Season 2, Episode 3 – Tayo The Ritualist - “Blood in the Signal”

The signal started as static—barely there. A broken soundwave caught between emergency broadcasts and city traffic reports. But Kemi heard it. Hidden behind the noise was a whisper: “He bleeds in the wires.”

She played it back a hundred times, slowing the audio, flipping it through filters. And underneath the whisper, something else pulsed—an irregular heartbeat, glitching like an echo from a body trapped in a machine.

“It\'s not just a signal,” she muttered, eyes wide. “It’s a transmission. A ritual encoded into data.” Dayo nodded from the shadows. “She’s learning how to feed on tech now.”

Tayo didn’t like it. The Warden had crossed a new line—she wasn’t just feeding on belief or fear anymore. She was digitizing the ritual. Possession through frequency.

That same week, five people collapsed across the city—nosebleeds, seizures, strange phrases repeated under their breath. All had been listening to a late-night pirate station called Ash FM.

The team scrambled. Kemi tracked the source to an old telecom tower outside the city, where the antenna still blinked red in the dark like a cursed lighthouse. “That’s where she’s broadcasting from,” she said. “And someone’s helping her keep it live.”

They suited up. Tayo armed with a charm-bound blade, Kemi carrying her signal disruptor, and Dayo with his strange, drawn maps of where the air felt “heaviest.”

At the base of the tower, they found him—the operator. A gaunt man with ash-blind eyes and spiral tattoos on his fingertips. “She speaks through me,” he said calmly. “I’m just the mouth.”

Before they could restrain him, he activated a switch. The tower howled. All their devices went haywire. Tayo dropped to his knees, blood dripping from his ears. Dayo screamed, his eyes glowing blue.

Then everything stopped.

They awoke inside the station. Somehow transported. Time had folded. The room pulsed with sound waves turned physical—walls bending like they breathed, cables coiled like snakes. In the center stood a screen.

On it: The Warden.

This time, her face was clearer—though still distorted. A woman with long, braided hair turned to shadow at the ends, her eye symbols burned onto her cheekbones. “Welcome,” she said softly. “You’ve finally come to listen.”

She offered Tayo a deal: surrender the Archive, and she would leave Dayo untouched. “Knowledge is weight,” she purred. “And the city is tired. Let me erase it all.”

But Tayo stood. Bleeding, dizzy, and defiant. “You want silence. But we are the noise. The Pulse will never stop.”

With Kemi’s help, they overloaded the disruptor. The frequency collapsed inward. The room cracked like glass. The operator vanished in a blink of ash and static.

Outside, the tower burned. Not just in flames—in memory. Every marked person across the city felt it. Like a shackle had snapped. One survivor screamed with joy. Another simply wept.

But it wasn’t a full win. Kemi’s equipment was fried. Dayo had gone silent, sketching symbols none of them recognized. And The Warden’s voice? It still echoed faintly in Kemi’s earpiece: “I see you still.”

Back at The Pulse, they reinforced their encryption, redrew protective sigils on the base walls, and added sound-proofing layers—both technological and mystical. War had evolved. And they would have to evolve with it.

Before sleep came, Tayo wrote a new name in the Fire Ledger: The Mouth. Under it, he scribbled a message: \"She feeds on silence. So we’ll scream louder.\"

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