Lume, 1912 – The Rebellion Years
The rifle was too heavy for her shoulders, but she carried it anyway.
She walked through the valley in boots she stole from a dead man, her hair hidden beneath a woolen cap, her breasts bound with linen, her name changed from Lume to Luan, which meant lion.
Because no one would follow a woman into war.
But they would follow a lion.
She had not always wanted to fight.
As a child, she had once braided dandelions into crowns and kissed the wounds of sparrows. But when her brother was dragged through the village square by Ottoman soldiers — accused of printing leaflets calling for revolution — something in her snapped.
They hung him from the old fig tree.
He was sixteen.
And Lume stopped braiding flowers that day.
She shaved her head. She burned her dresses. She disappeared.
And months later, a boy named Luan Dibrani joined the rebels in the northern mountains, rifle in hand, voice sharp as frost. No one asked him where he came from. No one saw the softness in his jaw or the curve of his hips. They only saw the fire in his eyes.
The fire of someone who had already lost everything.
The rebels camped in caves and ruins. They used whispers as maps and silence as armor. The war was not clean. It was not noble. It was blood and fever and betrayal. It was mothers burying children in the night so they wouldn't be found by morning patrols. It was men hacking other men to pieces because they prayed to the wrong God.
But Lume didn't flinch.
Because inside her was Ajkuna.
Inside her was Elira.
Inside her were the screams of every woman who had ever been silenced, sold, or slaughtered like cattle.
She didn't fight for glory.
She fought to make sure the wind never forgot their names.