Chapter 7: The Cursed Truth
In that narrow room that smelled of old paper and tension, Kamal was standing like a statue of anxiety. His eyes didn't settle on anything, as if he was chasing a spectrum that no one else sees.
Prince Adam broke the silence with a sharp voice like a sword:
"Speak, Kamal. Why did you choose to flee at the height of the battle?"
Kamal looked up, and there was no fear of the cowards, but the refraction of the knowledgeable. He said in a voice that looked like a whisper:
"You're chasing shadows, while real monsters sit on velvet chairs."
He prevailed and heavy, to bury Kamal the last bomb:
"It was not a war to discipline rebels. It was a 'harvest'. Your esteemed state did not want to quell a revolution, but wanted to ignite offerings. The blood of an entire people has been exchanged for a dark era. An imperishable power, in exchange for restless souls."
Mira sobed, as Yara felt a cold running in her marrow. I now realized that the "ghost" I encountered was not an enemy by nature, but a cry incarnated.
Kamal continued with his grip trembling:
"I saw them.. Leaders and ministers, standing around circles of blood. The screams didn't scare them, they were singing them. They opened a gate for the 'other side', but forgot one thing: that the oppressed does not rest with his death."
Chapter 8: The Moaning of Forgotten Souls
Adam looked at his palms as if he saw strange blood staining them. "So I am the fruit of this corrupt regime?"
Omar whispered: "You tried to prevent, and they tried to kill. The difference between you is the difference between light and abyss."
But Yara was in another world. She was thinking about what these "ghosts" were. I turned to Kamal and asked bitterly:
"Why are they attacking us? If they are victims, why all this hatred?"
Kamal replied in a sad tone:
"For they died without mercy, and remained without dignity. A person who kills treacherously, and leaves his body to strangers without prayer or shroud, does not leave in peace. His soul turns into energy of pure anger. They don't want to kill us, they want to 'free' from the prison of pain in which the rulers put them. They are demanding their right to the noble death that was robbed of them."
He looked at it deeply and completed:
"You, Yara. I'm not a ghost hunter. You are the 'crossing'. When you touched that entity, you didn't destroy it. You gave his soul the peace he was deprived of for years. You are the lock of this gate. Or maybe the key that will return to everyone who is entitled to his right."
Chapter 9: The Dawn of Rebellion
The decision settled in the souls like embers. It's no longer just a survival, it's a journey to rehabilitate thousands of wandering souls.
Adam said, wearing his formal cloak, but this time to take off his old loyalty:
"If the throne is built on the skulls of innocent people, let the throne be destroyed. We will not expect justice from the murderers."
Yara looked into her hands; they were no longer shaking. She no longer sees her life as a faint gray painting, but as a final line of defense between two worlds.
"We will go to the gate," Yara said with certainty, shaking the corners of the room, "not to fight the ghosts, but to fight those who made them. We will give these forgotten the burial that befits them, and close the gate with the faces of those who have exploited their blood."
The scene was surreal: an outcast prince, a repentant soldier, and students armed with hope. In the face of an empire that mocked death to serve its survival. The real war has begun now, a war for the dignity of the dead. Before the living.
Chapter 10: The Will of the Balance Keeper
That night, Yara's sleep was not a rest, but a journey to the past.
Her embodied before her the spectrum of her grandfather, the man who was never like the rest of the men. He was whispering to her in a voice that looked like a rustle:
"Yara, spirits are a mirror to us. It does not hurt those who understand its essence, but it devours those who tremble for fear of it."
Her grandfather did not teach her how to make a sword, but how to open the insight of her heart. He used to say that the worlds - the living and the spirits - are separated by a thin membrane like the eyelid, and that the greed of humans is the blade that tears this membrane.
Yara woke up and the heat flowed in her veins; that force was not an option, but rather a forced appeal from a fate that refused to wait.
Chapter 11: The Marginal Prince
Inside the cold corridors of the palace, Adam was walking as a shadow that no one saw. "The Fourth Prince." The title given by the entourage is ridiculous, because it was never within the calculations of the throne or the ambitions of power.
But this neglect was his only shield; the eyes that watch the aspiring, overlooked the "marginal" who began to see cracks in the wall of the royal family.
In the throne hall, the scene was terrifying in his silence. The king sits as a wax statue, his eyes absent in a dark kingdom, while his three brothers whisper in a machined tone as if they were parts of one machine.
Adam felt a suffocating pressure in his chest, heavy energy filling the place, but he noticed something strange: the more he recovered Yara's image in his mind, or approached her surroundings, that weight was fading. As if its aura is the only "safe space" in a kingdom filled with defilent.
Chapter 12: Who moves the threads?
Kamal woke up with a chuckle, sweat flooding his face. It wasn't an ordinary nightmare, it was a distorted vision of the past.
"They're not them." He said it as he tried to catch his breath in front of his friends in the morning. Ministers, leaders. They were all just tools. There is a shadow standing behind them, a man who weaves symbols out of nowhere with a brillianty that humans do not possess."
Adam looked at his companions in grief, "My father was not like this. He was a king who got angry and laughed. Now, it's just an echo. His voice changes, words that come out of him as if they are dictated to him from a deep well."
Yara remembered her grandfather's words about "invisible control". Chains are not always made of iron, sometimes they are made of poison energy that wraps around the will until it suffocates it.
Chapter 13: When Darkness Smiles
Suddenly, the light committed suicide in the room. Dams blackness was broken only by Mira's trembling as she whispered: "They found us.."
Yara didn't need eyes to see. I sensed their presence; increasing souls, seven, nine, dozens.. Lost souls demand salvation.
But in the midst of this spiritual noise, there was another "thing". Conscious, cool, and controlled force.
Yara recalled her grandfather's will: "Don't waste your effort fighting the shadow, but look for the hand that makes up this shadow."
Yara focused her being, and raised her palm, from which a warm white light was emitted, not a burning light, but a light that washes the pain. The small spirits around her calmed down, the features of anger faded from them and melted in the air peacefully.
But in the dark corner of the room, that "thing" didn't fade.
A ghost was not a victim, but an entity of another kind. Yara felt an insightful look that penetrates her soul. She saw the features of a smiling sarcastically face, as if he had finally found a "game" worth entertaining.
Before she uttered a word, he disappeared, leaving behind the smell of sulfur and a scary feeling that the real battle had not yet begun.