EPISODE 1: THE REAWAKENING OF JURGETHE
Chapter 1: “Ash and Breath”
Scene 1: “The Sand Screams”
Word Count: ~500
POV Character: Jurgethe
Setting: The Saharan Fringe, Nightfall, Winds Rising
Tone: Sensory. Cinematic. Psychological. Sacred.
The sand screamed around him.
Not metaphor. Not memory. The wind ripped over the dunes like a god with no skin, shrieking through every crack in the bones of the earth. Jurgethe could feel the storm’s teeth in his pores, gnashing against the oiled residue still clinging to his back—remnants of a ritual he didn’t remember consenting to.
His body was half-buried, his arms pinned beneath the sands, his legs useless beneath layers of rock-heat dust. Blindfolded with linen soaked in myrrh and something older—salt, perhaps, or blood. Everything tasted of forgetting.
And yet the name roared inside him. Not Jugurtha. No. That name was imperial, broken, used by history like a coin passed between liars.
Jurgethe.
He didn’t remember dying. But he remembered how it felt to lose his name. The way it was yanked from his chest by marble-tongued men in crimson sashes. The way it was pronounced wrongly in court scrolls. The way it became a lesson in treason—his face carved into coins as warning, not legend.
He twitched. Pain bloomed along his ribs. His skin was painted with sigils—he couldn’t see them, but he could feel their meaning: shame, silence, sovereignty surrendered.
Footsteps.
Bare. Soft. Not Roman. He could hear the sand kiss the arches of whoever approached.
Then another sound: metallic and wet. Like oil stirred with steel. The scent hit him like a memory—anise, ash, jasmine, heat. It curled into his brainstem, igniting fire where numbness had reigned.
A voice. Low. Female. Speaking a dialect his ears didn’t know but his soul recognized.
“You are not ready. But you are remembered.”
A thumb brushed his lip. Fingers smeared ointment along his temples, down his sternum. He convulsed. The oil wasn’t cold—but it moved like it knew him. Like it sought the cracks in his soul and filled them with fire.
She said nothing else.
He couldn’t see her face. Only the scent remained. And the heat.
Then came the scream.
Not from him. Not from her.
From the sand itself.
The earth beneath him cracked like a drum. His body lifted—he couldn’t move, but he rose, as if carried by invisible hands. The wind didn’t howl—it bowed.
His breath seized.
He wasn’t sure if he was dying again, or being born this time.
Then, silence.
One final whisper in the dark:
“You died once. Not this time.”
Scene End Cliffhanger:
Jurgethe’s blindfold slips. A masked, nude figure stands above him, backlit by burning blue fire licking the desert. Her eyes glow white. His name is written in her mouth.
EPISODE 1: THE REAWAKENING OF JURGETHE
Chapter 1: “Ash and Breath”
Scene 2: “The Mask and the Blade”
Word Count: ~500
POV Character: El Kahina
Setting: Edge of the Saharan Fringe | Dusk Bleeding into Night | Desert Wind at Ritual Peak
Tone: Clinical. Sacred. Erotic. Cold Flame.
He twitched like a dying man reborn too fast.
El Kahina crouched in silence, knees pressed into the cooling skin of the sand, the sacred oil drying across her chest in patterns traced hours ago by Na’ima’s trembling fingers. Her mask—black, bone-thin, featureless—filtered everything. But her eyes did not need to see. Her body listened.
Jurgethe’s pulse.
His breath.
The way his skin lifted to meet the wind.
He was not ready. But the prophecy was already moving.
She traced her blade across the air above his spine. Not touching him. Not yet. The iron was cold—not from the desert, but from restraint. This was the first test: to hold power like a flame in her palm without letting it devour her.
He had been left by the Romans to die ritual-style—blindfolded, etched with anti-memory runes, marked as exile-of-the-gods. Cowards. They feared what could not be killed in clean war. So they buried him in forgetting.
But not deep enough.
“Your breathing is untrained,” she said, not to him but to the wind.
His head jerked. Reflex. Animal. Somewhere in him, a soldier still twitched.
She wiped the back of her wrist across his chest. The ointment she’d applied moments earlier shimmered where it touched the old sigils. They fought her. The curses rebelled. Good.
“The oil remembers. Even if you don’t.”
She leaned close. Her mask nearly touched his ear. Beneath it, her breath was steady. Calculated.
“You don’t need to believe. You only need to follow the rhythm.”
His lips parted. She watched his teeth. White. Unchipped. Roman dentistry. Not their blood, but once their prized tool.
A mistake they would regret.
She pressed two fingers to his sternum and whispered the first of the Nine Opening Verses. The air trembled.
Behind her, the sands shifted. Footsteps—Zilah and Na’ima approaching. The night’s second test would begin soon: the remembering rite. If Jurgethe’s soul didn’t split from the shock, the gods might choose to speak through him. If it did…
They’d burn the corpse before dawn.
She stood.
Jurgethe coughed. Oil mixed with blood on his tongue.
“Who… who are you?”
She paused.
Then, carefully, deliberately, she removed her mask.
Just long enough for him to see the firelight in her eyes—and the scar running from her jaw to her clavicle, like a blade had tried to carve prophecy into her bones and failed.
“I am El Kahina,” she said. “And your death was a lie.”
Scene End Cliffhanger:
Behind her, Zilah appears, dragging a writhing Roman scout bound in ritual cloth. The scout is laughing in tongues. His mouth is not his own. The Archon has arrived.