"From the dust of forgotten wars, where beasts clashed with minds twisted by fear, rose a man with eyes that never truly closed: Dzimbale. Born in ash, raised in dream, and fed by the fire of his own soul."
Listen, child... before you decide he is only a boy from a small village.
I have watched children grow into ordinary men, and I have watched ordinary men crack when the world finally showed its teeth. But Dzimbale was never ordinary. Night did not give him rest. It carried him to places no living mind was meant to witness.
When his body lay still on a mat of worn cloth, his spirit slipped away, barefoot on paths the waking world denies. He wandered into realms most never knew existed, some too bright for the living, and some too dark even for the dead. By morning he returned with things no river could wash away: bruises that bloomed without hands, words from languages no elder has ever spoken, and a silence inside him that beats like distant drums under the ribs.
The villagers called him cursed. Of course they did. People always name what they fear, just to make it feel smaller.
But I tell you this, with years stacked in my bones: curses do not burn like that. What lived in him did not snarl. It watched. It waited. It grew hungrier every time he came back alive.
Long before his first breath, fingers you do not name pressed a spark into him, wrapped it in flesh, and sent it down like a dropped coal into our world, a seed of remembrance meant to drag back what we tried to bury: the old pact, the binding, the bond that once kept our kind from being eaten bone by bone in the dark.
And the dark, my child... the dark has a sharp nose for fire.
So when you open these pages, do it with steady hands. Walk where he walked at the edge of the Veil, where footprints fade faster than prayers. Feel the RHEALMS breathing behind the sky you think is solid. Witness what wakes when a thin boy dares to stand where the wound in the world still throbs.
Because a boy who never truly sleeps is a doorway in disguise.
And something on the other side has already leaned in, listening.
An African-rooted epic of beasts and broken covenants, where one dream-walking child carries the last living coal of an ancient bond... and the darkness that wants it back.