My family isn’t normal. We come from a long line of white shamans, and incense clings to my clothes long after every ritual ends.
Even now, the sharp, smoky scent can tighten my chest without warning.
“Spirits recognize effort, not belief,” my grandmother always tells me.
While the modern world abandoned the old ways for science, our family continued practising them quietly.
We practise the white rites not out of blind faith, but to maintain control. Yet control is fragile.
As the youngest heir, I am trained to listen more than I speak.
Only a handful of desperate souls know that we exist. They come burdened with grief, begging to speak one final time to a lost friend or departed loved one.
When guests arrive, my family welcomes them with hot tea and gentle words, wrapping their sorrow in temporary comfort.
But the moment the ritual begins, that warmth gives way to cold vigilance.
Every chant is measured. Every salt line must be precise. We guard every breath against the dark entities searching for a tear in the veil.
Yet guarding against the darkness we expect is the easy part.
Grandmother has warned me since childhood that a black shaman spirit never forgets the rites denied to it. It simply waits for the boundaries to weaken.
What she fears most is not the spirit we prepare to summon. It is the black shaman spirit that answers a call never meant for it.
White Rites and Black Shadows
Most people do not know that shamanism has two paths. My family follows the white path, and it demands absolute restraint.
We call briefly, speak with quiet respect, and meticulously seal every door we open. Each step is deliberate, each breath calculated.
If even a single voice wavers, the circle thins, and the protective veil begins to fray.
Black shamanism, however, rejects balance entirely.
It binds spirits through coercion, trading human suffering for immediate, brutal power.
My grandmother never wasted time lecturing me on the moral divide between these two paths. Instead, she corrected my posture with a sharp tap to my spine.
She steadied my panicked breathing, forcing me to repeat ancient chants until my throat bled raw and my hands stopped trembling.
Only later, standing in the cold darkness of a true summoning, did I finally understand her harshness.
Black shamans do not ask permission from the dead.
They command them, bending tormented souls to their will.
And when a black shaman dies, the power binding those spirits does not die with them—it rots, twists, and waits in the dark for a new master to claim it.
The Black Shaman Who Started It All
Since childhood, I have heard the same warning repeated countless times: long before I was born, a branch of our bloodline rotted.
One of our own broke every sacred law, trading restraint for dark power. He grew impossibly wealthy through secret dealings while neighbour turned against neighbour.
Soon, crops turned to black slime, mysterious fevers swept through homes, and livestock were found dead in the fields, their jaws locked open and stuffed with cold hearth ash.
He believed his stolen power made him invincible. He was wrong.
Power breeds arrogance, and arrogance leaves a trail.
The villagers caught him when his own bound spirits turned wild, tearing through his estate during a failed binding.
Blinded by fury, the townsfolk swarmed the broken gates.
They didn’t use steel; they brought salt, iron, and hundreds of blazing torches. Though he fought, spitting curses that withered skin and shattered glass, the sheer weight of the desperate mob pinned him down.
There were no courts that night.
The villagers bound him to a post in the square, piled green wood at his feet, and watched him burn until the screaming stopped.
To them, fire would cleanse the rot. Flame meant an end.
But no sealing rituals followed. No quiet prayers were whispered to guide his spirit away.
The ash cooled in the dirt. The rage did not.
My grandmother says the underworld didn’t reject a beast like that.
It kept him, stripped away what little humanity remained, and reshaped him into something deeply patient.
The White Rite That Let the Black Shaman Spirit In
Years later, I was there when the consequences of that missing sealing ritual finally reached us during what should have been a routine white rite.
A grief-stricken client had come seeking peace.
My father led the chant, his voice low and steady, while I assisted, careful not to rush a single breath. My grandmother watched silently from the edge of the circle.
At first, the incense burned straight up, a clean white thread.
Then the smoke folded sharply inward, collapsing as if the room itself had drawn a sudden breath.
My father paused for only half a beat before continuing. But that brief hesitation was enough to open a tiny fracture in the protective veil.
The response came too fast.
The air tightened until my lungs burned. The candle flames bent flat against the table, though no wind moved.
A thick, suffocating chill flooded the space, and the voice that answered through the dark did not belong to the grieving client’s dead relative.
My father’s spine jerked straight.
His hands shifted with unnatural, practised precision, correcting our formation in a way he had never taught me.
When he opened his mouth, his own voice was buried beneath a heavy, layered echo—calm, ancient, and terrifyingly exact.
“You have spent your whole life learning how to keep spirits out,” it rasped through my father’s throat.
Slowly, his head turned towards me. When his eyes opened, nothing living looked out through them.
“But your blood was never meant to guard the door.”
My father’s lips stretched into a smile that did not belong to him.
“It was meant to let me through.”
It did not need to name itself.
The ancestor who had burned. The black shaman whose spirit had been reshaped by fire and ash.
He had returned.
The Battle to Expel the Black Shaman Spirit
For one breath, none of us moved.
“Enough of your lies,” Grandmother snapped. “The white rites were created to cast out abominations like you.”
Then she lunged forward, her trembling voice striking the air with true names older than the village itself.
But the spirit merely smiled through my father’s face.
It began to chant—softly, almost tenderly—correcting our rhythm. The cadence was mesmerising, smoother and cleaner than anything we had practised.
For a terrifying second, my mind yielded. My throat locked, and I missed a syllable.
The salt line hissed. The protective circle thinned.
“Bind your breath to the living rhythm!” Grandmother gasped, her strength failing.
I forced the missing word from my lungs, but the entity’s grin only widened.
It didn’t rage. It simply flooded my mind with visions of the burning square, reminding us how easily fear turns into law.
Then came the whisper—a suffocating promise of survival at any cost. Knowledge without restraint. Power without apology.
And for one sickening moment, I wanted it.
That temptation terrified me more than the monster wearing my father.
“Two breaths become one. The living bar the dead!” I shouted, forcing my chant through the spirit’s rhythm.
Grandmother and I altered the chant—slowing it down, dragging every word against the unnatural pull.
Our voices were uneven, fragile, but fiercely human.
My father convulsed violently.
Bones popped as his spine contorted, and the layered voice splintered into a deafening, inhuman shriek. With a sound like ice shattering inside my skull, the presence was torn from his body.
My father collapsed onto the woven ritual mats, unconscious.
He survived. But when his eyes finally opened, I saw the fracture in them. Something vital inside him had loosened that night.
And I knew, with certainty, it would never tighten again.
Sealing the Black Shaman Spirit
I barely had time to look at my father’s broken body before the entity began thrashing against the fading salt circle.
My grandmother stepped over my father’s limp body to perform a sealing ritual I had never been allowed to see. Clasping a ceremonial blade, she dragged it across her palm, using her own blood to redraw the broken boundaries.
The air turned to ice. The heavy incense smoke refused to rise; it writhed across the floor like dark water.
Grandmother struck the ground, her ancient voice booming through the chill. But the black shaman spirit fought back.
With a guttural roar, the shadows coalesced into a towering shape of ash and spite. It lashed out, not at us, but toward my unconscious father.
I screamed as the shade tore a glowing, threadlike fragment straight from my father’s chest.
A piece of his soul.
“Seal it!” Grandmother bellowed, smearing her bleeding palm across my hands. “Now!”
I leaped forward, slamming my blood-slick hands onto the floor to complete the final invocation.
The entity shrieked against the binding light and hurled the stolen fragment into the spirit realm just before the blood-red seal ignited around it.
With a deafening crack, the veil snapped shut.
The dark shape vanished. The incense smoke violently lifted, then settled.
Grandmother slid down the wall, dragging in ragged breaths as though the ritual had crushed the air from her lungs.
My father lay completely still, his chest rising, but his eyes hollow—a vital piece of him stolen away forever.
Grandmother looked at me, her eyes clouded with cold dread.
“No seal lasts forever,” she rasped. “It holds only while our bloodline keeps watch… and now, he has a piece of us.”
The Heir Who Must Remember
Now, the burden has passed to me.
By day, I study modern science; by night, I master the ancient laws. I am no longer just an apprentice.
My voice does not waver during a call, my hands do not tremble, and the circle holds firm beneath my command.
I had to grow strong—because my father never recovered. Without that stolen piece of his soul, he is only half-present.
He no longer leads the rites.
Most days, he sits by the window, staring into nothingness. Sometimes he pauses mid-sentence, his lips moving silently as if answering a voice only he can hear.
He avoids mirrors completely, terrified of his own hollow reflection.
Once, I caught him whispering the black shaman’s second verse with perfect, terrifying cadence—before blinking and claiming he couldn’t remember a word.
The spirit left a mark on all of us.
When I light incense now, the smoke occasionally curls inward, reaching toward the dark before my sharp, steady chant forces it upright.
I don’t panic anymore. I don’t wait to see if the air corrects itself.
Every night, I inspect the boundary. I redraw the crimson chalk line even when it looks pristine, feeling the faint, hostile pulse beneath the floorboards.
Because doors remember being opened. And the thing on the other side still cradles a piece of my father’s spirit, waiting for the day I slip.
The seal still holds.
For now.
Related Stories
Some spirits do not wait in ritual circles.
They wait at intersections.
The dead are not always summoned.
Sometimes they are the last passenger you never meant to pick up.
The Last Fare After Midnight Keeps Running
Not every spirit needs a ritual to listen.
Some only need a name.
Objects remember voices long after people forget them.
And some things whisper back when the room is quiet enough.
