this… other, locked in a death grip, using him as their arena. Two full essences battling in a container meant for less.

And then, with a sound like reality itself tearing, he burst. Not in an explosion of gore, but in a catastrophic unraveling. The competing energies ripped him apart, not just physically, but at every level of being.

He dispersed across every spectrum. Every part of reality. Not death but simply nonexistence as a person or any type of thing. The awareness of it all lingered with him just long enough to know how very badly it would be, what it would be as eternity started from that moment.

He was aware, then not, then just enough that the full consciousness he'd always had could be terrified of what it meant. All thought gone and only pain as something else he'd never imagined before was what remained.

There was no Koffi, only disparate energies, raw, unchecked, unleashed back into the altered world. Only energy now with no vehicle to contain, control. Ayaba and her new, unexpected rival made sounds, impressions, as they also came apart, but not enough to be anything again.