The Primeval Era

<On the Communion with Amadlozi: A Sangoma’s Warning>

The young always imagine that meeting the spirits of the Ancestors will be a gift. They picture warm embraces, gentle words, the completion of what death interrupted. They picture forgiveness freely given and love returned without condition. They picture peace.

Let the old tell you what the young refuse to hear.

When you call the Amadlozi across the bridge of Uthingo, you are not calling back a memory. You are not calling back the comfort you lost. You are calling back a spirit that has walked in the Lands of the honored dead, that has seen what you cannot see, that has shed the softness the living mistook for their whole being. The spirit that answers you is not the one you buried. It is older. It is harder. It has remembered things it could never say while it drew breath, and it carries grievances that outlived its flesh.

Ask yourself before you invoke them. Were you holding on because they loved you, or because you could not let them go? When the aurora splits the sky and that gaze falls upon you at last, will the Ancestor look down with kindness? Or will it look down and ask why you disturbed its rest for a grief that was only ever yours to carry?

There are those who have called their fathers back and wished, in the silence that followed, that they had left the dead to their dreaming.

Pray your Ancestor is proud of you. Pray harder that you are ready to hear what pride sounds like when it is spoken through the mouth of a spirit who has seen what waits beyond the River.

-Attributed to Mkhulu Sefako, Last Sangoma of the Azure Reed Tribe, before his final silence

---

The aurora spread.

It was not like any light the Cradle of First Flames had seen before, and it was not like any light the tribesmen watching from below had imagined possible. The verdant-blue radiance climbed from the horizon and kept climbing, threads of color weaving themselves into a shape that refused to be contained by the heavens that held it. The illusory figure rose with the patience of something that had waited eight summers for this moment and would not be hurried through it.

Across dozens of miles of the Cradle, the clouds came!

Oh, they came!

They came without wind to carry them. They came without the usual darkening that storms performed before they announced themselves. One moment the skies held the soft glow of a paradise born hours earlier, and the next the clouds had rolled across every horizon and drunk the light from the world. Only the aurora remained, only that enormous verdant-blue figure staring down at the lands below with a gaze that felt older than the mountains.

Tribesmen fell to their knees in the streets of the Purple Stone Tribe. Refugees who had barely learned to walk in their newly awakened Warrior bodies dropped their tools and stared upward with mouths that could not decide between shock and weeping.

Old women began to chant, words that had not been sung in generations rising from throats that had forgotten they remembered the songs. Drums found hands that had not touched them in a lifetime. Feet began to move in patterns that belonged to the Ancestors themselves, bare soles striking earth that thrummed in answer to the communion happening above.

Some of them danced. Some of them wept. Some of them simply stared, convinced they had slipped through the veil and were watching something the living had no right to witness!

And Damian floated beneath it all with his wing-shaped pupils burning verdant blue, looking up at the face of the father he had last seen alive eight summers ago.

"Ubaba..."

My father...

The word emerged from him without permission. It cracked on its way out, carrying grief and longing and something small and desperate that had nothing to do with the enormous transformed body now housing it.

He was not a Primeval Viridis Lifeform in this moment. He was not the Tokoloshe, not the Young Lugal of a fallen empire, not the sovereign of the Cradle of First Flames!

He was an eighteen-summer-old boy looking up at the father who had been taken from him.

The aurora shifted.

Emperor Zuku Vakochev’s face turned downward. It was imperious in a way that no living face could manage, carrying the distance of one who had walked among the Amadlozi and could no longer quite remember how to wear warmth the way flesh wore it. His gaze found Damian floating in the dark air, and it pressed against him with the authority of an empire that had not existed for eight summers.

The voice that came was meant only for Damian.

Only he could hear!

"Who... are you?"

The words boomed through his skull without touching the air around him. They were not unkind as they were not warm either. They were the question a ruler asked when something presented itself before a throne, and the answer would determine everything that came after.

Damian felt his transformed body tremble. His wing-shaped pupils burned hotter, verdant flames dancing across his tattoos as if responding to the presence above him.

Pain moved across his face, and nostalgia moved behind the pain, and beneath both of them something straightened.

He rose higher in the sky. His shoulders drew back in a way his body remembered from a throne room that had burned eight summers ago. When he spoke, his voice carried the full resonance of his new existence, and it reached upward with a clarity that demanded to be heard.

"I am the son of two farmers. I am the son of two rulers." His flaming eyes held the aurora without flinching. "I am a Vakochev. And my blood burns over the Lands of Stone."

HUUM!

The aurora pulsed.

For a breath that had no business existing in a being of pure spirit, Emperor Zuku Vakochev’s gaze softened. The imperiousness did not leave entirely. The solemnity remained woven through every verdant-blue thread of his manifested form. But beneath those, something warmer moved across his face, something that belonged to a father looking at a son he had thought lost forever.

It lasted long enough for Damian to feel it. Then the warmth folded itself back behind the solemnity, and the Emperor’s voice rolled down through the dark clouds again.

"The Lands of Stone are cruel, my son. You have lived long enough to know this without needing me to speak it."

The booming words moved through Damian’s bones like the beat of a drum felt through the soles of the feet.

"They grind down the weak. They grind down the strong who forget themselves. They grind down everything that does not bend itself to survival, and half of what does. Every child born into these lands inherits a debt that was not theirs to owe. Every breath drawn is drawn at the expense of another. This is the nature of the world we were placed into, and no Ancestor has ever returned across the bridge with comfort enough to unmake it."

BOOM!