Somewhere in Southern Ethiopia — 1998 A.D.

The midwife screamed before she saw the child’s face.

Lightning cracked the sky outside the orphanage. The storm had come out of nowhere—just as the woman in labor had. She collapsed on the steps in soaked, tattered robes, blood trailing behind her. A thin, otherworldly mist clung to her skin, and the air smelled faintly of copper and ozone.

By the time they got her to a cot, it was too late. Her body gave out after a final push. But the child—he came out silent.

No crying. No screaming.

Only watching.

Eyes like burning moons.

Hair: silver, coiled and ancient.

His skin shimmered under the candlelight, as if part of him wasn’t fully here—his outline flickered when the light shifted, as though his body stood between one world and the next.

One of the nuns gasped. “What child of God is this…?”

The room fell silent.

A single thunderclap shook the walls. The crucifix on the far side of the room rattled on its nail.

The head nun, Sister Abeba, approached, forcing herself to be brave in the face of something she could neither name nor comprehend. She wrapped the infant in rough cloth, and though her hands trembled, the child never flinched. His gaze remained fixed on her, unblinking.

"The storm came with him," whispered one of the other sisters.

The orphanage gave him a name they couldn’t pronounce properly.

“Gussa.”

They didn’t know it was the name from another life. A name he’d already earned once in blood and fire.

The woman who birthed him had no identification. No name, no papers. Just a strip of faded cloth around her wrist, embroidered with strange, ancient letters none of them could read. Letters that would later be identified in secret texts as pre-Aksumite, from a forgotten language said to predate even the earliest known kingdoms.

And on that cloth, just one word:

"Rekuura."

They buried the mother behind the orphanage at dawn, the soil wet and black from the storm. No one came to mourn her. No family, no record of where she came from. The ground swallowed her quietly, the same way it had claimed thousands of nameless others before her.

But the child remained.

Strange things began to happen.

Objects moved on their own. Shadows lingered too long in the corners. Candles snuffed out when he was near, only to burst back into flame moments later. Other children avoided him. Animals refused to enter the room where he slept.

Every night, Gussa would stare up at the sky, wide-eyed and still, watching a single, distant star. It pulsed faintly, as though it, too, were alive—calling to him across the veil of worlds.

No one else could see it.

It was the Repeating Star.

The sign of his return.

The mark of the endless cycle.

A cosmic promise that destiny, no matter how twisted or cruel, would find him again.

The world had forgotten his name.

But the heavens hadn’t.

Years Later…

In 2004, when Gussa was just six years old, an American aid worker named Lauren Habteselassie visited the orphanage. The boy’s strange aura and solemn, ancient gaze unsettled everyone — everyone except Lauren. For reasons she couldn’t explain, she felt drawn to him, as though something immense and invisible pulled their fates together.

Ignoring the whispered warnings, she adopted him and brought him to California.

In Los Angeles, Gussa lived a quieter life, though always under the shadow of odd, unexplainable things — flickering lights, dreams of strange stars, and visions of otherworldly battles he couldn’t understand. He buried them in books, seeking meaning in the language of the cosmos.

By the time he was eighteen, he had earned a scholarship to UCLA, drawn irresistibly to physics, cosmology, and dimensional theory. The secrets of reality called to him, like an echo from a forgotten past he could feel but not remember.

In his quiet dorm room, beneath the glow of the campus observatory, he would often stare up at the same distant star — pulsing faintly, as if waiting.

He had no memory of his former life.

No knowledge of the power buried in his blood.

No idea what was coming for him.

But fate remembered.