The Primeval Era

The gaze from the aurora narrowed and found Damian.

"You inherited my blood. You inherited your mother’s blood. Whether you chose it or not, whether you wanted it or not, you inherited the responsibility that came with that blood. You can reject my will. You can turn from this and walk away. The Amadlozi would not stop you. But the Lands of Stone are burning, my Son, and they need your rain. Dross deserve days and nights without fear. Men and women deserve to live with dignity. Children deserve to grow."

A weight settled across every word that followed.

"If you had no power, no capability, you could sit back. No Ancestor would ask more of you than the flesh you were given could provide. But when you have power, Damian, you are obligated. The Lands of Stone do not grant capability to those who are meant to hoard it. You must move. Do you understand?"

Damian’s face had grown heavy through the entire time. His eyes burned. His tattoos pulsed with each word his father had poured into him.

He nodded. Slowly, fully, with the gravity of a mountain agreeing to be moved.

The aurora pulsed again, and this time the Emperor’s voice turned toward something the night itself seemed to lean away from.

"Then hear me, my son. Hear me as one who walked among the Demons in his final hours, as one whose body they took and whose wife’s soul they stole."

The verdant-blue light of the aurora took on edges that felt sharp.

"Demons do not feast on souls because they must. They do not hunger in the way mortal creatures hunger. They consume because consumption benefits them. Every soul swallowed is power added. Every essence drained is influence extended. They have built an entire society on the harvest of beings that never consented to be harvested, and they have refined this harvest into an art their Princes practice with the patience of elders tending sacred groves."

The booming voice grew colder than the clouds that carried it.

"Your mother’s soul burns in their hands as we speak. Not because they need her essence. Because she is rare, and rare things are studied. They have held her for eight summers, my Son. Eight summers of agony that does not end in the mercy of death, because death is not available to a soul already severed and anchored from its body. She screams in a place where no one who loves her can reach her, and the ones who took her record her screams and measure them and discuss what they have learned."

Damian’s hands curled into fists. The verdant-blue flames in his pupils burned white at their edges!

"Her captors must burn ten times worse, my son. Ten times worse for every breath she has spent in their keeping. Ten times worse for every measurement they have taken of her suffering. The Lands of Stone are cruel, and the honorable leaders, the good leaders, sometimes must be the most brutal creatures walking them. The Amadlozi are not meek. The Amadlozi are not frail. We do not wait in the place beyond with our hands folded, hoping the wrongs against us will unmake themselves. We seek vengeance!Every Ancestor who was wronged seeks it, and those of us who were wronged together seek it together!"

WAA!

...!

The aurora spread wider. Verdant-blue blazed across miles of the sky.

"I seek vengeance, my son. I seek the scorching of every demon from existence! I seek the burning of everything they built, every throne they sit upon, every name they have given themselves. I seek a day when the Lands of Stone can look toward the River of the World and see only ash where their kingdom stood. I seek it, and I cannot reach across the bridge to grasp it! You can! Will you deliver? Will you stand up?!"

Damian howled out! His voice fell into the Old Tongue then, and the words that emerged were not words a gentle man!

"Ngizobashisa bonke, amathambo abo abe umlotha, igazi labo libe amanzi, imiphefumulo yabo ibe isikhumbuzo sokuthi ukuphindisela kungakhohlakali!"

I will burn them all, their bones to ash, their blood to water, their souls to reminders that vengeance does not forget!

OOH!

The dark skies buzzed. They trembled. Clouds that had held their shape across dozens of miles suddenly vibrated with something that was not wind and was not thunder, as if a storm were gathering inside the sky itself while the sky watched and could not decide whether to resist!

Damian threw his head back.

And he howled again!

The sound tore from his throat with the fury of eight summers compressed into a single animal cry. His wings of verdant-blue flame flared wider than they had ever flared. His tattoos burned so bright they threw shadows across the clouds above him. When the howl ended, his voice found the Old Tongue again, and it bellowed upward with a resonance that shook the aurora itself!

"Ngizobaqothula bonke! Ngizoshisa izwe labo! Ubaba, ngiyafunga ngamadlozi, ngeke baphile!"

I will erase them all! I will burn their world! Father, I swear by the Ancestors, they will not live!

The aurora flared in answer. Emperor Zuku Vakochev’s manifested face held his son’s howl and absorbed it, and for a breath that shuddered across the heavens, father and son burned with the same promise!

Damian’s chest heaved. His eyes, still shining with verdant-blue flame, moved downward from the aurora. They passed across the dark clouds stretching to every horizon. They found Serala floating in the air a distance away, her own wing-shaped pupils wide with shock, her transformed body held motionless by the gravity of what she was witnessing. They found Uncle Adam far below on the earth, kneeling in grass bent away from the power of the communion.

They found Grandmother Essun beside him, her eyes enormous in her weathered face, her hands pressed flat against the ground as if she were holding herself down against the urge to rise and flee.

When Damian spoke again, it was in the Old Tongue, and his voice carried across every mile of darkened cloud.

"Izwe lamatshe lilandela indlela engingayivumi."

The Lands of Stone follow a way I do not accept.

His verdant-blue flaming eyes burned brighter.

"Ngizobeka indlela entsha. Ngizokwehlisa abagcotshiweyo babe emadolweni. Ngizobulala yonke indlela edalwe yilabo abangaphambi kwami, kuze kube yilapho yonke into iwela ngaphansi kwembono yami. Indlela yami."

I will set a new way to follow. I will bring the Anointed Ones to their knees. I will destroy every system designed by those who came before me, until everything falls beneath my vision. My Way!

BOOM!

The words hit the clouds like a hammer striking stone.

They were terrifying.

They were not the words of a prince reclaiming a throne. They were not the words of a son avenging a father. They were the words of something that had decided the Lands of Stone themselves had been built wrong, and that the only acceptable response was to unmake the building and begin again!

Serala’s hand rose to her mouth. Uncle Adam’s head bowed lower!

And above them all, Emperor Zuku Vakochev’s aurora pulsed once with something that was either approval or warning, and perhaps could not be distinguished from one another when spoken through the mouth of an Ancestor.

The dark sky held its breath.

The Tokoloshe had declared his way as the aurora above began to fade!