Before Kairo.
Before NAREZEN.
Before the civil war.
Before Safsan opened his eyes on a battlefield filled with people he did not remember killing...
there was a moment from the beginning of this story that you never fully saw.
You saw what Safsan saw.
But Safsan arrived late.
So let's go back.
To the day Saad walked away from him.
...
Saad kept walking.
He didn't look back.
But Safsan's eyes followed him inside his head.
That calm stare.
That complete lack of fear.
Saad hated it.
He was used to understanding people through their reactions.
Fear was easy.
Anger was easy.
Someone trying to prove themselves was even easier.
Safsan had given him almost nothing.
He had simply looked at him.
As if he could see through the jokes.
Through the confidence.
Through the little tests Saad used to measure other people.
Saad clenched his jaw.
He told himself it didn't matter.
Then why was he still thinking about it?
He kicked a stone from the road.
Hard.
There was another thought inside him.
One that had existed long before today.
Saad had wondered about many things.
How strong he really was.
How far someone could be pushed.
How much fear he could create.
But there was one thought he had never been able to answer.
What does it feel like to kill someone?
Not injure them.
Not beat them.
Not make them afraid.
Kill them.
He had thought about it before.
More than once.
But until now...
it had remained a thought.
Today was different.
Something about the frustration Safsan had left inside him fed it.
The thought no longer felt distant.
It no longer felt hypothetical.
It became something closer to desire.
Not words.
A feeling.
Saad stopped walking.
Then he heard laughter.
Three men were nearby.
Two were drunk.
One of them struggled to stand straight while the other laughed at almost everything he said.
A bottle moved between their hands.
The third man wasn't drinking.
He was leaning against a tree.
Quiet.
Watching them.
His name was Jalatta.
Saad didn't know him.
Jalatta didn't know Saad.
But Jalatta knew that look.
Not the face.
The look.
He had lived long enough to recognize when someone's thoughts were moving somewhere dangerous.
And Jalatta had lived through enough dangerous moments to trust that feeling.
Too many, actually.
There had been moments throughout his life that should have killed him.
Accidents.
Violence.
Wrong places.
Wrong times.
Moments where another person would have looked at the situation afterward and asked the obvious question:
How are you still alive?
Jalatta never had a good answer.
Sometimes he had escaped.
Sometimes someone had appeared.
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Sometimes circumstances had changed at the exact moment they needed to.
And sometimes...
he genuinely didn't understand how he survived.
It had happened enough times that Jalatta had stopped calling himself lucky.
Luck shouldn't repeat itself that often.
Still...
he was alive.
And right now, every instinct that had kept him alive before was telling him the same thing.
Something was wrong with Saad.
Jalatta pushed himself away from the tree.
One of the drunk men noticed Saad.
"Hey!"
Saad looked at him.
The man laughed.
"What are you looking at?"
Saad said nothing.
The second man laughed too.
Jalatta didn't.
"Leave him alone."
The first man looked back.
"What?"
"I'm talking to both of you."
Jalatta's eyes remained on Saad.
"Go home."
The men laughed again.
Saad slowly smiled.
Jalatta's expression hardened.
But then...
Saad turned around.
And walked away.
The drunk men laughed louder.
One shouted something after him.
Jalatta watched Saad disappear.
He didn't laugh.
...
Saad had changed his mind.
Not about killing.
About who.
Safsan.
The name returned immediately.
He wanted to find him.
He wanted that calm expression gone.
He wanted to see what Safsan looked like when something finally forced a reaction out of him.
And somewhere beneath that frustration...
the feeling from earlier remained.
What does it feel like?
Saad searched.
Street after street.
Path after path.
Nothing.
He didn't know that Safsan had already gone somewhere else.
Toward Tulluu Diimtuu.
The Red Mountain.
Toward a meeting that would change far more than either of them understood.
Toward Safuu.
Saad kept looking.
But he missed him.
And with every minute...
his frustration grew.
Eventually, Saad stopped.
Silence.
His breathing was heavier now.
Safsan wasn't there.
But the feeling was.
Saad looked back in the direction he had come from.
He remembered the three men.
Then he started walking.
...
Jalatta saw him returning.
This time Saad wasn't leaving.
Jalatta immediately stood.
"Go."
The two drunk men looked at him.
One laughed.
"Again?"
"Go."
Something in Jalatta's voice had changed.
The laughter weakened.
But they were too slow.
Saad reached them.
The first man barely understood what was happening.
A movement.
A strike.
His body hit the ground.
The second man froze.
Jalatta moved immediately.
"RUN!"
The man tried.
Saad caught him.
What happened afterward didn't take long.
The first man died.
Then the second.
The laughter disappeared.
The bottle rolled across the ground.
Jalatta stared at the two bodies.
Then at Saad.
Saad looked at his hands.
For years, there had been a question.
Now there was an answer.
He knew what it felt like.
And somehow...
that didn't make the feeling disappear.
Jalatta attacked him.
Not because he thought he was stronger.
Not because he thought he would win.
There was nobody else left to do it.
Saad turned.
The fight was brutal.
Jalatta hit the ground.
He forced himself back up.
Saad struck him again.
Blood filled Jalatta's mouth.
He stumbled.
Another hit.
His vision blurred.
He fell beside the tree.
Saad waited.
Jalatta moved.
Saad stared at him.
"You still want to get up?"
Jalatta pushed against the ground.
His arm shook.
His body barely responded.
But he rose.
Saad knocked him down again.
Something cracked.
Jalatta couldn't tell what.
Breathing became difficult.
His heartbeat sounded far away.
Saad stepped closer.
Jalatta tried to move.
Nothing.
Saad looked down at him.
"You really don't know when to die."
Jalatta almost laughed.
If Saad only knew.
This wasn't the first time.
There had been too many moments like this.
Different places.
Different dangers.
Different reasons.
Yet somehow...
Jalatta always survived.
But lying there beside two dead men...
he finally wondered whether the pattern had ended.
Maybe this was it.
Maybe there was no strange escape this time.
No coincidence.
No last moment.
No impossible survival.
His eyes began closing.
Then—
footsteps.
Saad turned.
Someone was approaching.
Jalatta couldn't see properly anymore.
Only a shape.
A young man.
Saad recognized him.
Safsan.
...
And now...
you know what Safsan didn't.
When Safsan arrived that day, he saw two dead bodies.
He saw a third man barely alive.
He saw Saad.
What he didn't see...
was everything that came before.
Saad's frustration.
The thought that became a feeling.
The search for Safsan.
The two men laughing moments before their deaths.
And the dying stranger who had already survived death more times than he could explain.
That stranger was Jalatta.
And once again...
he survived.
...
Much later.
Safsan opened his eyes.
The battlefield returned.
His body still refused to move.
Pain remained everywhere.
Every breath demanded effort.
He slowly breathed out through his nose.
His chest protested.
He swallowed the reaction.
The pain stayed.
Safsan stared across the battlefield.
Bodies.
He still didn't understand.
His mind continued searching for memories that weren't there.
He remembered waking.
The strange feeling.
The chains.
Fragments.
Then nothing.
He looked toward one of the bodies.
Then another.
His breathing became uneven.
He forced it under control.
Don't show it.
That instinct came naturally.
It always had.
Pain could exist.
Fear could exist.
Confusion could exist.
But Safsan had spent too much of his life learning how to swallow those things before anyone else could see them.
His eyes moved again.
Then—
someone moved.
Safsan froze.
A figure farther across the battlefield slowly rose.
Safsan couldn't turn his head properly.
Only his eyes followed.
The figure stumbled.
Stopped.
Then continued.
Safsan recognized him.
Not immediately.
But eventually.
The man from that day.
The third man.
The one Saad had nearly killed.
Jalatta.
Alive.
Again.
Jalatta looked around.
At the destruction.
At the dead.
At Safsan.
He didn't understand everything either.
But somehow...
after everything that had happened...
Jalatta was still standing.
SEENEE watched him.
Then looked at us.
"Interesting, isn't it?"
No explanation followed.
Not yet.
Because Jalatta's survival was not the only thing that mattered.
Something else had ended here.
Odania.
Not the continent itself.
Safsan's beginning within it.
...
The story moved upward.
Above the battlefield.
Above the smoke.
Above the broken streets.
Odania stretched beneath us.
The Land of Freedom.
Safsan's home.
The place where his story began.
A land that had once been whole.
A land that had been divided.
A land whose history had been buried, rewritten, forgotten and remembered again.
This was where Safsan dreamed of himself.
Where the black snake followed him.
Where his father's words pushed him toward something he had spent too long avoiding.
Where he met Safuu.
Where Saad died.
Where Jalatta survived.
Where Kairo appeared.
Where civil war tore through the land.
Where NAREZEN revealed itself.
Where Safsan breathed as though he had never truly breathed before.
Where black chains appeared around him.
Where he reached into time.
Where one second changed everything.
Odania had given Safsan questions.
Far more questions than answers.
But the world did not end at Odanian borders.
Far beyond it...
across distance Safsan had never traveled...
there was another continent.
SEENEE looked toward it.
For several seconds, he said nothing.
Then the story moved.
Away from Odania.
Across the world.
The green began disappearing.
The landscape changed.
The horizon darkened.
And eventually...
mountains appeared.
Not like Tulluu Diimtuu.
Not like the mountains Safsan knew.
These were enormous.
Dark.
Ancient.
They rose from the continent as though the world itself had been forced to carry something too heavy.
Some peaks disappeared into clouds.
Others formed endless walls of stone.
Deep valleys existed between them.
Old paths cut through the land.
Some were still visible.
Others had almost vanished.
The wind moved through the mountains.
There was no welcoming sound.
No celebration.
No voice announcing the arrival of a hero.
Only weight.
SEENEE watched the continent.
"This..."
"...is BAAČ."
The wind passed through another valley.
"THE CONTINENT OF BURDEN."
BAAČ did not look dead.
That would have been simpler.
It looked like something that had survived too much.
Its mountains stood like beings that had learned how to carry impossible weight without collapsing.
And somewhere among them...
things had been buried.
Not only beneath stone.
People buried things too.
Names.
Memories.
Regret.
Promises.
Truth.
Things they couldn't carry anymore.
Things they refused to face.
Things they convinced themselves they had forgotten.
But forgetting something...
does not make it lighter.
Sometimes it does the opposite.
SEENEE looked back toward Odania.
"Odania taught Safsan something about freedom."
A pause.
"But freedom is strange."
"Sometimes removing the chain is the easy part."
The image of Safsan lying on the battlefield returned for a moment.
Black chains.
Bodies.
Pain.
Then BAAČ again.
"The harder part..."
"...is discovering what you were carrying while it was attached to you."
The story moved deeper into the continent.
The mountains became larger.
The paths became narrower.
The silence became heavier.
Somewhere far beyond them...
something moved.
Too distant to identify.
SEENEE noticed.
His eyes followed it.
But he said nothing.
Not everything needed an answer the moment it appeared.
Especially not here.
Especially not in BAAČ.
The story continued across the mountains.
There were places where the stone seemed almost black.
Places where old paths suddenly ended.
Places where the land itself seemed to remember things no person was willing to speak about.
Safsan knew none of this.
He didn't know BAAČ existed like this.
He didn't know he would come here.
He didn't know what waited beyond those mountains.
He didn't know what the continent would demand from him.
And he certainly didn't know what he would be carrying when he arrived.
SEENEE looked toward the horizon.
"Every story has places its characters want to reach."
"BAAČ is different."
The wind stopped.
"It is the kind of place you reach..."
"...because something behind you has made staying impossible."
...
Back in Odania...
Safsan remained on the ground.
Jalatta was alive.
Safsan was alive.
Around them were those who weren't.
Safsan looked toward the sky.
He still couldn't move.
He still couldn't remember.
He still didn't know what his chains had done.
He didn't know what had happened to Kairo.
He didn't know why Jalatta kept surviving.
He didn't know the truth of his own first birth.
He didn't know what had happened during those few seconds before his first death.
He didn't know why Nafsan was connected to it.
He didn't know that an older version of himself would one day chase Nafsan across universes with those same black chains.
There was so much Safsan didn't know.
Maybe that had always been the point.
The story began with a young man who felt that something needed to be done...
but didn't know what.
He thought something invisible was stopping him.
He asked his father what to do.
He ran from himself in a dream.
He feared what waited behind him.
He feared looking up.
He feared the unknown.
And slowly...
the unknown had stopped waiting for Safsan to approach it.
It had come to him.
SEENEE looked at Safsan.
Then toward the distant continent.
"The first part of Safsan's story was never about knowing everything."
"It was about taking the first step despite not knowing."
Safsan had taken it.
And now there was no road back to the person who had once stood still wondering whether tomorrow would be easier.
Odania had been his beginning.
His home.
The Land of Freedom.
But beginnings are not homes forever.
Somewhere beyond the horizon...
the mountains of BAAČ waited.
Not for a hero.
Not for a chosen one.
Not for a King.
For a man carrying things he had never learned how to put down.
SEENEE smiled slightly.
"Safsan wanted to know where to begin."
"Now he knows."
He looked toward BAAČ.
"The question has changed."
A final gust of wind passed between the dark mountains.
"What will he carry with him?"
The story pulled farther away.
Odania on one side.
BAAČ beyond it.
Freedom behind him.
Burden ahead.
And between them...
Safsan.
The young man who had spent his life swallowing pain so nobody could see it.
The young man who had spent his life carrying things he told himself he didn't have time to feel.
Soon...
he would enter a continent built around exactly that.
BAAČ
THE CONTINENT OF BURDEN
WHERE SECRETS WEIGH
Odania was only the beginning.
NAFSAN HAS BEEN BORN.