Aka's Arc

Chapter 1 of 1

Aka set the photo album on his grandmother's kitchen table and opened it to the page he had marked. Three generations of black hair and brown eyes stared back. He was nineteen, six-foot-five, red-haired, and wearing the red pinstripe suit he had worn to every family dinner since he started asking questions. He tapped the album. "One of you knows where this came from," he said. His grandmother kept slicing pears. His mother looked at the window. His uncle stood up and left the room. Aka waited until the front door clicked shut, then asked again. His grandmother set the knife down and told him to eat. That was the answer he had gotten for a year. He walked out through the back garden with the mark on his neck itching under his collar, and he pointed himself at the tree line because the tree line was the only thing that had ever answered him. Roots had climbed his ankles once while he slept at the edge of it. The symbols carved into the bark inside matched the mark he was born with. His family would not speak. The forest already had. He crossed the first row of trees in his good shoes. Twenty steps in, something large moved on his left and stopped. He turned. A panther stood between two trunks, black, yellow-eyed, with folded wings pressed flat along its back. It was taller at the shoulder than any dog he had seen. Aka did not run. He had already tested whether the forest would let him leave, and it had. He wanted to know what it would show him if he stayed. The panther watched him for a long moment, then turned and walked deeper in. After three steps it stopped and looked back. Aka understood the look. He followed. The panther led him to a young oak with fresh cuts in the bark. The cuts were the mark on his neck, repeated four times around the trunk at the height of his hand. Under the lowest carving, pressed into the dirt, lay a folded square of paper with his grandmother's handwriting on the outside. His name. He picked it up. The panther sat and waited. Aka's family had refused him for a year, and one of them had been walking into the forest to leave him notes. The guessing was over. He had a name to confront and a trail to follow, and the thing the forest had sent to guide him was still watching to see what he would do next.