Mag-log inChapter 10 The Mathematics of Sacrifice: Sipho stopped counting deaths the way people counted bodies.Numbers were cleaner.They didn’t scream. They didn’t beg. They didn’t leave blood under his fingernails.Numbers made sense of things.The darkness liked numbers too.One life can correct a moment, it taught him.Ten can correct a direction.A hundred can rewrite a future.Sipho listened.---It began with ratios.The darkness showed him patterns the way accountants showed balance sheets. If Sipho wanted stability in one sector, it required collapse in another. If he wanted growth, something had to shrink. Not metaphorically. Literally.Lives were variables.Sipho tested the theory cautiously at first.A mining deal stalled because of environmental resistance—activists, lawyers, and delays that brought money slowly. Sipho hesitated, feeling the old tightness in his chest. They were idealists. Annoying, but not cruel.The darkness responded by showing him timelines.In one, the mine
Chapter 9: Blood Answers Faster Than PrayerSipho learned the difference the night he tried to pray.It was not desperation that drove him to it—desperation had long ago burned itself out of him. What he felt instead was unease, a thin fracture running through the calm the darkness had given him. Too much had begun to move too easily. Outcomes aligned before he finished thinking them through. Deaths arrived clean, efficient, and almost polite.It felt wrong.He knelt beside his bed, the way he remembered his grandmother doing when storms came, and folded his hands together. The posture alone made something inside him tighten.“I do not know whom to speak to anymore,” he said quietly.The darkness did not interrupt.So Sipho continued.“If there is anything left of me that is not yours,” he whispered, “I am asking for guidance.”Silence followed.Not the patient silence of the darkness—but something emptier. Distant. Unreachable.Sipho waited.Minutes passed. Then pain bloomed suddenly
Chapter 8: The Door OpensThe night Sipho stopped pretending was quiet.No storms. No omens. No blood on his hands.Just silence—thick and listening.He stood alone in the ritual room beneath his house, the air cool against his skin, the stone floor etched with lines he no longer remembered carving. The symbols did not glow. They did not move. They simply waited, the way the darkness always did.Sipho felt it then—the door.Not a literal thing. Not wood or iron. It was a sensation behind his sternum, a pressure that could either remain closed forever or be opened once and never shut again. He understood instinctively that this was the last moment of hesitation he would be allowed.Once opened, the darkness would no longer knock.It would enter.You know what this is, the darkness murmured, close enough to feel like breathing against his ear.This is consent without fear.Sipho’s hands trembled.“I’ve given you enough,” he said, voice hoarse. “My family. My sleep. My future.”The darkn
Chapter 7: Inheritance Without Mercy Amahle returned to Sipho in pieces.Not as a ghost—ghosts implied regret. What came to him in the nights was heavier than that. Memory sharpened by the darkness, rearranged into punishment.He began to dream of her hands.Always the hands.They were never still. In the dreams, they hovered above him the way they had when he was a child—protective, trembling, unsure whether to bless or to strike. Sometimes they were clean. Sometimes they were red. Sometimes they were neither, coated in a darkness that soaked into his skin when she touched him.Sipho woke each time with his chest tight, breath shallow, the darkness pressing from the inside like it was holding him together by force.You carry her debt, it whispered one dawn.And she carried mine.Inheritance, Sipho realized, was not money.It was an obligation.---The darkness began to strip away his illusions gently, the way one peels skin from fruit—slow enough to feel every loss.The first thing
Chapter 6: The First Offering Sipho did not wake one morning and decided to become cruel. Cruelty implies pleasure. What he felt was a necessity. The darkness had grown quieter as his wealth grew — lower corrective, more observant. It no longer lashed out at every small defiance. Rather, it watched him nearly, the way a bloodsucker watches a commodity it intends to keep alive for a long time. That silence was not peace. It was an expectation. The pressure returned slowly, subtly, like a headache that no way fully announced itself. Sipho felt it when he stood in apartments full of people and realized he could see the weak bones incontinent. Not innocently weak — structurally. The bones whose lives were formerly cracking under strain. Illness. Debt. Despair. Violence is staying for a reason. The darkness showed him how to fête them. “Not all deaths are equal,” it murmured one night as Sipho lay awake, peering at the ceiling. “ Some leave no echo.” Sipho swallowed. “
Sipho set fire to the house at dawn.Not driven by rage; rage would have been too loud, too easy. This one was quieter. Thoughtful. He brought the paraffin can from one room to another, pouring carefully, methodically, as if performing a ritual that he had never signed up for. The floorboards were like a thirsty beast, and the walls seemed to exhale, either relieved or resigned ; he could not tell.The thing observed him.It was always there in the reflections; one could only catch a glimpse of it in the windows, see its long shadow on the shiny surface of the kitchen counter, and sense it right behind you when you bent over to strike the match. It did not stop him.“Fire is a language you speak.”It whispered.Sipho struck the match.For a few seconds, nothing seemed to happen. But then the flame caught and violently spread across the floor. A wave of heat appeared. Smoke started to fizz in the air ; it was thick and black, and it brought the scent of old rituals, old lies, and old b







