Into the Darkness, Chapter 11 - Previous Chapter
Chapter Twelve
The valley learned first.
Before the river carried the rumour downstream, before the birds quieted at dusk, before the woman herself felt the shift—something in the Tugela Valley tilted. Not enough to alarm. Just enough to unsettle. Shadows lengthened unevenly. The wind hesitated where it had never hesitated before.
And somewhere, a man stood with blood singing in his ears.
He had followed her too long that evening. He knew that now, though not in the way that mattered. Desire had made him bold; refusal made him reckless. He blocked her path where the light thinned, spoke as if persistence could soften a boundary, as if her attention were something owed.
“No,” she said.
The word fell cleanly. Final.
When he laughed and reached anyway, her hand answered him faster than thought. The sound of skin against skin split the air. It was sharp. Absolute. The birds startled into flight. For one bright, terrible moment, he saw himself clearly—seen, judged, rejected.
Then she ran.
Dust rose beneath her feet as she fled down the slope toward the lights of the homesteads. She did not look back. She did not need to. He remained behind, one hand pressed to his burning cheek, his mouth tasting of humiliation.
The valley exhaled.
Shame curdled quickly when fed by entitlement. By nightfall, his thoughts had hardened into something colder, something that justified itself. He told himself stories where he was wronged, where refusal was cruelty, where her autonomy was theft.
By the second night, he knew where to go.
The witch doctor lived where the river narrowed and the reeds grew thick, where the land dipped into shadow even at noon. The path there was worn smooth by footsteps that preferred not to be remembered. The man said little when he arrived. He did not need to. His grievance announced itself in the way he stood, in the tightness of his jaw, in the way he could not stop clenching his hands.
The witch doctor listened.
The fire was lit reluctantly, its flame kept low. Smoke clung to the air, bitter and medicinal. The man spoke then—carefully, deliberately. He spoke of desire denied. Of insult. Of a woman who dared to say no. He did not ask for love. He did not even ask for her.
“If I cannot have her,” he said, voice flat with certainty, “then no one will.”
Silence followed.
Some words do not echo. They sink.
The witch doctor did not argue. He did not agree. He simply turned toward the river and dipped a bowl beneath its surface. The water was dark, heavy with memory. He carried it back into the circle he had drawn on the ground, tracing its shape with slow precision.
The night leaned closer.
The ritual did not call with a name. It shaped an intention instead, fed it breath and patience, pressed it into the dark until the dark answered. The fire bent inward. The air thickened. The water in the bowl trembled as if disturbed from below.
Something gathered itself.
It rose not as a proper form, but as a suggestion—small, hunched, a body folded and twisted wrong. Limbs bent at odd angles, joints too close together, as if imitation had failed. Hair clung in coarse, matted clumps, carrying the scent of wet stone and rot. Its head was too large, heavy with thought, and its mouth split wide, teeth crowded and irregular, built for tearing rather than eating. The eyes swallowed light, reflecting nothing, watching without curiosity or mercy. Skin showed through in dark puckers, textured like something long submerged. Fingers were clever and curling, capable despite their size. It crouched naturally, low to the ground, almost child-sized, almost harmless. Its mouth curved into a grin that was less expression than function. It did not look at the man. It did not need to.
It listened.
The witch doctor spoke again, lower now, careful. He described a woman. A life. A boundary violated. He described men who might come after, voices that might replace his own. He did not command violence. He did not need to. Fear would suffice.
The thing tilted its head, as if tasting the valley through sound alone.
Then it bent and lifted a smooth stone from the bowl. It placed it in its mouth and swallowed.
The space where it stood folded inward. Light slipped away. Where the thing had been, there was now only the absence of something that should have remained.
The man felt a sharp thrill coil beneath his ribs. Satisfaction, he told himself. Justice.
The witch doctor said nothing. He did not watch the man leave.
A dark, twisting portal tore open a few feet above the alleyway, its edges writhing like smoke caught in a storm. Damien stepped through, silent and deliberate, shadows clinging to him as if reluctant to release their hold. Tendrils of black stretched from his back, flowing forward to coil and curl into rough, trembling steps, reaching the ground before evaporating into his skin with a whisper of dark silk. He moved into the night with calm precision, the city’s chaos washing around him: sirens screaming through the streets, horns stabbing impatiently at the air, neon flickering over damp asphalt. Each footfall was measured, each movement claiming the dark as its own. He paused at a poster plastered to a brick wall: “Tugela Valley Carnival—Arriving Soon…” The paper shivered in the wind, but he did not notice.
Then a scream tore across the alley like a blade. Damien pivoted, shadow coiling behind him, tracing the scream’s path before he moved. A man had pinned a woman, his hands firm and unyielding, her protests swallowed by fear. Damien’s approach was quiet but absolute. One hand shot forward, gripping the man by the scruff of his collar and dragging him backward with effortless force, hurling him down the alley like a ragdoll. “It’s okay, ma’am. You’re safe now,” he murmured. The woman collapsed into him, trembling, face buried against his chest. The man struggled to rise, rage flashing in his eyes, and charged. Without hesitation, a tendril leapt from Damien’s back, wrapping in the air like liquid shadow before snapping across the man’s face. He fell again, stunned, his fury unspent but powerless. The woman did not see any of it; all she knew was the man and the calm that held her.
Damien stepped out of the alley slowly, arm draped protectively over the woman’s shoulders. His presence was calm, deliberate, a shadow among the throng of the night. He guided her toward the nearest police officers, explaining what had happened in clipped, controlled sentences. One officer reached for a radio, calling for a medic, while two others ran down the alley, disappearing into its darkness to find the man and place him under arrest. The city’s clamour rose and fell around them, but Damien said nothing more; he simply ensured she was safe before turning away, his figure slipping into the night like ink into water.
Elsewhere, in the Tugela Valley, the woman slid beneath the thin blanket beside her husband, curling against him, warmth pressing into the chill of the open room. The door had been left ajar, its hinges whispering, but it was not the wind that moved across the threshold. Something small and wrong crept silently, brushing along the edges of the bed, smelling of damp earth and rot. He felt it first as weight, a slow, deliberate pressure on his chest, small but unrelenting, bending him against the mattress. Then, in his dreams, shapes began to twist—his wife’s face blurred grotesquely, her skin pulling taut, mouth stretched too wide, eyes too dark—and every touch from her left him shuddering with pain, as if teeth or claws had carved into him where none should be.
The thing hovered there, crouched just beyond the covers, limbs bent at impossible angles, coarse hair brushing against his arm and shoulder. He caught glimpses out of the corner of his eye: a puckered, dark-skinned face, a grin too wide, fingers curling and uncurling in impossible precision. When he tried to kiss her, the sensation of teeth scraping his skin flared, deep scratches blooming across his chest and arms, burning and slick. Every embrace, every attempt at comfort, twisted into agony, and he recoiled instinctively, mind spinning, dreams rotting around the weight and presence of that thing.
He woke suddenly, lungs seizing, sweat plastering his hair to his forehead. The room was still, the night heavy and silent, the only sound his ragged breathing. His wife lay beside him, chest rising and falling softly in sleep, untouched and peaceful. Shaking, he reached for the bedside lamp and flicked it on.
The light spilled across him—and froze him. His arms and chest were lined with deep, jagged scratches, raw and angry, bleeding faintly where skin had split. They mirrored perfectly the agony he had endured in his nightmare, carved across him as if the thing in the shadows had followed him into the waking world.
Fear uncoiled inside him like a living thing. Without a word, he bolted from the bed, stumbling toward the door, chest pounding in terror. Behind him, the corner of the room seemed darker than it should be. For a fraction of a heartbeat, he thought he saw it: a grin too wide, teeth gleaming briefly in the lamplight, a shadowed face crouched impossibly low and then gone the instant his eyes fully focused. It did not advance. It did not need to. It only waited, patient, deliberate, obeying the command that had summoned it.
He fled into the hallway, the door slamming shut behind him, scratches burning with every heartbeat, mind reeling. And in the lingering gloom of the bedroom, the faintest curl of hair, the slightest curve of lips in shadow, remained—folded wrong, unseen, and watching.
Damien slowed as a man burst from a nearby house, barefoot and wild-eyed, fumbling with a shirt that refused to settle on his shoulders. Moonlight caught the marks on his skin—long, livid scratches raked across his arms and collarbone—as he staggered into the street like something half-chased, half-driven mad. Damien felt it then: not sight, not sound, but pressure, like a hand brushing the wrong side of the world. His gaze lifted to an upstairs window just in time to see a faint silhouette clinging to the frame, hunched and watching, its outline too crooked to belong to any proper human shape. The moment his eyes fixed on it, it slipped away, swallowed by shadow.
He hesitated only a breath—door or man, cause or consequence—then chose motion. Damien moved soundlessly after him, melting into the night as the man fled down twisting streets until the harsh white glow of a medical facility swallowed him whole. Inside, Damien folded himself into the shadows again, unseen, unheard, a rumour among corners. He listened as the man spoke from behind a thin curtain, voice shaking as he described the nightmare, the weight on his chest, the waking horror of scratches blooming across his skin like accusations. The nurse murmured reassurance she did not believe.
Then someone else did.
An old woman sat rigid in a chair nearby, wrapped in layers of dark cloth, eyes sharp as cut glass. She turned her head slowly—precisely—to where Damien stood hidden. Surprise flickered through him; no one ever looked there. She beckoned with two fingers. When he stepped forward, she caught his hand, her grip firm but not unkind, and began to murmur in a voice worn smooth by years:
"A thing that walks when doors are left ajar,
Small as a child, old as the dark.
It drinks fear, it scratches love,
And leaves the bed before the lark."
Her thumb pressed into his palm, grounding him. “It has been sent,” she said softly, not looking at him now, but toward the ward, toward the valley beyond. “And it does not stop until it is answered.”
The old woman’s grip tightened, not painfully, but with intent. Damien felt it then—recognition passing between them like a current through bone. Her cloudy eyes sharpened, fixing on him with something close to relief. Slowly, deliberately, she pulled him down until his ear was level with her mouth, her breath warm and faintly scented with herbs and smoke.
“You feel it because you were sent,” she whispered. “Not by a man. Not by anger. By balance.”
The ward seemed to dim around them, the hum of machines retreating, as if the world itself had leaned back to listen. Her voice dropped further, threading itself into his ear like a secret meant to stain rather than inform.
“Tokoloshe.”
The word did not echo. It settled. Damien felt it sink into the room, into the man behind the curtain, into the valley beyond the hospital walls. A name shaped by warning, not introduction. The shadows at the corners of the ceiling stirred, almost offended.
She released him then, leaning back as though she had said all that could safely be said. “It is small,” she murmured, eyes half-lidded now. “But it is old. It hides where love rests. It fears salt, hates being named, and follows commands better than conscience. Someone told it what to do.”
Damien straightened slowly. The scratches on the man’s skin burned brighter in his mind now, no longer random cruelty but method. Deterrence. Isolation. A thing tasked not with killing, but with making closeness unbearable.
Behind the curtain, the man sobbed quietly as the nurse cleaned his wounds.
The old woman did not look at Damien again. “You are not here by accident,” she said. “When such things walk, something else always follows. Even shadows have their hunters.”
Damien did not yet understand what the thing was—only what it did. Names alone were not knowledge. So he returned to the house, slipping back into the place where it had first pressed itself into the night. He folded into his own shadows and waited, a stillness within stillness, watching the woman as she moved through rooms now made strange by absence. She was shaken by her husband’s flight, wounded by his silence, and by morning she had decided she could not remain there alone. Confusion has its limits. Fear, less so.
She went to her family.
Her father opened the door before she could knock twice, pulling her into a hug that was solid and warm and real. Damien felt the air resist nothing. No pressure gathered. No corners darkened. That night, though, the old man dreamed uneasily—of weight on his chest, of something crouched near the bed, of a presence that did not touch but judged. He woke unsettled, heart racing, then scoffed at himself in the pale light of morning. Just a bad dream, he told his wife. Nothing more.
The next day her brother arrived.
He greeted her with easy affection, arms around her shoulders, laughter unforced. They sat together on the sofa as evening thickened, the house filled with voices and cups of tea and the small comforts of family ritual. Damien watched from the seam where wall met shadow, feeling the shift before anyone else did—the air tightening, the light seeming to hesitate before reaching certain corners of the room.
It was late when it happened.
The brother gasped sharply, the sound tearing free of him without warning. Conversation collapsed into silence as he doubled forward, hands clawing at his legs. He stood abruptly, panic flaring across his face, and yanked up the fabric of his jeans. Beneath, his skin was split with deep, livid scratches, raked high along his thighs as though something small had climbed him in the dark and marked its path.
The room erupted—questions, shouting, fear—but Damien saw only the pattern completing itself. The warning had passed. The line had been crossed. And somewhere just beyond the reach of the light, something small and patient adjusted its posture, obedient and exact, preparing to teach the same lesson again.
That night, sleep soured for both father and son. Their dreams grew dense and airless, crowded with the same sensation of being measured by something just out of sight. Damien remained where he was, folded into the architecture of shadow, patient as a held breath. When the brother began to thrash, muttering through clenched teeth, Damien reached into his coat and withdrew a small glass vial. Inside, the salt glittered dully, mundane and ancient all at once. He let it spill into his palm and cast it forward in a clean, practiced arc, the grains catching the light as they struck the brother’s legs and pooled against his skin.
The reaction was immediate. A sharp clicking sound snapped through the room, fast and furious, like stones struck together in anger. The darkness in the corner convulsed, shedding its disguise as something hunched and wrong tore itself free of the wall. It was small, wiry, its limbs bent at angles that suggested contempt for bone, its skin slick and dark as wet earth. Matted hair clung to its body, and its mouth stretched wide as it shook violently, trying to rid itself of the salt burning into it like accusation. With a sudden, practiced motion, it produced a small stone from nowhere at all, jammed it between its teeth, and swallowed. The air buckled. The thing vanished as if it had never been, leaving only the echo of its frustration hanging in the room.
Silence rushed back in, heavy and bewildered. Damien did not move for a long moment. Now he knew its shape. Now he understood its function. A guardian of isolation, a thing sent to enforce possession by erasing proximity. But knowledge was not comprehension, and comprehension was what he needed next. As the house slowly settled and frightened whispers replaced screams, Damien withdrew into the night, already turning his thoughts toward older wisdom. This was no longer a matter for observation alone. If he was to stop what had been set in motion, he would need to speak with someone who knew these things not as stories, but as neighbours of the unseen.
He would need a Sangoma.
Damien left the house before dawn could thin the dark and took to the streets of Tugela Valley, moving with the unhurried certainty of someone following a pull he could not yet name. He passed night workers and early risers alike, murmuring a single word as he went—Sangoma. Most recoiled as if the sound itself carried weight, shaking their heads and quickening their steps. Some would not meet his eyes at all. A few, braver or more resigned, lifted a hand and pointed silently down the road, offering direction without explanation. Damien followed none of them for long. The word was not landing yet. The valley was still deciding whether to answer him.
It was the milkman who finally did. His cart creaked along the street, bottles clinking softly like restrained bells, the horse moving with the tired patience of routine. Damien stopped beside him. “Excuse me,” he said quietly, “could you tell me where to find a healer. A Sangoma.” The man paused mid-motion, a crate of milk balanced in his arms. He studied Damien for a long moment, eyes narrowing not in suspicion, but recognition. Without a word, he set the crate down on a doorstep, straightened, and gave directions slowly, carefully, as though each turn mattered. His voice never rose, and when he finished, he did not linger. He simply nodded once and resumed his rounds.
The path took Damien to the very end of the valley, where the road thinned into a narrow ribbon of dirt and the air grew quiet enough to hear insects breathing. There, alone among leaning trees and stubborn grass, stood a hut crouched low against the earth. Charms fluttered from its walls, feathers and beads whispering to one another in the breeze. Animal bones and sun-bleached skulls hung from the eaves, turning gently, clicking softly like teeth remembering old songs. Damien stopped at the edge of the clearing.
“Hello,” Damien called, his voice measured, respectful. The word drifted into the trees and settled there. He waited without shifting his weight, without glancing away. Patience, here, was not politeness—it was currency.
After a time that refused to be counted, a man emerged from the hut. He wore red cloth bound close to his body, leopard hide thrown across one shoulder, goat hide brushing his calves as he moved. Beads circled his neck and wrists, clicking softly with each step, each sound deliberate. His eyes fixed on Damien with an intensity that did not feel like scrutiny so much as recognition.
“May I cross your threshold?” Damien asked, inclining his head.
The healer did not answer at once. He turned slightly aside, muttering under his breath, his words low and layered, as though spoken to others standing just out of sight. The charms around them stirred though there was no wind. At last, he lifted one hand and made a slow, beckoning gesture. “My spirit guides say you come… already walking with shadows,” he said, his voice roughened by age and smoke. “Step carefully.”
Damien drew in a breath and crossed into the clearing, mindful of every ward, every hanging bone and bound feather. He stopped where indicated, the ground beneath his boots worn smooth by years of ritual pacing. Up close, the healer smelled of earth, ash, and something bitter and alive.
“I require assistance,” Damien said quietly. “I know what a Tokoloshe is—I have seen it with my own eyes. I know its shape, its habits, the way it obeys instruction. But what I do not know is how it came to be set upon this woman, nor how to stop it from causing further harm.”
The healer studied him for a long moment, then exhaled through his nose, almost a laugh. “You think the danger is the creature,” he said. “That is the mistake of outsiders. The Tokoloshe is not born evil. It is sent. It is bent by jealousy, by wounded pride, by the smallness of men who cannot accept refusal.” He turned and reached for a bowl near the hut’s entrance, running his fingers through its contents—bones, stones, ash, salt. “Someone fed it purpose. Someone taught it where love sleeps.”
His gaze returned to Damien, sharp and unwavering. “To stop it, you do not hunt it like an animal. You unravel the command. You confront the hand that summoned it—or you convince the spirits the task is complete.” He paused, then added, softer, “But be warned. The Tokoloshe does not like being released. And neither do the men who call it.”
The beads at his wrist stilled. “If you wish to proceed,” he said, “you will have to listen—not just to me, but to the valley. It remembers everything.”
The healer’s mouth curved, not quite a smile, not quite a warning. “You see well,” he said, voice low. “Too well for someone who walks between places.” He lifted his wrist slightly, letting the beads shift and settle. “Red calls the ancestors who cleanse and who cut away rot. Leopard is not status—it is reminder. Power must be carried carefully, or it will turn its teeth on the bearer. Goat is protection, yes, but also sacrifice. Every working takes something.”
He stepped closer, close enough that Damien could feel the warmth of him, the hum of lives remembered. “Lineage is not strength,” the healer went on. “Listening is. These beads mean I survived what others did not. They mean I answer when the dead speak.” His gaze sharpened. “And they are speaking loudly about you.”
The charms rattled once, then stilled. “You may cleanse,” he said, “but cleansing alone will not end this. The Tokoloshe was fed a wound, not a spell. Someone who could not bear refusal shaped it with jealousy and gave it a rule: no one but me. You cannot simply erase that rule. You must break the pride that wrote it.”
He turned, scooping ash and salt together, grinding them with a stone. “I can show you how it was sent. I can trace the command back to the mouth that spoke it. But hear this plainly: when you confront the summoner, you confront a man who believes he was wronged by being denied. Such men do not release their monsters easily.”
The healer met Damien’s eyes again. “If you deal with him personally, the spirits will watch how you do it. Justice that becomes vengeance invites new shadows. Choose your hands carefully.” He pressed the ash-salt mixture into Damien’s palm. “This will not harm the creature. It will make it listen.”
Damien considered the healer’s warning in silence, letting it settle before answering. “I do not deal in vengeance,” he said slowly. “It has never been my nature. I walk in shadows, yes—but not to indulge them. I restore order where it has been broken. I help those who ask for closure. I intervene where I am needed, even when those above me would prefer I did not.” His voice remained calm, almost gentle. “If I go to the police and speak of a Tokoloshe, they will hear only superstition. So my aim is narrower. I will either frighten this man so thoroughly that he never dares summon such a thing again… or I will send him under, where judgement is not softened by lies, and punishment cannot be escaped.”
The air in the clearing shifted. The charms hanging from the trees went still, as if listening had ended and decision had begun.
The Sangoma stared at Damien, something profound unfolding behind his eyes. Recognition bloomed there—not surprise, but certainty, the kind that arrives when a long-pondered question finally answers itself. His posture changed, shoulders easing, spine straightening, reverence replacing scrutiny.
“So,” he said quietly, “the one who walks when balance fails stands before me.” His hand tightened briefly around his beads, not in defense, but in respect. “You are not driven by anger, nor sent by men. You arrive when the scales have tipped too far to right themselves.”
He inclined his head, just enough to acknowledge what he now understood. “Then know this: the man who summoned the Tokoloshe believes refusal wounded him. He will cling to that belief even when fear strips him bare. If you frighten him, the spirits will watch how you do it. If you send him under, they will weigh the manner of it.” His gaze sharpened once more. “Either way, the valley will remember.”
Damien inclined his head slightly. “Your warning is heard,” he said. “Now show me the man who demanded solitude as if it were owed to him. The one who would wound others to protect his own desire.”
The Sangoma did not answer with words. He knelt, drawing a circle in ash and crushed herb, murmuring as he worked, his voice slipping into a cadence older than grammar. When he rose, he seized Damien’s forearm with sudden strength. The world lurched.
Images flooded Damien’s mind—sharp, intrusive. A face twisted with entitlement. Hands that grabbed rather than asked. An alley slick with rain and fear. Recognition struck like a bell: the man who had tried to force himself on a woman in the dark, the one Damien had handed over to the night while police sirens hunted shadows too late. The vision tightened, sharpened, then shifted again.
Another image pressed in. The same man, smaller now, half-hidden in a crowd, shoulders hunched, eyes darting. He clung to anonymity the way drowning men cling to wreckage.
Damien steadied himself. “Can you give me an approximate location?” he asked.
The answer came without speech—just enough context to orient him, a sense of place nested inside movement. Then the Sangoma released his grip. The clearing exhaled.
“I will go and bless the woman’s home,” the old healer said, already turning away. “You do what it is you do.” He lifted one hand and waved it, dismissive not of Damien, but of the path now set.
Damien stepped toward the hut’s threshold, then stopped. He turned back and bowed low, forehead inclined toward the earth—a gesture of respect given rarely and without haste. The Sangoma did not look back, but the charms stirred softly, as if acknowledging the exchange.
Then Damien left, slipping once more into the valley’s arteries of shadow, carrying a face, a direction, and the quiet certainty that the man who had summoned a monster had never expected to be found by one who walked willingly in the dark.
Damien let instinct guide him, loosening his grip on intention until the valley itself began to steer his feet. Streets curved without decision, turns arrived without thought, and before he realised where he was, he stood at the mouth of the alley again. The carnival poster hung there still—Tugela Valley Carnival, arriving soon—now torn cleanly in half, its promise split and rotting on the brick. He glanced up and recognised the officers he had spoken to days earlier, posted near the entrance of a nightclub, their attention fixed on the restless churn of the crowd.
He kept his distance and said nothing. People passed him easily, some lifting hands in greeting, others offering compliments he neither acknowledged nor absorbed. He was elsewhere, listening. A police radio crackled nearby—static, then a voice cutting through it. “He’s been found and detained. We have him in the holding cells.” Damien moved at once, stride lengthening, purpose sharpening. Forty minutes later, he stood before Tugela Valley Police Station, the building humming with fluorescent fatigue.
He slipped back into shadow and entered unseen, the corridors opening for him as if accustomed to his passing. The holding cells lay ahead. Inside, the man he sought sat among ten others, posturing, loud with borrowed confidence. “I’ve got women lining up for me,” he bragged, grinning at someone beside him. “I can have them anytime I want. They can’t say no to me. Ever.”
Silence followed—thick, listening. Then a voice rose. “Boys,” a man said, standing slowly, “sounds like we’ve got a big fish here.” Laughter flickered, then died. A tall, broad-shouldered native of Tugela Valley pushed forward, eyes locked on the braggart. “It was you,” he said, calm but deadly. “You’re the one who tried to force yourself on my niece.” The man shook his head violently, words tumbling over each other in denial, but they fell on ears already closed.
The tall man seized him by the throat and slammed him into the wall. “Boys,” he said again, louder now, “get him.”
What followed was swift and chaotic—a surge of bodies, fists, boots, anger long contained finding a single outlet. Damien watched without expression as order collapsed inward on itself. When the officers finally rushed in, shouting, pulling men apart, the damage had already been done. The boasting voice was gone, replaced by a broken stillness on the floor.
Damien remained where he was, folded into shadow, and then turned away. There was nothing for him to do here. What had unfolded was not his hand to stay. It was consequence meeting cause, the natural order asserting itself without ceremony. He did not interfere with such moments. He simply left.
He found the Sangoma waiting outside the woman’s house as dawn thinned the night. The woman stood at the threshold with a small bag in her hand, ready to go, her face tight with confusion and hurt she had not yet named. The old healer inclined his head to Damien in quiet acknowledgement, then stepped forward, lifting a hand gently to stop her.
He spoke softly, carefully, explaining that she had been cursed, that fear had been sent to live where love should rest. He told her that was why her husband had fled, why the house had turned against itself. He said he had come to cleanse her spirit and her home, to close what had been opened without her consent. The woman listened, pale but steady, and did not argue. Some truths arrive already heavy with recognition.
Her eyes shifted then, catching on Damien where he lingered at the edge of light. The Sangoma followed her gaze. “He helped uncover what was done,” he said simply.
The woman looked at Damien, understanding flickering into something like relief. She mouthed a silent thank you. Damien inclined his head once in polite acknowledgement, no more, no less. Gratitude was not something he collected.
The Sangoma turned back toward the house, already murmuring to the spirits that waited. Damien stepped away, dissolving once more into the valley’s long shadows, leaving behind a home that would soon remember how to breathe again.
Chapter Twelve
The valley learned first.
Before the river carried the rumour downstream, before the birds quieted at dusk, before the woman herself felt the shift—something in the Tugela Valley tilted. Not enough to alarm. Just enough to unsettle. Shadows lengthened unevenly. The wind hesitated where it had never hesitated before.
And somewhere, a man stood with blood singing in his ears.
He had followed her too long that evening. He knew that now, though not in the way that mattered. Desire had made him bold; refusal made him reckless. He blocked her path where the light thinned, spoke as if persistence could soften a boundary, as if her attention were something owed.
“No,” she said.
The word fell cleanly. Final.
When he laughed and reached anyway, her hand answered him faster than thought. The sound of skin against skin split the air. It was sharp. Absolute. The birds startled into flight. For one bright, terrible moment, he saw himself clearly—seen, judged, rejected.
Then she ran.
Dust rose beneath her feet as she fled down the slope toward the lights of the homesteads. She did not look back. She did not need to. He remained behind, one hand pressed to his burning cheek, his mouth tasting of humiliation.
The valley exhaled.
Shame curdled quickly when fed by entitlement. By nightfall, his thoughts had hardened into something colder, something that justified itself. He told himself stories where he was wronged, where refusal was cruelty, where her autonomy was theft.
By the second night, he knew where to go.
The witch doctor lived where the river narrowed and the reeds grew thick, where the land dipped into shadow even at noon. The path there was worn smooth by footsteps that preferred not to be remembered. The man said little when he arrived. He did not need to. His grievance announced itself in the way he stood, in the tightness of his jaw, in the way he could not stop clenching his hands.
The witch doctor listened.
The fire was lit reluctantly, its flame kept low. Smoke clung to the air, bitter and medicinal. The man spoke then—carefully, deliberately. He spoke of desire denied. Of insult. Of a woman who dared to say no. He did not ask for love. He did not even ask for her.
“If I cannot have her,” he said, voice flat with certainty, “then no one will.”
Silence followed.
Some words do not echo. They sink.
The witch doctor did not argue. He did not agree. He simply turned toward the river and dipped a bowl beneath its surface. The water was dark, heavy with memory. He carried it back into the circle he had drawn on the ground, tracing its shape with slow precision.
The night leaned closer.
The ritual did not call with a name. It shaped an intention instead, fed it breath and patience, pressed it into the dark until the dark answered. The fire bent inward. The air thickened. The water in the bowl trembled as if disturbed from below.
Something gathered itself.
It rose not as a proper form, but as a suggestion—small, hunched, a body folded and twisted wrong. Limbs bent at odd angles, joints too close together, as if imitation had failed. Hair clung in coarse, matted clumps, carrying the scent of wet stone and rot. Its head was too large, heavy with thought, and its mouth split wide, teeth crowded and irregular, built for tearing rather than eating. The eyes swallowed light, reflecting nothing, watching without curiosity or mercy. Skin showed through in dark puckers, textured like something long submerged. Fingers were clever and curling, capable despite their size. It crouched naturally, low to the ground, almost child-sized, almost harmless. Its mouth curved into a grin that was less expression than function. It did not look at the man. It did not need to.
It listened.
The witch doctor spoke again, lower now, careful. He described a woman. A life. A boundary violated. He described men who might come after, voices that might replace his own. He did not command violence. He did not need to. Fear would suffice.
The thing tilted its head, as if tasting the valley through sound alone.
Then it bent and lifted a smooth stone from the bowl. It placed it in its mouth and swallowed.
The space where it stood folded inward. Light slipped away. Where the thing had been, there was now only the absence of something that should have remained.
The man felt a sharp thrill coil beneath his ribs. Satisfaction, he told himself. Justice.
The witch doctor said nothing. He did not watch the man leave.
A dark, twisting portal tore open a few feet above the alleyway, its edges writhing like smoke caught in a storm. Damien stepped through, silent and deliberate, shadows clinging to him as if reluctant to release their hold. Tendrils of black stretched from his back, flowing forward to coil and curl into rough, trembling steps, reaching the ground before evaporating into his skin with a whisper of dark silk. He moved into the night with calm precision, the city’s chaos washing around him: sirens screaming through the streets, horns stabbing impatiently at the air, neon flickering over damp asphalt. Each footfall was measured, each movement claiming the dark as its own. He paused at a poster plastered to a brick wall: “Tugela Valley Carnival—Arriving Soon…” The paper shivered in the wind, but he did not notice.
Then a scream tore across the alley like a blade. Damien pivoted, shadow coiling behind him, tracing the scream’s path before he moved. A man had pinned a woman, his hands firm and unyielding, her protests swallowed by fear. Damien’s approach was quiet but absolute. One hand shot forward, gripping the man by the scruff of his collar and dragging him backward with effortless force, hurling him down the alley like a ragdoll. “It’s okay, ma’am. You’re safe now,” he murmured. The woman collapsed into him, trembling, face buried against his chest. The man struggled to rise, rage flashing in his eyes, and charged. Without hesitation, a tendril leapt from Damien’s back, wrapping in the air like liquid shadow before snapping across the man’s face. He fell again, stunned, his fury unspent but powerless. The woman did not see any of it; all she knew was the man and the calm that held her.
Damien stepped out of the alley slowly, arm draped protectively over the woman’s shoulders. His presence was calm, deliberate, a shadow among the throng of the night. He guided her toward the nearest police officers, explaining what had happened in clipped, controlled sentences. One officer reached for a radio, calling for a medic, while two others ran down the alley, disappearing into its darkness to find the man and place him under arrest. The city’s clamour rose and fell around them, but Damien said nothing more; he simply ensured she was safe before turning away, his figure slipping into the night like ink into water.
Elsewhere, in the Tugela Valley, the woman slid beneath the thin blanket beside her husband, curling against him, warmth pressing into the chill of the open room. The door had been left ajar, its hinges whispering, but it was not the wind that moved across the threshold. Something small and wrong crept silently, brushing along the edges of the bed, smelling of damp earth and rot. He felt it first as weight, a slow, deliberate pressure on his chest, small but unrelenting, bending him against the mattress. Then, in his dreams, shapes began to twist—his wife’s face blurred grotesquely, her skin pulling taut, mouth stretched too wide, eyes too dark—and every touch from her left him shuddering with pain, as if teeth or claws had carved into him where none should be.
The thing hovered there, crouched just beyond the covers, limbs bent at impossible angles, coarse hair brushing against his arm and shoulder. He caught glimpses out of the corner of his eye: a puckered, dark-skinned face, a grin too wide, fingers curling and uncurling in impossible precision. When he tried to kiss her, the sensation of teeth scraping his skin flared, deep scratches blooming across his chest and arms, burning and slick. Every embrace, every attempt at comfort, twisted into agony, and he recoiled instinctively, mind spinning, dreams rotting around the weight and presence of that thing.
He woke suddenly, lungs seizing, sweat plastering his hair to his forehead. The room was still, the night heavy and silent, the only sound his ragged breathing. His wife lay beside him, chest rising and falling softly in sleep, untouched and peaceful. Shaking, he reached for the bedside lamp and flicked it on.
The light spilled across him—and froze him. His arms and chest were lined with deep, jagged scratches, raw and angry, bleeding faintly where skin had split. They mirrored perfectly the agony he had endured in his nightmare, carved across him as if the thing in the shadows had followed him into the waking world.
Fear uncoiled inside him like a living thing. Without a word, he bolted from the bed, stumbling toward the door, chest pounding in terror. Behind him, the corner of the room seemed darker than it should be. For a fraction of a heartbeat, he thought he saw it: a grin too wide, teeth gleaming briefly in the lamplight, a shadowed face crouched impossibly low and then gone the instant his eyes fully focused. It did not advance. It did not need to. It only waited, patient, deliberate, obeying the command that had summoned it.
He fled into the hallway, the door slamming shut behind him, scratches burning with every heartbeat, mind reeling. And in the lingering gloom of the bedroom, the faintest curl of hair, the slightest curve of lips in shadow, remained—folded wrong, unseen, and watching.
Damien slowed as a man burst from a nearby house, barefoot and wild-eyed, fumbling with a shirt that refused to settle on his shoulders. Moonlight caught the marks on his skin—long, livid scratches raked across his arms and collarbone—as he staggered into the street like something half-chased, half-driven mad. Damien felt it then: not sight, not sound, but pressure, like a hand brushing the wrong side of the world. His gaze lifted to an upstairs window just in time to see a faint silhouette clinging to the frame, hunched and watching, its outline too crooked to belong to any proper human shape. The moment his eyes fixed on it, it slipped away, swallowed by shadow.
He hesitated only a breath—door or man, cause or consequence—then chose motion. Damien moved soundlessly after him, melting into the night as the man fled down twisting streets until the harsh white glow of a medical facility swallowed him whole. Inside, Damien folded himself into the shadows again, unseen, unheard, a rumour among corners. He listened as the man spoke from behind a thin curtain, voice shaking as he described the nightmare, the weight on his chest, the waking horror of scratches blooming across his skin like accusations. The nurse murmured reassurance she did not believe.
Then someone else did.
An old woman sat rigid in a chair nearby, wrapped in layers of dark cloth, eyes sharp as cut glass. She turned her head slowly—precisely—to where Damien stood hidden. Surprise flickered through him; no one ever looked there. She beckoned with two fingers. When he stepped forward, she caught his hand, her grip firm but not unkind, and began to murmur in a voice worn smooth by years:
"A thing that walks when doors are left ajar,
Small as a child, old as the dark.
It drinks fear, it scratches love,
And leaves the bed before the lark."
Her thumb pressed into his palm, grounding him. “It has been sent,” she said softly, not looking at him now, but toward the ward, toward the valley beyond. “And it does not stop until it is answered.”
The old woman’s grip tightened, not painfully, but with intent. Damien felt it then—recognition passing between them like a current through bone. Her cloudy eyes sharpened, fixing on him with something close to relief. Slowly, deliberately, she pulled him down until his ear was level with her mouth, her breath warm and faintly scented with herbs and smoke.
“You feel it because you were sent,” she whispered. “Not by a man. Not by anger. By balance.”
The ward seemed to dim around them, the hum of machines retreating, as if the world itself had leaned back to listen. Her voice dropped further, threading itself into his ear like a secret meant to stain rather than inform.
“Tokoloshe.”
The word did not echo. It settled. Damien felt it sink into the room, into the man behind the curtain, into the valley beyond the hospital walls. A name shaped by warning, not introduction. The shadows at the corners of the ceiling stirred, almost offended.
She released him then, leaning back as though she had said all that could safely be said. “It is small,” she murmured, eyes half-lidded now. “But it is old. It hides where love rests. It fears salt, hates being named, and follows commands better than conscience. Someone told it what to do.”
Damien straightened slowly. The scratches on the man’s skin burned brighter in his mind now, no longer random cruelty but method. Deterrence. Isolation. A thing tasked not with killing, but with making closeness unbearable.
Behind the curtain, the man sobbed quietly as the nurse cleaned his wounds.
The old woman did not look at Damien again. “You are not here by accident,” she said. “When such things walk, something else always follows. Even shadows have their hunters.”
Damien did not yet understand what the thing was—only what it did. Names alone were not knowledge. So he returned to the house, slipping back into the place where it had first pressed itself into the night. He folded into his own shadows and waited, a stillness within stillness, watching the woman as she moved through rooms now made strange by absence. She was shaken by her husband’s flight, wounded by his silence, and by morning she had decided she could not remain there alone. Confusion has its limits. Fear, less so.
She went to her family.
Her father opened the door before she could knock twice, pulling her into a hug that was solid and warm and real. Damien felt the air resist nothing. No pressure gathered. No corners darkened. That night, though, the old man dreamed uneasily—of weight on his chest, of something crouched near the bed, of a presence that did not touch but judged. He woke unsettled, heart racing, then scoffed at himself in the pale light of morning. Just a bad dream, he told his wife. Nothing more.
The next day her brother arrived.
He greeted her with easy affection, arms around her shoulders, laughter unforced. They sat together on the sofa as evening thickened, the house filled with voices and cups of tea and the small comforts of family ritual. Damien watched from the seam where wall met shadow, feeling the shift before anyone else did—the air tightening, the light seeming to hesitate before reaching certain corners of the room.
It was late when it happened.
The brother gasped sharply, the sound tearing free of him without warning. Conversation collapsed into silence as he doubled forward, hands clawing at his legs. He stood abruptly, panic flaring across his face, and yanked up the fabric of his jeans. Beneath, his skin was split with deep, livid scratches, raked high along his thighs as though something small had climbed him in the dark and marked its path.
The room erupted—questions, shouting, fear—but Damien saw only the pattern completing itself. The warning had passed. The line had been crossed. And somewhere just beyond the reach of the light, something small and patient adjusted its posture, obedient and exact, preparing to teach the same lesson again.
That night, sleep soured for both father and son. Their dreams grew dense and airless, crowded with the same sensation of being measured by something just out of sight. Damien remained where he was, folded into the architecture of shadow, patient as a held breath. When the brother began to thrash, muttering through clenched teeth, Damien reached into his coat and withdrew a small glass vial. Inside, the salt glittered dully, mundane and ancient all at once. He let it spill into his palm and cast it forward in a clean, practiced arc, the grains catching the light as they struck the brother’s legs and pooled against his skin.
The reaction was immediate. A sharp clicking sound snapped through the room, fast and furious, like stones struck together in anger. The darkness in the corner convulsed, shedding its disguise as something hunched and wrong tore itself free of the wall. It was small, wiry, its limbs bent at angles that suggested contempt for bone, its skin slick and dark as wet earth. Matted hair clung to its body, and its mouth stretched wide as it shook violently, trying to rid itself of the salt burning into it like accusation. With a sudden, practiced motion, it produced a small stone from nowhere at all, jammed it between its teeth, and swallowed. The air buckled. The thing vanished as if it had never been, leaving only the echo of its frustration hanging in the room.
Silence rushed back in, heavy and bewildered. Damien did not move for a long moment. Now he knew its shape. Now he understood its function. A guardian of isolation, a thing sent to enforce possession by erasing proximity. But knowledge was not comprehension, and comprehension was what he needed next. As the house slowly settled and frightened whispers replaced screams, Damien withdrew into the night, already turning his thoughts toward older wisdom. This was no longer a matter for observation alone. If he was to stop what had been set in motion, he would need to speak with someone who knew these things not as stories, but as neighbours of the unseen.
He would need a Sangoma.
Damien left the house before dawn could thin the dark and took to the streets of Tugela Valley, moving with the unhurried certainty of someone following a pull he could not yet name. He passed night workers and early risers alike, murmuring a single word as he went—Sangoma. Most recoiled as if the sound itself carried weight, shaking their heads and quickening their steps. Some would not meet his eyes at all. A few, braver or more resigned, lifted a hand and pointed silently down the road, offering direction without explanation. Damien followed none of them for long. The word was not landing yet. The valley was still deciding whether to answer him.
It was the milkman who finally did. His cart creaked along the street, bottles clinking softly like restrained bells, the horse moving with the tired patience of routine. Damien stopped beside him. “Excuse me,” he said quietly, “could you tell me where to find a healer. A Sangoma.” The man paused mid-motion, a crate of milk balanced in his arms. He studied Damien for a long moment, eyes narrowing not in suspicion, but recognition. Without a word, he set the crate down on a doorstep, straightened, and gave directions slowly, carefully, as though each turn mattered. His voice never rose, and when he finished, he did not linger. He simply nodded once and resumed his rounds.
The path took Damien to the very end of the valley, where the road thinned into a narrow ribbon of dirt and the air grew quiet enough to hear insects breathing. There, alone among leaning trees and stubborn grass, stood a hut crouched low against the earth. Charms fluttered from its walls, feathers and beads whispering to one another in the breeze. Animal bones and sun-bleached skulls hung from the eaves, turning gently, clicking softly like teeth remembering old songs. Damien stopped at the edge of the clearing.
“Hello,” Damien called, his voice measured, respectful. The word drifted into the trees and settled there. He waited without shifting his weight, without glancing away. Patience, here, was not politeness—it was currency.
After a time that refused to be counted, a man emerged from the hut. He wore red cloth bound close to his body, leopard hide thrown across one shoulder, goat hide brushing his calves as he moved. Beads circled his neck and wrists, clicking softly with each step, each sound deliberate. His eyes fixed on Damien with an intensity that did not feel like scrutiny so much as recognition.
“May I cross your threshold?” Damien asked, inclining his head.
The healer did not answer at once. He turned slightly aside, muttering under his breath, his words low and layered, as though spoken to others standing just out of sight. The charms around them stirred though there was no wind. At last, he lifted one hand and made a slow, beckoning gesture. “My spirit guides say you come… already walking with shadows,” he said, his voice roughened by age and smoke. “Step carefully.”
Damien drew in a breath and crossed into the clearing, mindful of every ward, every hanging bone and bound feather. He stopped where indicated, the ground beneath his boots worn smooth by years of ritual pacing. Up close, the healer smelled of earth, ash, and something bitter and alive.
“I require assistance,” Damien said quietly. “I know what a Tokoloshe is—I have seen it with my own eyes. I know its shape, its habits, the way it obeys instruction. But what I do not know is how it came to be set upon this woman, nor how to stop it from causing further harm.”
The healer studied him for a long moment, then exhaled through his nose, almost a laugh. “You think the danger is the creature,” he said. “That is the mistake of outsiders. The Tokoloshe is not born evil. It is sent. It is bent by jealousy, by wounded pride, by the smallness of men who cannot accept refusal.” He turned and reached for a bowl near the hut’s entrance, running his fingers through its contents—bones, stones, ash, salt. “Someone fed it purpose. Someone taught it where love sleeps.”
His gaze returned to Damien, sharp and unwavering. “To stop it, you do not hunt it like an animal. You unravel the command. You confront the hand that summoned it—or you convince the spirits the task is complete.” He paused, then added, softer, “But be warned. The Tokoloshe does not like being released. And neither do the men who call it.”
The beads at his wrist stilled. “If you wish to proceed,” he said, “you will have to listen—not just to me, but to the valley. It remembers everything.”
The healer’s mouth curved, not quite a smile, not quite a warning. “You see well,” he said, voice low. “Too well for someone who walks between places.” He lifted his wrist slightly, letting the beads shift and settle. “Red calls the ancestors who cleanse and who cut away rot. Leopard is not status—it is reminder. Power must be carried carefully, or it will turn its teeth on the bearer. Goat is protection, yes, but also sacrifice. Every working takes something.”
He stepped closer, close enough that Damien could feel the warmth of him, the hum of lives remembered. “Lineage is not strength,” the healer went on. “Listening is. These beads mean I survived what others did not. They mean I answer when the dead speak.” His gaze sharpened. “And they are speaking loudly about you.”
The charms rattled once, then stilled. “You may cleanse,” he said, “but cleansing alone will not end this. The Tokoloshe was fed a wound, not a spell. Someone who could not bear refusal shaped it with jealousy and gave it a rule: no one but me. You cannot simply erase that rule. You must break the pride that wrote it.”
He turned, scooping ash and salt together, grinding them with a stone. “I can show you how it was sent. I can trace the command back to the mouth that spoke it. But hear this plainly: when you confront the summoner, you confront a man who believes he was wronged by being denied. Such men do not release their monsters easily.”
The healer met Damien’s eyes again. “If you deal with him personally, the spirits will watch how you do it. Justice that becomes vengeance invites new shadows. Choose your hands carefully.” He pressed the ash-salt mixture into Damien’s palm. “This will not harm the creature. It will make it listen.”
Damien considered the healer’s warning in silence, letting it settle before answering. “I do not deal in vengeance,” he said slowly. “It has never been my nature. I walk in shadows, yes—but not to indulge them. I restore order where it has been broken. I help those who ask for closure. I intervene where I am needed, even when those above me would prefer I did not.” His voice remained calm, almost gentle. “If I go to the police and speak of a Tokoloshe, they will hear only superstition. So my aim is narrower. I will either frighten this man so thoroughly that he never dares summon such a thing again… or I will send him under, where judgement is not softened by lies, and punishment cannot be escaped.”
The air in the clearing shifted. The charms hanging from the trees went still, as if listening had ended and decision had begun.
The Sangoma stared at Damien, something profound unfolding behind his eyes. Recognition bloomed there—not surprise, but certainty, the kind that arrives when a long-pondered question finally answers itself. His posture changed, shoulders easing, spine straightening, reverence replacing scrutiny.
“So,” he said quietly, “the one who walks when balance fails stands before me.” His hand tightened briefly around his beads, not in defense, but in respect. “You are not driven by anger, nor sent by men. You arrive when the scales have tipped too far to right themselves.”
He inclined his head, just enough to acknowledge what he now understood. “Then know this: the man who summoned the Tokoloshe believes refusal wounded him. He will cling to that belief even when fear strips him bare. If you frighten him, the spirits will watch how you do it. If you send him under, they will weigh the manner of it.” His gaze sharpened once more. “Either way, the valley will remember.”
Damien inclined his head slightly. “Your warning is heard,” he said. “Now show me the man who demanded solitude as if it were owed to him. The one who would wound others to protect his own desire.”
The Sangoma did not answer with words. He knelt, drawing a circle in ash and crushed herb, murmuring as he worked, his voice slipping into a cadence older than grammar. When he rose, he seized Damien’s forearm with sudden strength. The world lurched.
Images flooded Damien’s mind—sharp, intrusive. A face twisted with entitlement. Hands that grabbed rather than asked. An alley slick with rain and fear. Recognition struck like a bell: the man who had tried to force himself on a woman in the dark, the one Damien had handed over to the night while police sirens hunted shadows too late. The vision tightened, sharpened, then shifted again.
Another image pressed in. The same man, smaller now, half-hidden in a crowd, shoulders hunched, eyes darting. He clung to anonymity the way drowning men cling to wreckage.
Damien steadied himself. “Can you give me an approximate location?” he asked.
The answer came without speech—just enough context to orient him, a sense of place nested inside movement. Then the Sangoma released his grip. The clearing exhaled.
“I will go and bless the woman’s home,” the old healer said, already turning away. “You do what it is you do.” He lifted one hand and waved it, dismissive not of Damien, but of the path now set.
Damien stepped toward the hut’s threshold, then stopped. He turned back and bowed low, forehead inclined toward the earth—a gesture of respect given rarely and without haste. The Sangoma did not look back, but the charms stirred softly, as if acknowledging the exchange.
Then Damien left, slipping once more into the valley’s arteries of shadow, carrying a face, a direction, and the quiet certainty that the man who had summoned a monster had never expected to be found by one who walked willingly in the dark.
Damien let instinct guide him, loosening his grip on intention until the valley itself began to steer his feet. Streets curved without decision, turns arrived without thought, and before he realised where he was, he stood at the mouth of the alley again. The carnival poster hung there still—Tugela Valley Carnival, arriving soon—now torn cleanly in half, its promise split and rotting on the brick. He glanced up and recognised the officers he had spoken to days earlier, posted near the entrance of a nightclub, their attention fixed on the restless churn of the crowd.
He kept his distance and said nothing. People passed him easily, some lifting hands in greeting, others offering compliments he neither acknowledged nor absorbed. He was elsewhere, listening. A police radio crackled nearby—static, then a voice cutting through it. “He’s been found and detained. We have him in the holding cells.” Damien moved at once, stride lengthening, purpose sharpening. Forty minutes later, he stood before Tugela Valley Police Station, the building humming with fluorescent fatigue.
He slipped back into shadow and entered unseen, the corridors opening for him as if accustomed to his passing. The holding cells lay ahead. Inside, the man he sought sat among ten others, posturing, loud with borrowed confidence. “I’ve got women lining up for me,” he bragged, grinning at someone beside him. “I can have them anytime I want. They can’t say no to me. Ever.”
Silence followed—thick, listening. Then a voice rose. “Boys,” a man said, standing slowly, “sounds like we’ve got a big fish here.” Laughter flickered, then died. A tall, broad-shouldered native of Tugela Valley pushed forward, eyes locked on the braggart. “It was you,” he said, calm but deadly. “You’re the one who tried to force yourself on my niece.” The man shook his head violently, words tumbling over each other in denial, but they fell on ears already closed.
The tall man seized him by the throat and slammed him into the wall. “Boys,” he said again, louder now, “get him.”
What followed was swift and chaotic—a surge of bodies, fists, boots, anger long contained finding a single outlet. Damien watched without expression as order collapsed inward on itself. When the officers finally rushed in, shouting, pulling men apart, the damage had already been done. The boasting voice was gone, replaced by a broken stillness on the floor.
Damien remained where he was, folded into shadow, and then turned away. There was nothing for him to do here. What had unfolded was not his hand to stay. It was consequence meeting cause, the natural order asserting itself without ceremony. He did not interfere with such moments. He simply left.
He found the Sangoma waiting outside the woman’s house as dawn thinned the night. The woman stood at the threshold with a small bag in her hand, ready to go, her face tight with confusion and hurt she had not yet named. The old healer inclined his head to Damien in quiet acknowledgement, then stepped forward, lifting a hand gently to stop her.
He spoke softly, carefully, explaining that she had been cursed, that fear had been sent to live where love should rest. He told her that was why her husband had fled, why the house had turned against itself. He said he had come to cleanse her spirit and her home, to close what had been opened without her consent. The woman listened, pale but steady, and did not argue. Some truths arrive already heavy with recognition.
Her eyes shifted then, catching on Damien where he lingered at the edge of light. The Sangoma followed her gaze. “He helped uncover what was done,” he said simply.
The woman looked at Damien, understanding flickering into something like relief. She mouthed a silent thank you. Damien inclined his head once in polite acknowledgement, no more, no less. Gratitude was not something he collected.
The Sangoma turned back toward the house, already murmuring to the spirits that waited. Damien stepped away, dissolving once more into the valley’s long shadows, leaving behind a home that would soon remember how to breathe again.