Babalú's Tithe

He thought he was a healer. He was just the tax collector.

In the high-rises of Lagos, Dr. Sèdégbé Alade fights a war between his surgical skill and a 300-year-old blood pact. The ancient King of the Earth demands a life every year, and Sèdé has run out of strangers to sacrifice. Now, the fever is coming for his wife.

Dr. Sèdégbé Alade has spent a lifetime scrubbing the dirt of the old world from his hands. From the hermetic, eighteen-degree silence of his penthouse clinic in Victoria Island, Sèdé commands the most exclusive medical practice in Lagos. He is a man of science, rationality, and immense wealth-the perfect modern savior.

But the Alade dynasty was not built on medicine. It was built on debt.

For three hundred years, his lineage has held a pact with Sakpata, the King of the Earth. The terms are absolute: the deity grants the family prosperity, and in return, the family pays the tithe. One soul, every year.

Sèdé has managed to gentrify the ritual, offering the dying and the desperate to keep the ledger balanced. But the Earth is tired of loopholes.

When his wife, Sìkán, falls ill with a fever that defies every medical protocol-a heat that rots flesh and weeps black blood-Sèdé realizes the bill has finally come due. The "Alade Machine" is powerless against a landlord coming to collect.

As the red dust of the ancient grove begins to stain the pristine white floors of his clinic, Sèdé must make a terrifying choice: watch the woman he loves be consumed by the god he serves, or become the monster his ancestors were and pay the tithe in full.

Modern medicine meets ancient blood. The doctor is in, but the debt is overdue.