That was when Koffi noticed the crack.

The Ashen Grove lay before him, gray and still. No birds. No wind. Just trees that grew in spirals and a path that seemed to invite him in.

The sun was a white blister in the sky. Koffi squatted at the edge of the Cassava Field, the one closest to the Old Wall—a crumbling spine of mud-and-stone that no one remembered building but everyone knew not to cross. Beyond it lay the Ashen Grove, where the red soil turned gray and the trees grew twisted, their branches pointing east like accusatory fingers. No one from Lapazza had gone into the Grove in three generations. Not since the Season of the Missing.

The old women of Lapazza said the village was born from a single tear. Not a tear of sorrow, but of exhaustion—dropped by the first mother, Yema, as she collapsed after walking for three moons with a child on her back and another in her belly. Where the tear hit the cracked earth, a spring burst forth. Where the spring flowed, the baobab grew. And where the baobab cast its shade, Lapazza took root.

He did not feel like a village today. He felt like a boy holding a leaking gourd.

Koffi looked back at Lapazza. From here, it looked peaceful: round huts with thatched roofs, smoke curling from cooking pits, children chasing a lame goat. But he saw what others didn’t. The wells were shrinking. The goats gave sour milk. The babies were born with gray eyes that turned brown after three days—except now, they stayed gray.