Dove light studios

*ABAKWA – Part Eleven*

The light didn't burn.

It remembered me.

I stepped through and the promise-color washed over my skin like warm rain. No heat, no glare. Just the weight of every word I'd never said being lifted off my shoulders at once. I staggered. The man with no diamonds caught my arm. His hand was calloused. Real.

"Easy," he said. "First time's always like dying, but backwards."

Behind us, I heard the lantern go out. Not blown. Not snuffed. It just... completed. When I turned, the lantern woman was gone. Only a small pile of salt on the ground where she'd stood. The path was gone too. There was only this place now.

We were in the room I'd seen through the star-window. Mud walls. A mat on the floor. A louver window with morning pushing through it, blue and thin. Someone was under a thin sheet on the mat. Chest rising, falling.

Me.

Younger. Maybe nine. School uniform folded on a chair.

The man let go of my arm. He looked at the sleeping boy, then at me.

"You asked if you were him," he said. "You were. You are. Question is—"

The boy on the mat stirred. Eyelids fluttering. About to wake.

"—are you gonna let him keep sleeping?"

Outside, a rooster called. A pot clanged. The quarter was waking up. A radio started, distant, playing Makossa. Same morning I'd lived twenty years ago. Same choices waiting in the light through the louvers.

The man stepped back. Into the corner. Where the shadows live.

"He wakes up alone, you walk the memory road forever," he said. "You wake him, you walk the real one. With scars. With sugarcane juice. With slaps and stories and lights going out."

The boy's eyes opened.

He didn't see us. He saw the ceiling. The morning.

My throat was raw. "What happens if I—"

"Then the diamonds were never the point," the man said. "You were."

The light from the window hit the mat. Hit the boy's face.

I had one breath left that smelled like rain-that-hasn’t-fallen-yet.

I used it to say his name.

ABAKWA – Part Ten

The path wasn’t dirt.
It wasn’t stone. It was memory, packed hard under my feet.

Each step I took, something surfaced. The first time I tasted sugarcane — the juice running down my chin while my brother laughed. The slap I got for answering back in class two. The night the lights went out in the whole quarter and we told stories until our voices were smoke.

The lantern woman kept pace. Her light didn’t cast shadows. It pulled them out of things. Trees here had the shadows of other trees. Rocks had the shadows of houses. I had the shadow of a boy who never left.

“Where are we going?” I asked. My voice didn’t echo. The air ate it.

“To the place where you stop asking,” she said.

Ahead, the light from the tear in the horizon was wider now. It wasn’t sun. It wasn’t fire. It was the color of a promise you made before you had words.

The man with diamonds stood at the edge of it. He wasn’t shining anymore. The diamonds were gone. Or maybe they were inside him now. He looked ordinary. Tired. Like someone who’d walked a long way to tell you something simple.

He saw me. He didn’t wave. He didn’t smile. He just nodded. Like I’d been late, but I came.

The lantern woman stopped. “This is as far as I go.”

The flame in her lantern stood straight up, still. For the first time, it wasn’t bending toward anything.

I looked back. The hut was gone. The silver ground was gone. There was only the path behind me, and it was already fading. Like a dream you can’t tell after waking.

I was scared. Not of him. Of what came after the nod.

“What if I’m not him?” I said. “The one you waited for.”

The man’s voice was rough. Used. “Then you’ll have to become him.”

He held out his hand. It was empty. No diamonds. Just lines. Scars. A life.

I didn’t take it yet.

I looked up. The stars were still falling up, but slower now. One of them paused right above us. It wasn’t a star. It was a window. And through it, I saw a room. A mat. A morning. Someone was about to wake

ABAKWA – Part Nine

I didn’t answer.
Not yet.

Instead, I watched the ripples from the diamond man’s steps. They’d reached my feet now. The sound in them was louder: my brother calling my name before sunrise, the scrape of a machete on wood, my own breath when I first learned I could run and not fall.

The lantern woman tilted her head. The faces kept moving — my mother, the groundnut seller, a girl I passed in school who never spoke to me. Then none of them. Then all of them.

“You’re waiting for the ground to choose for you,” she said. Not unkind. Just true. “It won’t.”

Behind me, the hut. I could smell it now. Dry thatch. Ash from last night’s fire. The mat I woke on every morning since I could remember. Warm meant safe. Warm meant walls.

Ahead, the man with diamonds reached the tear in the horizon. He stepped through like it was a doorway. He didn’t vanish. He just… became part of the light that was leaking upward.

The silver ground under me stopped humming. It was listening.

I looked at my feet. They were still mine. Bare. Scarred on the heel from when I jumped the fence at eleven. The ground didn’t ripple under me either. Not anymore.

“Why did he not wait?” I asked.

“He did,” she said. “Three times. You were asleep the first time. Afraid the second. This is the third.”

The lantern swung once more. The flame bent toward the path.

I took a breath. The air tasted like rain that hadn’t fallen yet.

I stepped forward.

The hut did not call me back.
The path had no roof, but the stars falling up lit it well enough.

The lantern woman walked beside me. She didn’t speak. She didn’t need to.

Somewhere ahead, the man with diamonds was waiting — not to lead, not to follow. Just to see if I would arrive as myself.

ABAKWA – Part Eight

The lantern did not flicker. It cut a clean line through the night.

As it drew closer, I saw her feet first. Bare, like mine, but the silver ground did not ripple under them. She walked on it the way breath walks on a mirror.

The man with diamonds kept moving. He would not wait for us to meet.

She stopped three paces away. The lantern hung from a crooked stick. Her face was my mother’s. Then it was the face of the woman who sold groundnuts by the road. Then it was no one I knew.

“Who are you?” I asked. The words came out heavier than I meant.

“Who do you need me to be?” The lantern light caught in her eyes. It was not fire. It was the same light I’d seen leaking from my chest in the hut.

Behind her, the horizon was still tearing open. Stars fell up in slow arcs, like they were being called home.

“Are you taking me somewhere?”

“No.” She lifted the lantern. “I’m showing you that you were never in one place.”

The ground under me gave a low hum. The ripples from the diamond man’s steps were returning, but they carried sound now. Voices. Chickens clucking at dawn. My own laughter from when I was small. The sound of thatch being tied in the rain.

“Pick,” she said. “The hut behind you is still warm. The path ahead has no roof.”

The man with diamonds was almost to the place where sky touched ground. He did not look back. If I called, he would not stop.

The lantern swung once.

*What do I choose — the hut I know, or the path with no roof?*

ABAKWA – Part Seven

I stepped forward with both feet into the silver ground.

The cold swallowed me to the knees. It did not feel like water or earth. It felt like standing inside a bell the moment before it rings.

The man with diamonds on his back did not turn. He walked. Each step made a small ripple that ran outward and disappeared into the stars.

“Wait,” I called. My voice was thin here. The horizon drank sound.

He stopped but did not look back.
“Do you know what it costs to leave the hut?”

“No.”

“Everything in it.”

Behind me, the door was still open. My mat, the patched roof, the pot with last night’s rain. They were all there, small and waiting. If I turned now, I could lie down and wake up to the same morning I’d had every morning.

If I didn’t, I would not wake up in that hut again.

The light in my chest pulled toward him, toward the place where the ground met the sky and stars fell up instead of down.

“What is your name?” I asked him.

“I gave it to the last man who came through,” he said. “He left it at the edge. Names are heavy. You will need to be light.”

I looked at my hands. They were the same hands that mixed feed for the chickens, that tied thatch, that held my head when the waiting got too loud.

“Will I remember?”

“What matters, yes. What doesn’t, no.”

The star that had been moving was closer now. It was not a star. It was a lantern, carried by someone walking toward us from the horizon.

The man with diamonds began to walk again.

I followed.

*Who do you think is carrying the lantern?*

ABAKWA – Part Six

My foot hovered above the silver ground.
Cold air rushed up and kissed my sole, nothing like the warm clay I’d known all my life. The rain kept falling outside, but the sound was distant now, like it belonged to someone else’s world.

The man with diamonds on his chest watched me. His light did not flicker.
“You are standing in the space between,” he said. “Most people die there.”

I swallowed. “Between what?”

“Between the life you were given and the life you could take.”

The silver ground rippled when I finally set my foot down. It held my weight, but I could feel depth under it. Like the sky had fallen and learned how to be still.

Behind me, my hut looked smaller. The roof I’d patched with my own hands, the mat where I slept, the corner where the water pooled when it rained. All of it looked like a drawing a child made, left out in the weather.

“Why me?” I asked. My voice sounded too loud in that starlit place.

He turned, and for the first time I saw his back. More diamonds. They formed a pattern, a road, a river, a vein.
“Because you said door,” he answered. “Most say wall. They love their walls. Walls are honest. Doors are not.”

I took another step. The cold climbed to my ankle.
“What happens if I go back now?”

“Nothing,” he said. “The door closes. The rain comes through the roof again. You wait, like before. And you will remember this night for the rest of your life as a dream you almost touched.”

I looked at the stars I had never seen. One of them moved. Or maybe it fell. Or maybe it was coming closer.

“What’s out there?” I pointed to the horizon, where the silver ground met the strange sky.

“Everything you are not yet,” he said. “And everything you could lose.”

The light in my chest pulsed once, hard. The tired version of me wanted the mat, the roof, the waiting. The other version, the open road at dawn, wanted to run barefoot into that cold.

I lifted my other foot.

To be continued…

ABAKWA – Part Five

“Door or wall.”

The words stayed in the air after he spoke them. They did not fade.

The light from his palm was still in my chest. I could feel two versions of myself standing there. One was tired. Wet. Small. The one who knew how to bow his head when the rain came through the roof. The one who knew how to wait.

The other was… open. Like a road at dawn with no one on it yet.

“Door,” I whispered.

He did not smile. He did not nod. The diamonds across his chest brightened, and the hum deepened until the clay walls seemed to breathe with it.

“Then walk,” he said.

He stepped back. And there it was. Where the wall of my hut had been — solid mud and old bamboo — there was now a doorway. Not cut. Not broken. Just… open. Beyond it was not the yard. Not the farm. Not the road to the market.

It was night, but the sky was full of stars I had never seen. And the ground was silver, like water holding still.

“If you cross,” he said, “you cannot unsee.”

My feet were bare. The clay was warm behind me. The silver ground was cold in front of me.

I looked back at him. “Will you come too?”

“I am already there,” he said. “I have always been there. I was only waiting for you to choose the door.”

The rain still fell outside, but not through the roof. Not through the new doorway either. The storm knew it was not invited.

I lifted my foot.

To be continued…

ABAKWA – Part Four

My name in his mouth did not sound like a sound. It sounded like a door opening.

He said it once. The light pulled back again, and for the first time I saw outlines. Tall. Crowned with something that was not metal and not fire. The diamonds across his chest breathed with him — slow, patient.

“Stand up,” he said. Not a command. An invitation.

My legs forgot how to be afraid. I stood. The clay was still warm.

“You called,” he said. “Three nights ago. When the storm took your roof and your voice gave out. You asked if anyone was listening.”

I had. I remember. I was on my knees in the water.

He stepped closer. The hut shrank. Or he grew. The stones on his body hummed, low, like the note you feel in your chest when thunder is far away.

“I am not an answer,” he said. “I am a beginning.”

Then he reached out. He didn’t touch me. He held his hand over my heart, and the light from his palm passed through my ribs without heat, without pain. I saw my own life — small, wet, tired — and then I saw it beside something else. Something wider.

“Choose,” he said. “Door or wall.”

Outside, the rain started again. But it didn’t touch the roof.

To be continued… Door or wall — what should I choose?